seandr
Capitol Hill, Seattle
Bio
send hate mail and naked pictures of yourself to seandrslog@gmail.com
TMI
- SVN or Git
- What helps you sleep?: klonopin on occasion
- What book have you read the most?: Gravity's Rainbow, but never to completion.
- Pot or Coke
- Presse or Pichet
2:56 PM
seandr commented on Savage Love.
seandr commented on Savage Love.
@ven: It's becoming evident that I'm a fool for trying to generalize from my experience. As mydriasis would tell you, my own relationship constitutes an N of 1, which leaves 0 degrees of freedom, and thus provides no basis for drawing statistical inferences about the greater population.
2:30 PM
seandr commented on Savage Love.
seandr commented on Savage Love.
@migrationist: Perhaps my use of the term doesn't precisely square with the technical definition of "validation" as taught in clinical training programs. I also suspect there may be gender differences at work here with women deriving more therapeutic benefit than men from simply being heard and understood.
The process I have in mind (call it what you will) looks more like the following. Patient describes an incident in which something triggers a negative emotional response. Depending on the trigger (which is always a behavior, not a person per se) the therapist assures the patient that their emotions were a normal, understandable, justified, or otherwise valid response to said trigger. Perhaps the therapist "unpacks" the trigger in order to help the patient understand and accept his resulting emotions. Perhaps he relates it to other cases he has seen, or to a scene from a movie or book (hi vennominon!). The effect of this is to soothe the negative emotion. Moreover, the patient implicitly becomes an observer of himself in the incident, learns to label the various dynamics at work, and thus the trigger begins to lose its power as a negative emotional catalyst.
As this cycle is repeated, the patient becomes less reactive to the trigger, and can thus take more constructive steps (perhaps suggested by the therapist) to address it with the triggering party, or, minimally, he can avoid acting in ways that escalate the situation and take the focus off of the instigating behavior.
This form of validation has proven useful to me. If a therapist simply reflects back what I say, I would assume he is an amateur who has no idea what he's doing.
More...
The process I have in mind (call it what you will) looks more like the following. Patient describes an incident in which something triggers a negative emotional response. Depending on the trigger (which is always a behavior, not a person per se) the therapist assures the patient that their emotions were a normal, understandable, justified, or otherwise valid response to said trigger. Perhaps the therapist "unpacks" the trigger in order to help the patient understand and accept his resulting emotions. Perhaps he relates it to other cases he has seen, or to a scene from a movie or book (hi vennominon!). The effect of this is to soothe the negative emotion. Moreover, the patient implicitly becomes an observer of himself in the incident, learns to label the various dynamics at work, and thus the trigger begins to lose its power as a negative emotional catalyst.
As this cycle is repeated, the patient becomes less reactive to the trigger, and can thus take more constructive steps (perhaps suggested by the therapist) to address it with the triggering party, or, minimally, he can avoid acting in ways that escalate the situation and take the focus off of the instigating behavior.
This form of validation has proven useful to me. If a therapist simply reflects back what I say, I would assume he is an amateur who has no idea what he's doing.
11:06 AM
seandr commented on Savage Love.
seandr commented on Savage Love.
@mydriasis: I don't think we disagree - validation has been the key to successful therapy for me.
My point is that therapy that limits itself to rote application of objective statements, in which the therapists withholds all judgement, opinions, and wisdom, or worse simply asks questions and reflects back the patient's response, is in my opinion unlikely to produce meaningful change.
My point is that therapy that limits itself to rote application of objective statements, in which the therapists withholds all judgement, opinions, and wisdom, or worse simply asks questions and reflects back the patient's response, is in my opinion unlikely to produce meaningful change.
7:42 AM
seandr commented on Savage Love.
seandr commented on Savage Love.
@migrationist: Validation can take fairly neutral, rote, and I would argue useless forms, i suppose, but the kind i have in mind might be something like "Of course you felt angry, that was a humiliating thing for her to have said to you in front of your friends".
1:08 AM
seandr commented on Savage Love.
seandr commented on Savage Love.
@migrationist: Validating and acknowledging are not the same thing.
And please tell me you aren't doing talk therapy with anorexics.
And please tell me you aren't doing talk therapy with anorexics.
12:14 AM
seandr commented on Savage Love.
seandr commented on Savage Love.
@ven: Fair enough - let's go with "disproportionately high" if you believe that's a less value-laden description. The two phrasings have exactly the same dry statistical meaning to me.
But you appear to be prioritizing benefit to the relationship over benefit to the wife
You appear to be assuming the relationship is not to the wife's benefit.
may I ask you to insert...
For you, I'll gladly make the requested insert.
For something new, what is your take on bisexual therapists?
No experience with such that I'm aware of.
