Quote from: cynthialee on February 16, 2013, 10:00:23 AM
I had a very good therapist but she was incapable of helping me in geting to the bottom of the well. I had to dig there with the help of other trans women.
Do not think that a therapist is some form of mystic witchdoctor who will make it all better.
You can get there with or without a therapist. Now granted a therapist will be of some use to get letters and maybe get you started on the right path of question asking, but they are not very helpful for alot of us.
I'm only referring to the good ones. And to explore these issues with someone competent, it still does take, first of all, making it clear what you are feeling at the roots. My trans son had seen therapists for years before coming out to himself. And in my case, I had a therapist who tried to convince me I was other things rather than help much in the way described here, though in time I did manage to get through to him why gay did not fit, living in hiding did not fit, and that for me things really boiled down to issues with my body rather than anything about particular relationships or other more distant factors.
My son does have a good gender therapist who is not trying to negotiate from prejudice, but she seems only to be helping him to understand himself and give him a full range of choices when it comes to dealing with his identity. At least that was my impression from (admittedly) one fairly brief part of a double session I took him to about a month ago.
The point I'm trying to make is that, as much as our trans sisters or brothers can be helpful, and may sometimes know more about being trans than anyone but a transwoman or transman therapist (and our numbers in such a forum also give us some real sense of how diverse we can be), still, someone who is seeing you in person, alone, in a quiet, unthreatening space, and has the skills to actively listen, can often ask questions that may or may not ever come up here, in part just because there is a distance, and we are all hearing many, many voices here, and rarely have the focus, except after a long and continuous conversation that may or may not happen for many of us, to get to those points, and ask the kinds of questions that give us permission to explore something we might have avoided, perhaps because it is hard to face, hard to admit in an open space where we might get any sort of response.
Therapists are not miracle workers or witch doctors with magical properties, that's true. But the setting of one-on-one therapy is very different from (and for me is less threatening than) a forum where I cannot be entirely sure who is reading, or what their level of understanding is, or whether what I say might activate some unknown trauma for them that leads the conversation in some direction that's very different from what I was looking to explore.
Granted, I had some pretty awful sessions with one therapist, and allowed that relationship to go on for far too long, where I did feel that what I was saying was often not being heard. That I would often find myself listening to his somewhat rambling stories about his antique Rolls Royce should have been a big red flag for me, but I have a really bad tendency to see other people's faults as something I somehow provoked. Hopefully that is at least one of the benefits that came from that otherwise often wasted experience: to recognize that tendency I have to make excuses for others, and personalize their reactions. I do that far, far less, either with health care pros or with the other people in my life than I once did, so I guess I have him to thank in part for my coming to that realizations.
Whatever one's feelings on this, though, in the end there remains the fact, at least if some sort of transition is likely to be part of one's future, that the involvement of a therapist will be part of the drill. Given that, it might as well be a competent one, and even better yet, one who is not attached to discredited ideas about where being trans comes from.
