That was the headline for the article in the New York Times blog, an article springing from a piece by John Grohol of PsychCentral. My impulse was to respond, "Of course!" -- because I think this is a normal thing in the course of therapy.
I touched on this issue in my earlier post on secrets. But it seems worthwhile to me to say a bit more about how I see and experience this in my practice.
As Grohol says,
You pay a therapist for the time you spend with them. Their one and only job is to help you find a way to feel better, help you stop repeating unhealthy behaviors or patterns of behavior that are no longer working for you, help you live a better life.
And that is true and seems so .. so ordinary. Of course, a patient should tell the therapist anything and everything that is relevant to the problems at hand and to the therapy. But it is never that easy. It may be easy for me to tell the mechanic everything about the problem I have with my car or the dentist all the relevant information about my problem tooth -- I don't feel personally at stake in those transactions because everyone develops car trouble or dental problems at least once in their lives. But in therapy, things cut much closer to the bone, especially when the therapy is psychodynamic or depth oriented. Because then we are not talking just about observable behaviors or discrete problems, but rather about innermost feelings and thoughts.
The basic instruction of psychoanalysis, "Say whatever comes to mind" is both extremely simple and fiendishly difficult. It means letting go of the rules we all have about what is and isn't all right to say, what things we can and cannot admit to. Just try it some time and see how quickly the inner censor starts editing what you feel you can say.
It takes time for most people to build the depth of trust needed to feel secure enough to talk about anything and everything. It takes the experience of trying first this, then that and discovering that what you feared would happen didn't, that the therapist can and does still care for you despite whatever dark thing you have revealed. Each successful experience lays the groundwork for the next piece. Whatever it is that any of us buries deep within, out of shame, humiliation, fear, hatred -- all that stuff of secrets -- feels unique as well as burdensome. No matter how we may believe we know better, it is all but impossible to believe that the therapist has heard the same dark feelings and thoughts from others and even felt them herself.
I'm not sure I actually agree with Grohol and conventional wisdom that withholding secrets and indulging in lies of omission actually impedes treatment. If the aim of treatment is the alleviation of symptoms, then yes, that is true. But if the goal of therapy is deepening one's knowledge and understanding of ones self, of getting under the symptoms to their meaning, then the struggle with lies and omissions is an integral part of the therapy, a necessary part of revealing the truth of a person's life.