I've just had my fourth or fifth session. I don't know how to make best use of it, and the therapist is less focussed, less directional, than I had expected.
In the past I have had psychodynamic 'talking-cure' therapy, where everything is very free-flowing and spontaneous, and part of what I thought would be attractive and useful about CBT was the highly pracical, well-defined approach, where you take e.g. a negative thought, pick out the associated situation, mood, behaviour, and work out strategies for interrupting bad patterns, etc. etc.
This is what the therapist is doing at core, I suppose. But it is fluid and diffuse I suppose because depression is a diffuse, all-ecompassing thing. I can see clrearly how helpful the approach is with tightly defined unhappiness a phobia for example. But I am floundering with the shapelessness, the everythingness, of depression. And I wonder if the therapist is too (not because he is rubbish -- he isn't rubbish).
Today he said something (harmless in iteslf but a trigger of parts of my unhappiness) and I was so upset, so sobbing, that I couldn't think straight for any of the disciplined identification of problem thoughts, behaviours, etc, and the identification of alternatives.
And when I came away I thought that the best thing about the session had in fact been the disabling grief, the expression of sadness, which kind of calmed me, emptied me.
So I wonder if I should be having a completely diff sort of therapy -- the old free flowing talking cure again. But that didn't 'cure' me before.
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Mental health
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for depression -- how best to approach it
11 replies
Dearthworm · 10/06/2009 14:13
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