Are You Being Honest with Your Therapist

Published Sep 3, 2018, 6:00 AM
This booster session was inspired by HBO's Insecure, Season 3, Episode 4. In this episode we saw that Molly is still meeting with her therapist (YAY) but also see that she hasn't told her the entire truth so I wondered if maybe some of you were struggling with withholding some information from your therapist. In this episode I discussed two reasons you might be withholding and what you can do about it. 

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Hey, y'all, this is Dr Joy from the Therapy for Black Girls podcast, and this it's a booster session. As a reminder, the information included is meant to be educational and entertaining, but it is not a substitute for a relationship with a licensed mental health professional. Hey y'all, it's Dr Joy and I'm back with another booster session. So if you caught Insecure last night, you probably knew that I would have some thoughts I wanted to share, and I definitely did. Last night's episode was a really good one, and I have feelings about quite a few things. But for this booster session, I wanted to specifically talk about the fact that we saw Molly in another session with her therapists. Yeah, she's still in therapy, and she's talking about how she doesn't feel like she's getting her props at the new law firm, and she comments that she doesn't want to keep getting caught up in situations that don't move her forward, like that situation Withdrew. And at that moment, we hear a record scratch as her therapist asked, who's Drow? So y'all know, I found that hilarious because it's actually not at all made up. There definitely are times when clients will leave out seemingly huge pieces of the puzzle that opens up an entirely new dimension for the work. So I wanted to share briefly about two reasons you might not be being honest with your therapists and how you can change that, because, of course, if you're not being honest, then you're not getting everything you could be getting out of the therapeutic experience. So the first reason you might be withholding a part of the story from your therapist is that you're afraid of their judgment. And if this is the case, I want you to ask yourself what's making you feel like they would actually judge you. Is it something they've actually done, or are you projecting stuff from other relationships onto your therapist. If you're projecting that, I'd like to challenge you to try something new within the confines of this relationship and see if you have a different outcome. A part of what makes therapy effective is the creation of a space that is non judgmental. So it's the perfect time for you to try a new behavior and for you and your therapists to be able to check in about how it feels. People have often asked how are we as therapists able to be non judgmental, and a large part of it is training and knowing how to hold something that others might judge you for as the space where the work needs to happen. We're not doing our job if we're using the pain you come into therapy with as a tool to shame you, so in essence, we're not doing effective work. So that's my suggestion for how you might make changes if fear of judgment is keeping you from being completely honest with your therapist. The second reason you might be withholding the truth from your therapists is that you're not really ready to make changes in a certain area of your life. You might be surprised by this, but it's actually not uncommon for people to come to us with quite a bit of ambivalence about making changes in their life, even if they feel like at some point they would benefit from the change. So in this instance, our job as the therapist might be to sit with you in the ambivalence and explore it to see if that helps you to move into an action stage, and to see what barriers might be getting in the way of you moving to action. If this is the reason you're withholding information from your therapist, I'd encourage you to share exactly how you're feeling and have a conversation about what fears, concerns are trepidations you have about how your life might be different if you did something different. I mean, we have to be honest. Even when we change for the better, transitions can still be really hard, so it's understandable that sometimes it takes a while to move into action. So I'm curious to hear if you had experiences with not being completely honest with your therapist. Was it for one of the reasons I shared or something else. Let me know on social media using the hashtag tv G in session. Thank you all so much for joining me for another booth of session, and I'll chat with you soon. Bye, m Fie.

Therapy for Black Girls

The Therapy for Black Girls podcast is a weekly conversation with Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, a license 
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