PRICE OF THERAPY

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-01-15 16:05

Everyone gets so much

How much is willing to pay

Psychotherapy is an active process not only on the part of the psychotherapist, but also of the client, here you have to give, invest, you have to pay for it.

The option to receive something without showing personal activity does not work, despite the client's frequent desire to take a passive position and wait for a miraculous healing. No matter how professional the therapist is, no matter how he tries to help the client in solving his problem, without the counter movement of the latter, all his efforts will be useless.

What does the client have to pay for a successful therapy?

Time, money, effort, experience.

I will consider these forms of "payment" in more detail.

I'll start with the most obvious.

Money

Money in therapy has a number of important functions:

1. Money in general performs the function of evaluation and in a sense, the value of something. Therapy is no exception. The need to pay for therapy, of course, increases its value for the client, contributes to the creation of a certain motivation for him to work. It is very important that the client pays himself, and not someone else for him. Otherwise, the therapy will have no value or value for him.

2. Money gives freedom … In a therapeutic relationship, the client's payment for the therapist's work helps maintain a take-and-give balance between them. Otherwise, the client has to pay with something else. If this balance is not observed at the monetary level, then you will have to pay at another level, sometimes more subtle. Most often, such a payment in therapy is dependence on a therapist.

3. Attitude towards money is a criterion of realism, the adequacy of a person, the ability to accept this world as it is, and live in it. The modern world is hard to imagine without money, money is an important part of this world. And neglecting money, a person does not accept, ignores an important part of this world.

4. Money sets the mode of responsibility in a therapeutic relationship. The money in therapy confirms the professionalism of the therapist and the responsibility of the client. A profession is a type of activity through which a person (professional) earns his living. If the therapist does not take money from his clients, he is not a professional. If he considers himself a professional therapist and does not take money for his work, then in this case he satisfies some other need of his.

Money is not the only equivalent of price, despite its importance.

Time

The client has to pay for the therapy with his time, which is the time of his life. Psychotherapy is often a fairly lengthy project. And the client will have to give tens and even hundreds of hours of his personal life for a successful result of therapy.

Efforts

In the course of therapy, the client will inevitably be forced to make a number of efforts:

Be aware. The therapy begins with this process. The result of awareness is not always pleasant for the client, and sometimes quite painful. And here you need a certain courage "to look at yourself and your problem with different eyes."

To risk. The very appeal to a therapist requires a certain risk. The client often has to make an effort to see a specialist, struggling with the fear of being misunderstood and the shame of being appreciated.

Experiment. Awareness is just the first step to change. Without attempts to break the habitual stereotype of one's behavior, to try to do something differently, to gain new experience, the therapy will “get stuck” at the stage of awareness.

Assimilate. The new experience obtained as a result of experiments must be integrated into the picture of your I, into the picture of the World. Otherwise, this experience will remain an unnecessary burden on the background of the personality.

Experiences

For the client, the process of therapy is by no means a "pleasant walk along the road of his life."As well as realizations, experiences and feelings of the client can be unpleasant and painful for him. A number of problems (first of all, we are talking about psychological trauma) require returning to unpleasant moments of the past and re-living (re-experiencing) the traumatic experience.

All of this requires the client to perform self-effort in the course of psychotherapy.

The above "forms of payment" of the client for successful therapy inevitably lead to his resistance to the therapeutic process and, paradoxically, resistance to change and, consequently, the solution of his problems. Indeed, the client, going to therapy, sincerely wants to solve his problem, but in the course of therapy he encounters a number of subjective obstacles and begins to slow down this process.

I want to highlight another source of resistance to change in therapy. Such an obstacle is fear of change.

The fear of change is irrational and poorly comprehensible and controllable. It can manifest itself both in the form of the client's real experiences of anxiety, loss of support, and in the form of dreams, in which there is a theme of the path, something new, alluring and fear and even horror to move there.

Fear of change can manifest itself in the following specific fears:

Fear of changing your own self … I will cease to be I - this is one of the strongest fears, comparable to the fear of physical non-existence.

Fear of changing the world. This fear is derived from the first. If you change yourself, the world will change.

Fear of meeting oneself Another, with your not-I, your shadow, your unconscious drives, repressed desires, instincts hidden under social layers.

