It is not uncommon for therapists to take a posture of judgment and even at times denigrate the client for not seeing what the therapist sees or feeling things the way that the therapist feels are appropriate. The ego driven need of some counselors or therapists is to demand that the client agree with the judgments of the clinical professional. This process of demanding insight from others can not only be demeaning to those seeking relief and help, but on occasion erode the fabric of rapport necessary to provide the best care.

Read through a number of articles this article in Psychology Today captured my interest and thought it might be enjoyable for others as well. Give a read and see what you think! http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/confessions-techie/201008/dump-your-ego

I’m using geography as the metaphor of the problem at hand. If you think about geography you want to know about the latitude and longitude, the weather, what kind of flora is growing there, who lives there and you want to know the basics of what is going on in that geographic region.

If you’re having anxiety we might say that that is a “desert” problem for you and your geography is like a desert. Another person might have anxiety that is an “arctic” problem.

One of the things that often times happens is that people start therapy too soon and they try to apply polar bear, penguin intervention to a desert problem.

My goal is to make sure that I understand the geography of your situation before we ever start to intervene in it.

The better we can come to an understanding for the geography before we begin treatment, the faster and more efficient therapy is for most people and it actually ends up saving the patient time and money and we can have efforts that are really focused on what we need to accomplish.

Years later, as an adult, even though she was living in Arizona and her family is all back east she equated the relationship so that food really meant being connected to family and she was kind of feeling the loss of her family every time she deprived herself of food. I really didn’t need to do any therapy. Upon realizing why she overate she said to me at the end that second session “well that’s kind of silly”. And I told her, no that’s just how you constructed it. So she responded, “Oh…well… I don’t want to do that anymore”. She had her moment of realization and she was done. End of therapy.

I got most of the initial groundwork out of the initial consultation and then I looked for patterns in the first session and by the second session she had really clarified what all of this meant to her, looked at it and said “I don’t have to keep doing that. That’s not helping me”. She was a successful case after that.

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If you relate to Tina’s story, if you suffer from depression due being overweight, if you have an eating disorder, help is available through professional services of a counselor, life coach or therapist.

How do you deal with a new patient that says I only can afford five or six sessions can you help me and fix me in five or six sessions?

My answer generally is that it depends upon how much energy that you have. How much energy do you have to put into this? We only have so much energy. You may not have enough energy to get it done in five or six sessions but we can certainly make a really good impact in that time. But it might take 7 to 10 sessions over a period of several months.

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Typically I do a lot of predicting for people. Even coming out of the consultation, generally have a pretty good idea of what the time lines are going to be and I’ll say to the patient, if you have the energy to put into this we can probably handle this treatment between 5 to 6 sessions or 7 to 10 sessions.

The reason why I ask how much energy you have is that I am going to assign you things to do outside of our sessions. I generally do not see people every week. This little hour we spend together every couple of weeks isn’t enough to help create the change you need as a patient. But the things we want to work on outside of session, if you have the energy to do those assignments we can make a real improvement in a short period of time.