A good therapist helps us clarify our feelings

Hi X,

In my last e-mail to you I wanted to add Alice Miller’s comment below, but I got interrupted by a resident at my work and then I forgot. I don’t know if your therapist is a good one or not that is something you have to come to see and decide for yourself with the help from your own true feelings, a good therapist encourages autonomy and not addictive dependency on pain and on the therapist, should help the patient use present triggers productively and once a patient learns to use present triggers effectively there is no further need of the therapist’s presence, just like Alice says: ““As adults we don’t need unconditional love, not even from our therapist. This is a childhood need, one can never be fulfilled later in life, and we are playing with illusions if we have never mourned this lost opportunity. But there are others things we can get from good therapist: reliability, honesty, respect, trust, empathy, understanding, and an ability to clarify their emotions so that they need not bother us with them. If a therapist promises unconditional love, we must protect ourselves from him, from his hypocrisy and lack of awareness “Alice Miller (The Drama of the Gifted Child: The search for the True Self) Page 45

I see you might becoming addicted to the therapist and to pain and not moving through it, but keeping you stuck in the wounded child and a good therapist helps one move through the pain and not enable the patient addiction to pain, just as a Alice Miller’s says in her article “The Longest Journey” “Successful therapy should shorten this long journey. It should liberate us from our ingrained adaptation strategies and help us learn to trust our own feelings - something our parents have made difficult, if not impossible. Because it was prohibited, and hence feared, right from the beginning, many people find it impossible to embark on such a journey. Later, the role played initially by our parents is taken over by teachers, priests, society, and morality, all of them conspiring to cement this fear. And cement, as we know, is very difficult to soften.”

Best wishes to you,

Sylvie