2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
When is it time to see a therapist? When a person feels that he has wandered into a dead end. With all the abundance of self-educational materials, some of us need a tangible guide from the jungle of psychic heaps. He seeks to find this guide in therapy.
Why does it happen that therapy does not work or brings temporary results? A good builder knows that if a building is built on a flimsy foundation, it will not stand for a long time, no matter how much you coat it with plaster inside. It is the same with therapy: sometimes a person needs a protective or adaptive mechanism in order to come to the state of mind in which the foundation can be laid. The ability to explain to the client such mechanisms as tracing paper on the wounded mind - including positive focus, gratitude list, body sensation scanning - and their difference from deep inner work is a sure sign of a professional therapist.
One of the mistakes that lead to a waste of time, mental and intellectual resources is trying to force the patient to jump over the canyon, when he does not even see the beginning of the cliff. This is not about the limited time available to the patient due to financial resources. More often than is acceptable, the therapist is in a state of seeming "objectivity", which, in fact, is a kind of amalgam of his professional and life experience, supported by the need to remain abstracted.
Patients who have abandoned therapy often complain that as soon as they enter the therapist's office, they immediately come across this "objective, judgmental person who keeps the answers to all questions." It is the therapist's lack of humanity that can be compared to the lack of glue that holds the bricks together in a freshly built building.
As happens with many great ideas in our culture, the golden mean, or balance, is sometimes unknown to us. If we are told that the psychotherapist must proceed from a position of objectivity, then an end is put to the involvement of our own emotions in the therapy process. Such an attitude is rather destructive than curative: healing can occur only with the intelligent interaction of the lost and the guide. To bring a lost traveler into the light, the guide, first of all, needs to understand where he is and find him himself!
What is a lost person most afraid of? That's right: that in his wanderings he will always be alone, without company. That he has nowhere to shout, because no one will hear; and that he would have to get out with his own hands. Therefore, when a person experiencing deep depression meets a psychotherapist who immediately informs him that being depressed is unhealthy and wrong, and that such a state needs to be changed, the patient is faced with a situation in which he is still alone.
Most of us turn to psychologists and therapists for the reason that we cannot find a way out on our own. Continuing to be in this state of loneliness even in the presence of a therapist, we only assert ourselves in our wrongness. If I feel a feeling and they make it clear to me that the feeling is wrong, what do I do? I begin to feel that something is wrong with me. I come and say to the psychologist: "Something is wrong with me." The psychologist rushes to treat this "not so", although in fact everything is so, and the shaky foundation to which the enlightened gaze needs to be turned is a deep feeling of the patient's wrongness and unacceptability of his emotions. If you need to send a team of workers somewhere, then only there.
The first step a psychotherapist needs to take to truly alleviate the patient's condition and ensure further healing is to look at the world from the patient's point of view
In consciousness-based therapy, we call this process conscious acceptance of the patient's consciousness. Only by looking at the world from the patient's position, we can determine what gave rise to this attitude to reality.
Recognizing the adequacy of the patient's emotions is step two. Some of us in the psychotherapeutic field try to view patients' lives as a movie: without unnecessary involvement, fearing that involvement a) would violate the therapist's objectivity (which we ourselves invented and placed at the forefront, and which we rely on in making decisions even more than on intuition that is absolutely necessary in the process of therapy), and b) will affect our own mental state (given that taking other people's problems to heart has earned a reputation as an absolute "no" in the sphere of relations between people).
Turning to the second concern, let me draw your attention to the fact that unconsciously taking someone else's pain close to your heart and consciously looking at reality from the perspective of an observer placed inside the patient are two different things. These are two different states, two different sensations of energy waves! Given that the most common method of coping with pain today is to resist it, it is not surprising that we are afraid of “uninvited” feelings and emotions. Especially if they can be avoided.
Traveling through points of view is a fun technique. She also helps outside the office, in communicating with family and colleagues. Actors who are able to get used to the role are well aware that only by taking on a part of the consciousness of their character, they can act on his behalf realistically. This is exactly what we need to learn to do more in therapy!
Understanding the reality in which the patient lives "from the inside" and recognizing this reality as existing and present is the starting point for conducting fundamental psychotherapy. Even if the number of sessions is limited.
Lilia Cardenas, transpersonal psychologist, psychotherapist
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