Transcription
Most of the time when clients complained about what you did, usually you'd actually done what they thought you'd done. So, you had to develop uh humility.
As I say to my therapists and DBT says that to be a DBT therapist, you have to accept that most therapists are indeed jerks. Most of the things clients say we did, we actually did do. The problem with our clients is that they react in such a strong way to what we do that it can really interfere with the therapy.
So I decided I had to teach them acceptance and I had to teach therapist acceptance. I had to teach the clients to tolerate distress and I had to teach the therapist to tolerate distress. This boils down to how to teach myself how to do all this, but I have had to teach other therapists because it can be extraordinarily distressing to treat someone who keeps telling you they're going to kill themselves or keeps telling you what a terrible therapist you are or keeps telling you the whole thing's hopeless or as some clients will do, start telling you most of the time how much better their previous therapist was than you on and on and on.
So, a therapist also has to have distress tolerance.