Insanity Descent

Patients and Therapists Should Match Personalities

We need to start giving patients and therapists some way to match based on their personalities. This sounds kind of dumb, but let me explain...

Different people can solve the same problem in different ways. I don't think I need to come up with an example for this, you've seen it in your life at some point probably. Some people go over an obstacle while others go around it, and still some people remove it. They're all different solutions to the same problem.

A therapist is there to help you solve problems. Thing is, two therapists recommending the same coping skill {ex. deep breathing} will present it differently to their patient, and the way they speak to their patient is different too. This is gonna lead to different levels of success for the same patient having different therapists.

Here's a good example: I've expressed the same issue of constantly worrying about my future to probably hundreds of people at this point. Generalizing people's responses, pretty much 99% of the time I get a response similar to, "Stop worrying so much, I'm sure you'll do fine in the future. You can do anything!"

Hell, therapists regurgitate that bullshit to me. While for some people {probably those who just need some plain encouragement to motivate them} that might actually motivate them, but for me it's never done anything. Those comments always fall on deaf ears for me.

What's stuck with me is when one of my school counselors told me upfront that I very well could end up having a terrible future or I could have a great one, and it depended on the effort I put into a good future {for reference, when I say 'good future' I'm exclusively referring to my future career and the place I'll be living, aka things that are mostly in my control}.

Whenever I told people that's what she said to me, I was baffled when pretty much everyone told me she was rude as hell and she should never have said that to a student. Although I was definitely put off in the moment because I was emotional in that moment, it not only helped me return to rationality but it motivated me, and I think it was so effective because I'm a realist- instead of optimism or pessimism, I choose to look for the reality. My answer to the famous glass half empty/half full scenario is literally that it's both half empty and half full because two halves make a whole.

Getting an answer to my anxieties that was basically tailored to how I see things and solve problems was pretty eye opening for me. However, apparently for the majority of people, doing that is apparently rude. That's called ★people have personalities★

That's why I think it's super important for therapists to be matched with patients on a basis of personality. A person who wants feel-good positivity would probably hate hearing, "You can fail or you can succeed," just like I hate hearing, "Just do your best and things will work out." Yet still another person might hate to hear, "Expect to fail, but hope to succeed," but that seems to motivate my dad quite a bit.

Another thing is coping skills. Not only will therapists recommend them in their own different ways, but they will recommend different skills entirely. If a patient has depression, one therapist might recommend they start with journaling to help identify where the issues are coming from, their intensity, etc. Another might recommend starting with lifestyle changes like exercising and eating properly because change can help some depressed people, and the positive changes for their physical health can influence their mental health.

These coping skills have different levels of success on patients and should both be tried so they can decide what works and what doesn't, but therapists might choose to omit certain skills altogether or not fully explain them enough to actually be helpful.

One example is radical acceptance. Radical acceptance of oneself is that even if you don't like something about yourself, you teach yourself to still accept that part of yourself. It doesn't mean you stop trying to improve yourself, it just means you accept your good and bad traits and who you are as a person. It's a skill I'm trying to teach myself, and because of my surprisingly egotistical nature that I almost always suppress {trust me, I'm great at acting humble but I'm not}, it works pretty well on me. I don't think I need to explain why.

However, when I was first introduced to the concept of radical acceptance, I didn't think it would help because it was VERY poorly explained to me. I was basically told, "Radical acceptance means you accept everything." To me, that just sounds like turning myself into some kinda doormat for being abused. What was the problem? The therapist trying to explain it to me either didn't like the skill, didn't think the skill was important, or they simply didn't understand the coping skill in full. Either way, clearly that therapist wasn't a good match for me because they were responsible for turning me away from a skill that turned out to be helpful after somebody else properly taught me what the skill was and I started trying it for myself.

Obviously you're not gonna know what coping skills will and won't work on a patient until you try it, that's why the therapist is there to guide them and recommend things. However, it IS the therapist's job to make sure as many skills are tried and that they're properly tried as well as explained to the patient in a way they understand and are satisfied with the information.

However, if a patient absolutely hates any physical activity whatsoever and their mom forces them to do sports, then maybe trying physically related coping skills like running isn't a good fit. However, unless there's a situation where a patient has already tried a particular coping skill and it either doesn't work or they need more skills to support it because it's not enough, no stone should be left unturned until the patient can find a place that makes them happy. That's on the therapist to help the patient find that place, and if they can't recommend coping skills they think will work for the patient then it's probably not a good therapist/patient match.

This is why I think making sure therapists and patients have similar personalities is very important. It'd be tedious because getting into therapy is already such a huge wall, but in the long run it'd hopefully make therapy MUCH more helpful. It seems to help the majority of people, but for those whose therapists have completely different ways of solving problems, it doesn't really help them.

{Also, your therapist can be a good person but still be a shitty therapist. For example, a super nice person who never gets mad is a good person, but may not always be a good therapist for everybody. They could be a phenomenal therapist to somebody else, though.}