Treat Me For Free

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

Treat me for free

Money is an idiotic criterion for human achievement

but this, alas, is the only universal criterion, which we have.

Charles Steinmetz

During his many years of therapeutic practice, he discovered a number of interesting patterns in relation to the cost of therapy.

Namely:

The higher the price of therapy, the

1. More effective therapy results for the client
2. Less energy is wasted by the therapist.

The most ineffective, complex and energy-consuming clients are “free” clients.

I thought about what it was connected with and explained this phenomenon for myself as follows. The results of therapy directly depend on the client's willingness to "invest" in the therapy himself - with his own money, I-efforts, time.

And money here is one of the criteria for a person's ability to make self-efforts, and, consequently, to personal growth.

The "free" clients have a stable attitude of expectation from the world: The world owes me. This is an attitude with a childish fairy-tale faith in magic, faith in omnipotent parents, in a kind, fair world in which one must wait and believe and “they themselves will come and give everything themselves”. Such a life position is essentially infantile and leads to shifting responsibility for one's Life onto Others, including the therapist.

Having met with the unwillingness of the world to “do something for him,” such a person begins to behave like a small child - to get angry, hysterical, whine, demand, manipulate, violate boundaries … child deficiency in adult relationships - clinging to others and sucking their energy.

Behind the problems visible to the client himself, with which he comes to therapy, there is a basic, unconscious problem - the problem of psychological infantility and inability to take responsibility for his life. And without solving this basic problem - without "growing up" the client - it is impossible to solve his visible symptomatic problems, arbitrary from this central problem for him.

Unsurprisingly, dealing with these types of clients is extremely challenging. Here we are essentially dealing with a client who is snowing for therapy. It is almost impossible to build a therapeutic relationship with him. If it is not possible to "hook" him during the first meetings for realizing the possibility of his personal contribution to his existing actual problems, the client will leave the therapist disappointed, even more firmly established in his infantile life position: The world is unfair to me!

Even in my youth, being carried away by oriental practices, I read that George Gurdjieff took as his students only those people who had achieved financial independence. Then I was surprised by his position and even somewhat outraged. Now I understand him. A person who could not achieve anything in terms of financial solvency turns out to be just as impotent in terms of spiritual development.