Therapists being fallible human beings

[Fluffy Flowers]

How would you (as the client), cope/deal with a therapist forgetting a session, or confusing the times, or just generally making human mistakes?

If you can rationalise it, does that rationalisation have to contend with any sort of rejection issues, or any other relevant issues or emotions?

What could the therapist do to make it better?

This is something that happened to me recently and just wondered how anyone else might feel.

[Jenny]

It happened to me many years ago and my instant thought was "well there you go, you don't matter, no one cares". Straight away i felt really miserable, lost. Even a counsellor couldn't hear me!

What was important though was that i talked this through with the counsellor. Part of me wanted to know her reason why she forgot - but she never gave me a reason. In hindsight it was probably best this way as i hate excuses - I think it's easy for people to just make anything up after the event (wow this is such a reflection of my childhood experiences!) - and really, she didn't need to disclose anything to me. What mattered were my feelings.. and that's what we focused on.

So in summary i think it's really important to just focus on the client's feelings about the possible rejection/abandonment, etc. Yes the therapist may have forgotten for their own valid reasons, but they can take this to supervision or their own counselling and talk about that there. :)