M has never been robotlike about anything. Even if he is saying something therapist-y, or like from a script, he’s fully engaged and present, very much with me during the entire session.
And he really doesn’t question much. A direct question from him is very rare. Most of the time he just lets me talk and reflects back to me what he is understanding. If he wants to know something more specific, he uses something called the “I wonder” technique, which David McPhee has written about. M says “I wonder…” followed by whatever it is he wants to know more about. That makes it sound like he’s sharing rather than interrogating. This works extremely well for me because I am very sensitive to even the merest hint of feeling interrogated.
While I have the usual complaints about the at times seemingly snail’s pace of our work and the sessions never being frequent or long enough, I would have to say that my therapy is overall going very well and I’ve been making lots of really great progress.