Your Therapist And You Aren't Going To Agree On Everything

[MainerMikeBrown]

Many psychotherapists nowadays specialize in what's called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). CBT therapists try to change many beliefs that their clients with mental illness have, such as replacing a belief system depressed people have that's too negative with more positive thinking, or getting a person with mania who's beliefs are too grandiose to start thinking more realistically.

So if you're in therapy, it's good for your counselor to help you change your belief system into a more rational and healthy belief system.

However, your therapist and you aren't going to agree about everything.

And that's a good thing. If you and your therapist, after a while, started to agree with each other about everything, that would be a problem, I think. After all, you want to continue to have a mind of your own.

 

[Aries]

At what point to you disagree so much that you dump the therapist? I talked to a guy last time I was unemployed and I didn't agree with him on much of anything. We had one stupid argument about whether it was OK for me to go a few minutes beyond my hour. I didn't think I should. At least I think that's what it was about. Then my mother's alcoholism came up and I said she said and did a lot of awful things because of it before it killed her- but it's a disease. And he said no, he didn't believe that. I didn't explain the implications of that to him. I didn't want to have to go over whether was my mother a horrible person or a sick person. I think it's better for me to put it behind me by just thinking of her as having an illness and not being a monster.