Why Does Talk Therapy Take So Long?
The case for open-ended psychotherapy
Talk therapy includes feelings, and it takes time and trust to feel safe enough to express your feelings.
– JE
I recently said goodbye to a patient I’d seen for six years in my psychotherapy practice.
“Doc,” he said, pointedly using the name he’d insisted on for the first two years of treatment, “all those times ... well, I’m glad I stuck with it. I definitely wouldn’t have Jackson,” referring to the adored child he’d sworn early in life never to have.
Circling back to using "Doc" in this instance was a gesture of intimacy, a private joke. But it had first been a distancing technique used with deference and then disparagement when he initially came to see me after his fiancée had left him at the altar, literally.
Credit: Jo-Ann Finkelstein Ph.D., Demystifying Talk Therapy