Why Do Clients Leave Therapy?

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

In the professional activity of a psychologist and psychotherapist, it also happens that clients leave therapy.

At first, in the first years of work, it seems to us most often that the problem is in us, that we did something "wrong." We have no experience, so both burnout and recoil are side effects of our professional achievements.

With age and over time, our approaches and views on this topic change.

We very often write about responsibility and choice, about the need for a person to make a decision, but the person himself, especially being in a trauma, hardly realizes what is happening to him.

For example, a woman after a divorce or a break in relations with her beloved is unlikely to be able to build a request for a psychologist, rather, it can be "a way out of a state, oppressive, difficult."

At the same time, unprocessed, and in some cases neglected traumas of a person's soul do not allow him to adequately respond to one or another message from a psychologist.

That is, turning to a psychologist, a person shifts the responsibility to the psychologist. For example, after a traumatic circumstance and disturbed ideas about how to achieve a harmonious relationship, a person can turn off therapy so as not to come into contact with pain.

Many fears point to various kinds of psychoemotional disruptions, when therapy suddenly begins to seem "threatening".

Thus, the client believes that even despite the psychologist's possible warnings about therapy (correction) as a difficult stage, which is accompanied by an encounter with pain, feeling it, he remains within the reach of this point trauma, and leaves therapy under any convenient pretext.

In a number of cases, clients come back again, after a year or two, but for the most part, refusal from therapy is associated precisely with a mental breakdown and a person's resistance.

Striving for conditional safety, a person often believes that it is not as safe with a psychologist as he thought (thinks).

Returning to a traumatic state causes pain; accordingly, the psychologist is "to blame";

Complaints about "heaviness" in a semantic way reflect only the aggravating situation (for example, everything is "hard" for the client: work, family, everyday life, relationships, etc.). The process of therapy itself is often called "difficult", which means "unable to heal" this person.

Uncertainty in the success of therapy and increased anxiety are unfavorable factors that contribute to the conservation of the state and its irrationalization.

Hence the refusal of therapy. That is, fear is the opposite, an incentive to action, to the choice to "leave."

I agree and support both colleagues and clients who pay attention to mutual understanding and agreement between them.

Much less often, the client asks his psychologist about his anxiety or insecurity.

Discomfort in many situations is a manifestation of an anxious reaction. An emotionally draining process, anxiety makes a person hide, including from a psychologist.

So, there are often cases of a person's refusal to perform this or that exercise, analytical task, etc., precisely because of the fear of pain. In turn, such states, as well as withdrawal from therapy, speaks of a deficit in awareness, understanding of the therapeutic process.

The extinction of the reactive component of anxiety occurs when comprehending the uselessness and a certain inadequacy of one's own reaction to a particular question of a psychologist or his task.