The Psychotherapist's Picture Of The World, Or Why The Client Has A Chance

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

The world as an image and representation

The world and the perception of the world are not identical concepts. In the process of perceiving the world, each person creates his own idea of the world, a subjective, individual picture of the world, which to varying degrees can be adequate to the objective world. The expression “how many people - so many worlds” is about this. Therefore, it can be argued that the picture of the world of each person, despite the similarity with the pictures of the world of other people, is always different.

Similarity and difference are two important qualities of the picture of the world. The first quality (similarity) is a condition of mental health (mentally healthy people can, despite the difference in the perception of the world, negotiate, creating a divided, contractual picture of the world, in contrast to people suffering from psychosis, for example, schizophrenics). The second quality (difference) - creates an opportunity for the individuality of each person. The condition of individuality or subjectivity in the perception of the world is knowledge and experience. We can even say that we see the world not with our eyes, but with our brains - a substance where experience and knowledge are captured. The eyes are only an instrument of perception.

Professional worlds

Any professional activity contains professional knowledge inherent to it, which in the process of assimilation becomes the experience of each person (skills and abilities), mastering this or that profession, thereby forming his own special professional picture of the world. The process of assigning a profession creates in a person's consciousness new constructs related to the content of the profession and its subject, changing the usual picture of the world, adding to it a professional perception of the world. The profession of a psychotherapist is no exception here. Therefore, we can talk about the psychotherapeutic picture of the world, which is present in the picture of the world of a particular psychotherapist. Structurally, the picture of the world includes the following three components: the image of the world, the image of oneself, the image of another. The listed components are also known as the concept of the world, the concept of self or self-concept, and the concept of the other.

The originality of the psychotherapeutic picture of the world

The peculiarity of the profession of a psychotherapist lies primarily in a special attitude towards another person, who, in fact, is the object of his professional activity. The uniqueness of the object of professional influence of the psychotherapist, who is at the same time the subject, creates that special specificity of the professional vision of the psychotherapist's world. Indeed, a person is a client of a psychotherapist, being an object of professional influence of a psychotherapist, while he does not cease to be a person, a subject, and it is impossible not to reckon with this. First of all, the uniqueness of the psychotherapist's professional worldview lies in a special professional position in relation to the client.

Features of the professional position of the psychotherapist in relation to the client

The client of the psychotherapist, as noted above, being the object of his professional activity, nevertheless remains a person. This “human component” of professional impact presupposes a special, sensitive, caring attitude towards the client. This is manifested in the need for the presence in the work of the psychotherapist of the following mandatory rules / attitudes in relation to the client.

• Respect for the client's secrets

• Trust in the client's story

• Customer insight

• Non-judgmental attitude towards the client

Let us dwell in more detail on each of the above highlighted professional rules.

Client secret

Keeping the client secret is the most important rule of the professional position of the psychotherapist and, in general, the condition for the possibility of psychotherapy as such. In order for the psychotherapy as a whole to take place, the client needs to open up, “bare the soul”, “undress” (by analogy with the procedure for exposing the body by a physician with a somatic direction). It is not surprising that at this point the client often has many stopping feelings - embarrassment, shame, fear … In order to be able to cope with these feelings, the therapist needs to be very careful and careful with respect to the “phenomena of the soul” presented to him by the client. The client should form a strong confidence that his spiritual secrets will be dealt with professionally - they will remain within the confines of this office. Otherwise, trust will not be formed between the client and the psychotherapist, without which an alliance and psychotherapy in general is impossible.

Trust in the client

Trust is the basic condition of any interpersonal relationship, especially a psychotherapeutic relationship. The psychotherapist needs to be very attentive and sensitive to everything that the client presents or tells him. The ability to relate with trust to the "truth of the soul" of the client is an important and necessary professional quality of a psychotherapist. The well-known professional attitude of the psychotherapist: "Everything that the client says about himself is true" creates the condition for the opportunity to hear this very truth of the client's soul. Such a trusting position towards the client is a specific component of the professional world of the psychotherapist, which is fundamentally different from the everyday picture of the world in which “others lie”. On this occasion, the famous psychotherapist Irwin Yalom wrote that the psychotherapist as a person is easy to deceive, since he is used to trusting clients, and therefore all people. But for a psychotherapist as a professional, the presence of a trusting attitude towards his clients is inevitable, otherwise, as well as on condition that the client's secrets are not kept, this very trust in the client in the psychotherapist and psychotherapy simply will not be formed.

Customer insight.

There is no need to prove the thesis about the importance of understanding the client by the psychotherapist in his professional activity. Let's consider how this becomes possible. In the process of training, a future professional forms a psychological picture of the world, an important component of which is knowledge / ideas about the personality (personality model), the mechanisms of its development in norm and pathology, ideas about norm and pathology. Over time, the student develops a professional perception of the object of his activity.

Knowledge about what kind of person, how his development takes place, become those constructs of the professional world that organize the psychological vision of a person and are the first necessary condition for understanding another person. For the therapist, they are one of the conditions that make it possible for him to understand the client.

