Good points-- I'm just making an observation about the fact that my entire family is inherently, in a knee-jerk kind of way, highly dismissive of anything that doesn't seem to be rationally- or evidence-based; we just tend to view spiritually- and belief-based rhetoric as strange, bizarre, or alien when applied to us personally. I need to make it clear that I don't think that OTHERS are strange/bizarre/foolish for considering things in that light.
Sorry that it wasn't clear that I sincerely DO NOT mean any offense to people at the other end of the spectrum from us. And I am aware that there is a spectrum, and that my immediate family is pretty much at one end of it.
Not that such things are valueless-- they clearly are of value or they wouldn't be so meaningful to so many people. Obviously that is a therapeutic approach which works for a great many people. It just doesn't work for us because it isn't that we're UNWILLING to go along, so much as that we can't feel as though we're doing anything but pretending to go along... if that makes sense.
My DH and I have both had difficulty with therapists who doggedly wanted to "explore" things in a way that made no sense to us. In my case, I lasted nearly a dozen sessions of what felt like completely inane nonsense that had no relationship to anything in my life past present or future before I just plain quit out of frustration over the wasted time and effort. This was someone that I had seen somewhat helpfully for nearly six months prior to that. DH had a similar difficulty with someone he saw for a completely different problem almost two decades later. It can easily lead to a breakdown the patient-therapist relationship if the therapist keeps, er... well, you know the old saw about how every problem looks like a nail when your favorite tool is a hammer? Yeah, that.
I mean, I get that some therapists' areas of expertise and treatment preferences may not really lend themselves to some patients' needs/styles. But there is also an aspect of this which is about whether or not a patient and therapist have enough perspective in common to communicate with one another effectively. That's all. My aforementioned therapist would have been better off sending me off to someone else with a different treatment philosophy.
We're mostly at one end of that spectrum-- again, my apologies if it wasn't clear that "post-modernist" thinking is pretty much at the OTHER end of the spectrum of how human beings assign meaning and interpret their lives. I'm well aware that people from that other end of the spectrum view us as being spiritually tone-deaf in some important respects, and they may well have a point.
It's a concern when searching for a therapist, because relatively few of them are at this end of things, and that means that building a patient-therapist relationship can be quite challenging.
