Therapy often becomes a sado-masochistic relationship - ISTDP Jon Frederickson
Channel: Visceral Gravitas
Date: 2022-12-01

Excerpt from https://youtu.be/-dTFjMFIh6w

Rough transcript:
Q- Does submission usually hide lack of collaboration? Promote a stance of incapacity? 

A- 
Well if a patient is submitting to me, she's not collaborating with me, and I'd say to him yeah, but if you submit to me, we'll have the same awful relationship here, that you had with your father, Why do that?

Because this submission, is just the way you learn to hide with your father, but if you submit with me, then you'd be hiding from me too. 
So could we look underneath this facade of the submissive son and find out who you really are? 

You notice when you frame things in this way, now the patient says: "Yeah, I would like to take a look at those feelings.  Yeah I would like to find my power and capacity. I would like to know who I am, I would like to stop having to be the submissive son." 

The therapy needs to make sense for the patient for him to do it right and pressure of feelings needs to make sense to the patient, otherwise they're just submitting to you and they're "I don't know why you're asking this but I hope it goes somewhere but I'm going along with it."  Well then we just have, we basically have a sado-masochistic relationship and we're calling a therapy and we get into problems.  
Basically have a sado-masochistic relationship and we're calling a therapy.