Fear of facing the real world. To discover that the world is not quite the same as it used to be drawn, to be disappointed in one's illusions, fantasies, and expectations.

Fear of meeting a real other … What if I see that next to me is the wrong person? (Weak, dependent man, controlling, domineering woman, etc.)

In childhood, a person builds a picture of this world for himself, and then for the rest of his life, as a rule, he is engaged in supporting it. An interesting need in psychology is described - for cognitive consonance - the need to maintain a consistent picture of the world. On the other hand, there is an opposite need - for change, development.

A person constantly dwells in his life between fear and interest, curiosity. Fear stops, makes you immobile, rigid. But at the same time, the illusion of security and stability remains. Curiosity pushes a person towards changes, risks, destroys stability, while increasing the level of uncertainty and anxiety. Fear prevails in a person's life - this leads to stagnation, if interest - changes.

Essentially, we have two alternatives in life:

Live with closed eyes, illusions, expectations that something will change by itself; Take responsibility, take risks, make choices, be responsible for them, build your own life

Many people want to solve their problems without changing themselves. Sometimes it works. In the event that the problem was of a situational nature - i.e. was created by a certain situation that exceeded the adaptive capabilities of a person. In this case, the task of the psychologist is to help the client cope with the situation: to show a different perspective, equip with the necessary knowledge, skills, in the most general form, provide support and teach. But in therapy we often encounter problems, the author of which is not the situation, but the person himself. We can say that in these cases the person is the cause of his problems. And in this case, in order to solve the problem, it is necessary not to change the world, other people, but to change yourself.

Therapy empowers the person to change. Whether he is ready to take advantage of this opportunity is up to him.

At the same time, it is important to honestly answer yourself the following questions:

What price are you willing to pay for the change? Are you willing to take the risk, step out of your relative comfort zone and face the unknown? Can you handle the anxiety of uncertainty and open up to new experiences?

And at the end “for dessert” I offer a parable I liked (by Yulia Minakova), which beautifully describes the price of human desires.

The parable about the fulfillment of desires

On the outskirts of the universe, there was one shop. There was no sign on it for a long time - it was once carried away by a hurricane, and the new owner did not begin to nail it down, because every local resident already knew that the store was selling wishes.

The assortment of the store was huge, here you could buy almost everything: huge yachts, apartments, marriage, the post of vice president of the corporation, money, children, your favorite job, a beautiful figure, victory in a competition, big cars, power, success and much, much more. … Only life and death were not sold - this was done by the head office, which was located in another Galaxy.

Everyone who came to the store (and there are also those who wish, who have never entered the store, but stayed at home and just wish), first of all, found out the value of their desire.

The prices were different. For example, your favorite job was worth giving up stability and predictability, willingness to plan and structure your life on your own, self-confidence and permission to work where you like, and not where you need to.

Power was worth a little more: you had to give up some of your beliefs, be able to find a rational explanation for everything, be able to refuse others, know your own worth (and it should be high enough), allow yourself to say "I", declare yourself, despite approval or disapproval of others.

Some prices seemed strange - marriage could be obtained almost for nothing, but a happy life was expensive: personal responsibility for your own happiness, the ability to enjoy life, knowing your desires, refusing to strive to match those around you, the ability to appreciate what you have, allowing yourself to be happy, awareness of one's own value and significance, refusal of “sacrifice” bonuses, the risk of losing some friends and acquaintances.

Not everyone who came to the store was ready to immediately buy a wish. Some, seeing the price, immediately turned around and left. Others stood for a long time in thought, counting the cash and pondering where to get more funds.

Someone started complaining about too high prices, asked for a discount or was interested in a sale. And there were those who took out all their savings and received their cherished desire, wrapped in beautiful rustling paper.

Other customers looked enviously at the lucky ones, the gossip that the owner of the store was their acquaintance, and the desire went to them just like that, without any difficulty. The store owner was often asked to lower prices in order to increase the number of customers. But he always refused, since the quality of desires would also suffer from this.

When the owner was asked if he was afraid to go broke, he shook his head and replied that at all times there would be daredevils who would be ready to take risks and change their lives, abandon their usual and predictable life, who could believe in themselves, who had the strength and means for in order to pay for the fulfillment of their desires.

And on the door of the store for a good hundred years there was an announcement: "If your wish is not fulfilled, it has not yet been paid for."