Confrontation

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

Author - Olga Shubik

Confrontation is painful in experiences. And it tends to create fear.

To stand alone, as you are and with what is in you - against the world - can be scary.

The world of other people, the world of another, separate from you, a person.

Stand - against - against …

Confrontation is about your separateness, your boundaries, your isolation in this world and your uniqueness.

Confrontation is the bulwark behind which is your experience, your vision, your self-awareness and perception of the world - your essence.

Confrontation suggests that "I am!"

This is the first time we confront our parents in this world when we declare that we are separate, different, and different from them.

This happened when we shoved a nipple or spit out an extra (read - toxic) spoon for us, the most useful - from the point of view of parents - porridge. When they pushed exactly these socks or this hat, which the adults wore on us when they themselves thought it necessary to do it. When we first said - "no, I don't want to!" and "myself!" When we committed insane, dangerous or strange from the point of view of other people actions that we broadcast to the world - "I have it like that"

We declared ourselves through disagreement, the designation of our boundaries, the contours of our "I", expressed in our desires and our protests against something around us and in relation to us.

In confrontation, we grew, developed: confrontation shaped us as separate, different from other people.

The fear of confrontation with others - to declare oneself, to designate one's personality and its boundaries - is scary precisely because in our life the experience of confrontation with parents and other adults in our childhood was in advance, as a rule, doomed to their resistance to it.

In their anxiety for us, in their human weakness, they often perceived our desire to express ourselves, to defend our separateness, as a threat to their existence, their separateness, and, therefore, often it ended with a forceful suppression on their part of our impulses to declare ourselves the way we do. knew how to do it.

And this collision brought us pain.

It hurts to lose yourself, giving up your needs, your desires, the designation of your characteristics.

It hurts to lose the kindness of important adults who were the whole world for us.

It hurts to feel the power of their anger for our "disobedience."

And scary.

Therefore, many of us - moved away from confrontation, from confrontation with another person, abandoning ourselves, our desires and our needs. We were too young to endure the pain and fear that confrontation with another person brought with us.

We refused to stand opposite.

We hid ourselves and smoothed our "uncomfortable" features to ease this fear, to make this pain less.

Many of us have grown up with the conviction that “confronting is painful,” “confronting is losing love,” “confronting is being a bad boy,” or “a bad girl.”

We went out into the world with these constructs.

And they lost, perhaps, the best part of themselves.

… When the pain of being lost in this world becomes unbearable, a person comes to a psychologist for consultation, therapy.

He wants to find himself, to recognize among other people with whom he merged, agreeing thoughtlessly with what others offer him, not hearing himself, his soul and heart, his feelings and his needs.

He is torn between the need to be himself and to stay with other people.

In therapy, the client may show two strategies for interacting with the therapist:

• confront with the therapist for the sake of continuing the experience of confrontation with parents in his childhood in order to receive - in the person of the therapist - recognition by the "parents" of his distinctiveness, uniqueness, peculiarity and, therefore, the value of his own personality (thereby, a negative transference to the therapist is formed)
• and to refuse any confrontation with the therapist, "swallowing" from him, as in his childhood, all the ideas, thoughts, suggestions offered by the therapist - thus forming a positive transference to the therapist and continuing to prolong his experience of suppressing his essence, which led him, in turn, to therapy

These processes can be somehow dealt with in the course of therapy.

For the therapist, in the context of the topic under discussion, it comes to the fore in personal therapy of his own pain points associated with confrontation in his life.

Because, without working on this topic, the therapist will frustrate the client (which in itself can be healing: to limit, not to give what he, the client, wants to receive for himself in the usual way).

But frustrating the client with his lack of elaboration, remaining with this unconscious moment of therapy for the therapist himself (what exactly he does in relation to the client and why he confronts him), the therapist cannot give the client the experience of awareness, understanding that confrontation can be a movement forward.

He cannot give the experience of awareness, understanding that confrontation with the therapist is now the necessary ground, the basis on which the client's authenticity grows, his - the client's - uniqueness becomes clear.

The experience of feedback “from the world” (in the person of the therapist) cannot give, that even when confronting, the client does not cease to be accepted, valuable, and important.

It cannot give the experience of awareness, a new understanding that by confronting, one can stay close to another person.

In this case, the therapist replays in session the same infinitely sad story of his own parents not recognizing his worth.

The therapist's conscious confrontation in the client-therapeutic relationship presupposes the client's awareness of what is happening to him, the client, in the session and gives a chance for further appropriation of the above-mentioned experience, new for him.

And already this kind of frustration (realized by both the therapist and the client) is the necessary support for the client, which he once did not receive in his early experience.

An experience of confrontation, where there is no "death for one and life for another."

The experience when the construct “either you or me” acquires flexibility, other forms, includes new possibilities for manifesting oneself, for example, “there is you - and this is valuable, there is I - another person - and this is also valuable. We can talk about our differences. We each can tell another - what we are, and this is a new opportunity to love each other."

Here's what I know about confrontation, frustration, and support in therapy from my client and professional experience.