Thanks for chiming in. I find counselling useful, but not everybody does! I enlisted the help of a psychologist advertising quick symptom-relief with his publi

Thanks for chiming in. I find counselling useful, but not everybody does! I enlisted the help of a psychologist advertising quick symptom-relief with his published set of CBT tools without first needing a protracted psychological deep dive. Avoiding imminent, life-altering consequences required fast results. I reckoned we could address less cut-and-dried matters down the line and gave it a shot. The tools worked, but I needed more connection. Our session began by quantifying the efficacy of parts of an exercise with 1-10 scales and a/b comparisons, and ended with him walking me through a tweaked version of an exercise and emailing me a copy in a word document. Exchanges not directly advancing that process frustrated him. A two-sentence response to “how are you doing?” felt inappropriate, like explaining the impact of unreliable transportation on your life to a busy auto mechanic expecting terse, actionable bullet points. He’d almost certainly have preferred a 1-10 answer. He was pretty upfront about it when we started, but I expected less of a departure. That said, he’d have been perfect for my father— a lovely and very type-A retired engineer. At my mom’s behest, he gave therapy a shot with a trusted family counselor they’d previously used for family therapy. He truly gave it his type-A best, but couldn’t open up. The counselor essentially said that so many years of psychological self-policing rendered talk therapy too difficult to pursue barring a mental health crisis.