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PeonForHer -> RE: Talk about science denial (6/17/2014 4:33:08 PM)
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FR
As someone experienced at seeing a therapist, I can speak with just a little authority:
One of the major reasons people end up in the patient's chair of a therapist in the first place is because their freedom of choice has become crushed. They want to exercise it, but it's become blocked. Their own minds have blocked it. The therapist's job is, in part, to help the patient break through those blocks. But the therapist can't always do that by going along with the worldview of the patient. If he were to try, he might well end up coming up against the same blocks as the patient. Very often, perhaps every time, the patient is where he is precisely because he's lost his grasp of what 'freedom of choice' really can mean.
I can very easily imagine a gay man turning up to see a therapist asking how he can 'rid himself of his gayness'. The therapist, in order to do his job properly, would advise on what he knows of the various therapies on offer that claim to achieve that aim. But this is to conform to the patient's own idea of 'freedom of choice'. In theory, possibly fine. But regardless of whether it were even possible to 'eliminate one's gayness', the therapist must go further than that. This is because the patient's idea of freedom of choice may be too small. In the case of a gay man wanting to rid himself of those gay feelings, it pretty emphatically *is* a narrow idea of 'freedom of choice'. He just must learn that there exists the possibility, at least, that all those around him who consider gayness 'abnormal' are wrong and that, in fact, his choosing to accept his gay feelings could be *right*.
This strategy isn't about being idealistic, it's about being realistic. (That's something that righties amongst us favour, correct?) Therapists of all flavours may do all sorts of things with their patients, but what they absolutely mustn't ever do is help their patients tie the knots in their heads even tighter.
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