Posted by alexandra_k on January 18, 2019, at 9:05:44
In reply to Re: What are your experiences with ACT compared to CBT, posted by baseball55 on January 16, 2019, at 21:45:04
My experience of therapy is that the fit between the therapist and myself is the most important thing and that transcends theoretical orientation -- though I suppose different personalities (or similar) are drawn to different orientations.
My experience of cognitive therapy was that the therapist was often on the look-out for particular statements or phrases that resembles the textbook ones they encountered in their training, I guess. I suppose because they felt like they had knowledge in what to do about those sorts of things -- getting me to question, or to say the opposite to myself, or whatever.
I personally found it fairly artificial. They were more focused on surface form than listening for deeper meaning. Confrontational. They were focused on challenging or changing the things they had identified.
I found it encouraged me to dissociate / separate out from the emotion.
It led me to investigate into how emotional responses can be non-voluntary and isolated from reason. How emotional responses can be entirely appropriate responses to the way things are in the person or the environment even when the person may not be able to articulate the reason or rationality.
It might be that people in your vicinity do treat you with not much respect. Whether or not it is about your height / weight. Many people are disrespectful of others. It might be that you are picking up on that. Whether or not it has anything to do with your height / weight.
It is feeling like that that leads many people to attempting to do something about it, though. Most concretely, eating their way to obesity for increased... Heft. Or (in conjunction with gym) eating their way to something more dwarven, since there isn't much you can do about your height.
I guess a textbook CBT therapist would have you question / challenge whether your statement was true. The therapist would likely jump on it as a classic falsehood / something to see about changing.
ACT and DBT and other types of therapy might be more interested in validating your feeling as your feeling and trying to grasp the inherent grain of truth in what you are saying. Then working with that core.
poster:alexandra_k
thread:1102701
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20161002/msgs/1102835.html