Help me with a possible askme question: The kindest way to deal with a student therapist.→[More:] I have this psychotherapy class where we have to be a therapist to one student and a patient to another. My therapist is especially bad. She has done about everything she can do wrong. She always wants to know if I'm going to be the same patient or another patient when it would have never occurred to me to be another patient. She has gotten to the point with the current patient where the patient's next step will be to leave her. Do I let her start up with a new patient and confront her more on the mistakes she's making this time around, or do I have the current patient tell her why she is leaving and point out what she is doing wrong? Which is the actual kinder option, to give her an easy out with a new patient or to let her know how badly she is screwing up?
Some background, the patient I am playing presented with what seemed like social anxiety disorder and the first thing out of her mouth was to blame the patient's husband. She does not even know the husband's name and the patient is somewhat dependent on the husband. The therapist has his bad habit of squinting and staring at the patient and it looks very judgmental. I think it's just what she does when she doesn't know what to do but she ends up doing it most of the time, just squinting and staring at a patient who has a problem with being judged. I've unconsciously started to stare at her when she does this and I just noticed because it causes her to jump and blurt out a pointless question. She asks the same questions over and over, I assume because she can't think of anything to say. There are other things, like she explained relaxation therapy totally wrong to the patient, but am I being too harsh on her? Right now I feel like the patient should leave and explain to her why she is leaving but she could just take it personally and not learn anything at all. This is already the second patient I am playing because she wasn't getting anywhere with the first patient.