I've been in therapy before. In one case in real life, the therapist kept asking "and how did that make you feel?" When they depict therapy in movies and TV, you also hear "and how did that make you feel?" Just how productive is this, over and over, especially for patients who are fairly expressive. I would imagine this works in coaxing thoughts and feelings from someone who is shy or holding back. Is this normal? Repeatedly? Are they filling up the time in the session, as in then "Oops, time's up?" Which approach is this aligned with? Thanks. Also, if people have gotten annoying or weird questions in therapy they'd like to share, please do so, if it can be kept appropriately general.
There IS a reason most therapists push the "and how did that make you feel?" angle. It's because people tend to talk specifically about events, and to push their feelings deep into the background. Even when the answer is extremely obvious - "it made me angry - DUH" - the person has now vocalized the emotion, and can confront it directly. "Is this emotion appropriate for what happened? How do I usually respond when I feel this emotion? Is this the best way to deal with this emotion?" And in a sense, it puts things back into your control. You can't stop people from doing things to piss you off (say), but you can work on dealing with how to react when you get pissed. That said, you're allowed to question your therapist. If you find the questions too trite, you're allowed to say "It seems you keep asking that question, and I'm starting to think you're doing that to bulk up the session rather than actually discover anything about myself." Lex
As someone who's worked a lot in therapeutic sessions (on both sides of the "questioning" process), when you have a good therapist, there's a lot going on behind those interactions. What many therapists find is that a lot of their clients, particularly male clients but both male and female, are pretty "cut off" from their emotions. I can't tell you how many times I've said "How did that make you feel" to a client and have them come back with "Well, I think that..." and I've had to gently say "In this circumstance, I'm interested in what you feel, not what you think"... and often the language of emotion is completely foreign to many clients, to the point that, when confronted with it, the client has *no idea* what they are actually *feeling* and so the therapist is directing their attention away from the intellectual and into the emotional. Since much of my training is at the intersection of the mind and the body, often I'd ask things like "where in your body do you feel it" and "what does it feel like" which sound like odd questions, but they can be powerful entry points into actually feeling the emotions that have often been locked away and carefully protected by the intellectual self. There are a lot of other questions that may seem sort of trite or inane therapists use to gently encourage the client to be more expressive, and some people get really annoyed with them -- a good therapist will see this as intellectual resistance or misdirection designed to avoid the topic -- but they are effective. Many of the best therapists don't speak a whole lot, but probe what's going on with the client, and encourage him or her to do the "work" that happens in therapy, because the effects are more long-lasting and deeper when the client comes to the insights rather than being fed them by the therapist.
