Unconditional Positive Regard…and Clinkers
It’s easier for me to think about the sort of therapist I don’t want to be, rather than the sort that I do. Growing up with a rather bleak view of mental health professionals due to many forced family counselling sessions to address my delinquent/concerning teenage behaviour, I reached adulthood with the opinion that ‘seeing someone’ was either a punishment or a last resort – basically something you did when everyone else had given up or stopped listening. I found the counsellors and psychologists that I was dragged along to in my youth patronising, and their ‘strategies’ simplistic and irrelevant – as if they were following a mandatory flow chart (self-harm = mindfulness strategies). There never really seemed to be any discussion around values or resilience or ME as a person, and I’d always end up feeling like there was something wrong with me that needed to be fixed, and it required my family ganging up on me with a team of experts to do so.