The second condition for understanding the client is empathy or empathic position in relation to him. The most famous definition of empathy belongs to the humanistic psychotherapist K. Rogers and reads as follows: “Empathy is the ability to stand in the shoes of another, from the inside to perceive the internal coordinate system of the other, as if the therapist were this other, but without losing the condition“as if” . Already quoted earlier, Irwin Yal also spoke metaphorically about empathy as an opportunity to look at the world from the client's window. The empathic position of the therapist allows him to put himself in the client's place, to look at the problem through his eyes, which opens up an opportunity for empathy and a better understanding of the latter.

Despite the constant declarations of the importance of empathy as a professionally important quality of a psychologist / psychotherapist, it is far from always possible to talk about its presence in the professional arsenal. For the development of empathic understanding, knowledge is not enough; it can be learned only through specially selected exercises, as a result of which it is possible to get the experience of "touching" another person. Moreover, such training is possible only if empathy is initially present in the personality structure of the future psychotherapist, exercises will only help to develop it. So, because of this, persons with a borderline level of personality disorder - psychopathic, asocial and narcissistic, are professionally unsuitable for training in psychotherapy.

Non-judgmental attitude towards the client

This important component of the professional worldview of a psychotherapist is one of the most difficult to form in training. Like empathy, the nonjudgmental attitude cannot be learned by simply reading books. Nevertheless, without this attitude towards the client, psychotherapy is simply impossible, although counseling is possible.

A client, going to an appointment with a psychotherapist, experiences many different feelings, among which the main ones are shame and fear. Both of these feelings belong to the category of social, that is, they arise and "live" in the presence of another. The psychotherapist acts as such a frightening and shameful other in the client's mind - they are expected to diagnose him, confirm his "abnormality", there are fears that the psychotherapist will not understand, accept, inadequately assess … The level of psychological culture of the modern consumer of psychological services, unfortunately, at the moment does not allow one to expect a different attitude towards the psychotherapist, which makes additional requirements for the psychotherapist to create a “territory of trust”.

In the process of psychotherapy, fear is mainly "stopped" by the psychotherapist's understanding of the client and trust in him. Shame becomes bearable through acceptance and non-judgmental attitudes towards the client. And here high demands are made on the personality of the psychotherapist. Perhaps, it is precisely this non-judgmental attitude and acceptance of the client that is spoken of in the well-known statement that "the main instrument of psychotherapy is the personality of the psychotherapist."

The non-judgmental attitude and acceptance of the client by the psychotherapist is a property of the psychotherapeutic picture of the psychotherapist's world, his concept of the other, for which tolerance to the otherness of the other is inherent as another.

The everyday human consciousness is largely characterized by evaluativeness, evaluation is firmly soldered into the perception of each person practically from the moment of his birth. The appearance of an assessment in the field of psychotherapeutic relationships instantly destroys contact, making this kind of relationship impossible. The client, as noted above, when going to therapy, is most afraid of evaluation, while secretly hoping that at least the psychotherapist will be able to understand him and treat him without judgment. Presenting the psychotherapist with his problems, "stripping his soul" creates a situation of increased sensitivity of the client to assessment, obliging the therapist to treat his professional reactions with special care and caution.

How is it possible to expand the boundaries of accepting the other? How to get rid of evaluativeness and moralizing in the perception of the client? This is especially true of those cases when the client goes far beyond the boundaries of the common human, ethical, and, often, the medical concept of norm and normality? How to misjudge an alcoholic, a psychopath, a client with a non-traditional sexual orientation? Such clients are called borderline - and it is they, and not clients of the neurotic register, to whom it is easy to show sympathy and empathy, who are the challenge for the therapist's tolerance.

The nonjudgmental attitude and acceptance of the client by the therapist is largely made possible by understanding. To understand means to allow another person to be in accordance with his inner potencies, meanings, his essence (M. Boss). Understanding, as mentioned above, is formed through knowledge and empathy. The easiest way to understand another person is if you yourself have gone through something similar in your life, you have the experience of similar experiences. So the "former" alcoholic will better understand and accept the addicted client (it is no coincidence that the groups of Alcoholics Anonymous are led by the "old" members of this society), a person who has experienced mental trauma will not experience problems with empathy for a client in a similar situation, and so on. People who have experience of similar emotional experiences from within their own souls are able to understand a person who has addressed them with a similar problematic experience. Consequently, the richer the psychotherapist's “soul experience” is, the more sensitive his “main instrument” will be, the easier and more effective he will be in working with clients.

Does the above mean that every psychotherapist in the process of professional training must necessarily get such a painful experience for the soul? Or, otherwise, he will never be able to properly understand and nonjudgmental to his clients? Fortunately, no. Part of this professional sensitivity is made possible by empathy training, in the process of which the future psychotherapist works out his sensitivity to the emotional experience of another person.

Another means of increasing sensitivity, and, consequently, a better understanding and acceptance of the other, is to increase sensitivity to your I, to your own emotional experiences. This becomes possible thanks to personal psychotherapy, which is a mandatory attribute of the professional training of a psychotherapist. By developing self-sensitivity in the process of personal therapy, the future psychotherapist begins to better understand and accept various "bad", "unworthy", "imperfect" aspects of his own self, thereby paradoxically becoming more accepting in relation to similar aspects of another person - his client.