But you appear to be prioritizing benefit to the relationship over benefit to the wife
You appear to be assuming the relationship is not to the wife's benefit.
may I ask you to insert...
For you, I'll gladly make the requested insert.
For something new, what is your take on bisexual therapists?
No experience with such that I'm aware of.
9:46 PM yesterday
seandr commented on Savage Love.
seandr commented on Savage Love.
@ven: Who says any marriage in question SHOULD be saved?
Certainly no marriage counselor I've ever hired. If either party is considering divorce, no therapist worth a dime would try to take that option off the table.
Anecdote - a couple in the last throes of their marriage sees a marriage counselor. At the end of their first intake session, the counselor simply says "X, I don't think Y wants to be married to you anymore." No further sessions are scheduled, and soon after the couple begins divorce proceedings.
As for your comments on 4), I have to admit I'm unable to follow your acronyms, but assuming GMT means Gay Male Therapist, I'll take a stab at it. I've never seen a GMT for marriage counseling, so maybe I'm wrong about that. I have seen a GMT as an individual therapist, during which various marital issues came up, and he was always reluctant to validate me. When I eventually brought this up with him, it basically came down to him holding a feminist perspective that made him uncomfortable, as a man, taking any position that could be construed as unsupportive of my female partner. He also said, in the context of a different discussion, "I wish I could revoke Dan Savage's gay card", in essence because of Dan's lack of political correctness. Not a good fit for me, obviously.
Anyway, I've found that a skilled straight male therapist (and maybe also a GMT) can advocate for the husband's position in a way that doesn't threaten the wife, in part because he is free of the emotional baggage that gets in the way of the husband's ability to communicate and the wife's ability to hear.
We did have one female therapist try to step into that role - a lesbian as it turns out - but I think she violated my wife's expectations about how women are supposed to relate with each other, expectations she doesn't have with the male therapist, and so my wife felt she was allying with me and we quit seeing her after a few sessions. This ties back to my statement about female therapists being limited to processes that support the status quo in cases where change from the wife would benefit the relationship.
More...
Certainly no marriage counselor I've ever hired. If either party is considering divorce, no therapist worth a dime would try to take that option off the table.
Anecdote - a couple in the last throes of their marriage sees a marriage counselor. At the end of their first intake session, the counselor simply says "X, I don't think Y wants to be married to you anymore." No further sessions are scheduled, and soon after the couple begins divorce proceedings.
As for your comments on 4), I have to admit I'm unable to follow your acronyms, but assuming GMT means Gay Male Therapist, I'll take a stab at it. I've never seen a GMT for marriage counseling, so maybe I'm wrong about that. I have seen a GMT as an individual therapist, during which various marital issues came up, and he was always reluctant to validate me. When I eventually brought this up with him, it basically came down to him holding a feminist perspective that made him uncomfortable, as a man, taking any position that could be construed as unsupportive of my female partner. He also said, in the context of a different discussion, "I wish I could revoke Dan Savage's gay card", in essence because of Dan's lack of political correctness. Not a good fit for me, obviously.
Anyway, I've found that a skilled straight male therapist (and maybe also a GMT) can advocate for the husband's position in a way that doesn't threaten the wife, in part because he is free of the emotional baggage that gets in the way of the husband's ability to communicate and the wife's ability to hear.
We did have one female therapist try to step into that role - a lesbian as it turns out - but I think she violated my wife's expectations about how women are supposed to relate with each other, expectations she doesn't have with the male therapist, and so my wife felt she was allying with me and we quit seeing her after a few sessions. This ties back to my statement about female therapists being limited to processes that support the status quo in cases where change from the wife would benefit the relationship.
8:18 PM yesterday
seandr commented on Savage Love.
seandr commented on Savage Love.
@ven: "overrepresentation of lesbians"
By this I mean that the percentage of lesbians psychologists is greater than the percentage of lesbians in the general population. It's a simple statistical observation suggesting non-random selection, not a judgment. Another example of this usage - men are overrepresented in prisons, computer science programs, and the US Senate.
By this I mean that the percentage of lesbians psychologists is greater than the percentage of lesbians in the general population. It's a simple statistical observation suggesting non-random selection, not a judgment. Another example of this usage - men are overrepresented in prisons, computer science programs, and the US Senate.
7:59 PM yesterday
seandr commented on Savage Love.
seandr commented on Savage Love.
@mydriasis: My understanding of everything that happens in the universe is fundamentally informed by my training in statistics. And yes, you are correct that my joke using "statistical significant" as shorthand for "large sample size" does, technically speaking, rely on an incorrect definition of the former.
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@migrationist: Thanks, it seems I've left out one of the most important effects of validation - building trust with the patient.