Posted by pinkeye on April 29, 2005, at 15:31:50
In reply to is your T's intelligence critical to therapy?, posted by JenStar on April 29, 2005, at 13:51:22
It was very important to me too - to have a highly intelligent T. Actually not just my T, I looked for high intelligence in any relationship as well.
And my ex T was pretty intelligent and had lot of common sense, and I was glad he was that way. I am not sure I would have been able to progress much with a person who was significantly less intelligent than me at that time.
But now, I am going to a new T, who may or may not be highly intelligent. I don't think she is extremely smart in all the areas. But she is an expert in therapy techniques and understanding my emotional patterns. In some areas, even more than my ex T was - because he was a man and had little experience before he started treating me. But she has about 20 years of experience as a T, and that is something to give credit to. Just because she has seen so many patients like me, she knows.
If I were one of the first few patients to her, like I was to my ex T, she would have done far worse with me than my ex T did. But because she has lots and lots of experience, she is able to recognize things that my ex T was not able to - especailly this transference related portions of it.
But my ex T was logically very smart, and he corrected all my logical errors. And my current T is emotionally perspective, and that helps my emotional self to grow more.
In short, it is not all about your logical intelligence. Ideally, you need both - logical and emotional. In fact, too much of logical intelligence puts the emotional self growth at risk - that happened a little bit with my ex T. He would be able to point my mistakes in a second, and I would be able to grasp it in a second, and we both thought that was what was needed, but in fact, for me to change emotionally and grasp things emotionally, it needed longer time, and several times going over the same thing again and again and again. And I think my ex T, because he was extremely intelligent, and perceived me as intelligent, didn't find it needed to do for me. So in a way, since both of us were more logically intelligent, it led to some aspects of the growth being missed out.
I would say all the right things, speaking from my logical mind, and my T, was tuned to my intelligence, as I was to his, and both our brains would match, and we both thought I was doing extremely fine. Whereas my emotional self continued to suffer, and I didn't have a clue why it was happening. I thought I had everything right, and yet I was suffering.
poster:pinkeye
thread:491528
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20050428/msgs/491570.html