Every Day Gets a Little Closer: A Twice-Told Therapy Book

Last year I started seeing a therapist for the first time, initially as a side-effect of the computer programming bootcamp I was attending; this particular bootcamp, in fact, keeps a paid therapist on staff in order to offer free sessions to their students, but I ended up responding so well to the process that I continued seeing her in private practice once every two weeks after bootcamp was over.

One of the things that's become of interest to me because of it is understanding more about the therapeutic process itself -- as I mentioned to her a few weeks ago, when you're a client and have never experienced therapy with other clients, you have no way of comparing what your experience is like to what others go through, other than to refer to famous therapy situations in movies and television, and God only knows how realistic THOSE are -- so she recommended this book to me, in which back in the early 1970s a therapist and a creative writer made a deal to each keep a journal about their feelings after each session they had, only comparing notes with each other after the experiment was over and a book was published of both journals.

I have to admit, it's a fascinating read -- it's amazing to see how many times the two would have the exact opposite reactions to a particular thing that would happen in a particular session, and it was also really interesting to see how the behavior that the client thought of as "natural and spontaneous" was in so many cases in the therapist's eyes an expected reaction based on classic personality patterns he studied as a psychology student. Also interesting as simply a time capsule of the countercultural era -- taking place in the San Francisco Bay area, the journals are filled with references to encounter groups, active sexual manipulation of patients as a form of "intimacy therapy," and "shocking" new revelations about how beneficial it can be for a couple to attend therapy together -- this will be of strong interest to those like me who have had positive experiences with therapy themselves and are now curious to see how the process compares and contrasts to someone else's experience. It comes recommended specifically to those people.