2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
Recently I wrote that I changed the psychotherapist, switched from gestalt to psychoanalysis (3 times a week). Plunging into the community of psychoanalysts, I was surprised that psychotherapists who have been working for decades (20-30 years each) still go to their personal therapy and periodically change therapist (every 7-10 years).
It is important to change the psychotherapist not once a year, but once every 7-10 years - this is the cycle that allows you to start and complete therapy in full. If we consider deep, high-quality and professional psychotherapy, a year is given only for the beginning and completion of therapy. The formation of our psyche occurs from birth, and by the age of 7-10 it is already formed. Approximately the same period is needed for therapy to work out all the nuances. Why multiple therapists are needed? Psychotherapists are prone to retraumatization next to the client, and it is very important to “wool” your life over and over again. If the therapist does not have his own therapy, it is really scary professionally and directly affects the clients.
So why should a psychotherapist have her own therapy?
The first and most important factor affecting quality is depth. If the therapist himself is not sufficiently treated, he does not understand himself well, cannot understand his psyche, trauma, and childhood situation. This is if there was little psychotherapy. If it did not exist at all, the depth level will tend to zero. And one more option - there was therapy, it was enough, but now it is not, then the therapist is prone to retraumatization next to his clients, which will also affect his work. Why? The work of a psychotherapist is always work through oneself. There is no other way to provide a quality service to a client if you have not passed the experience through yourself. Relatively speaking, having listened to the person in the session, the therapist, in order to understand his feelings, asks the question: “Have I had a similar experience? If so, when?"
If this is an insufficiently treated psychotherapist, experiences and experiences will be closed from him, repressed, or there is a denial (“No, this was not the case with me!”), Respectively, he will not be able to raise a similar experience and be useful to the client. Naturally, it is not necessary to go through all life experiences (for example, to have cancer in order to understand a person with cancer), it is enough to be seriously ill. It is important to be able to collect various experiences, and this therapists learn from their therapy.
If the therapist has a lot of unprocessed experience, you will feel it in the process of therapy - as if you are spinning in one place, slipping, not going deeper, but superficially and one-sidedly considering the problem. That is why supervision is important for the therapist! For some personal reasons, the therapist (even with therapy!) May not notice something, but when he goes to supervision and shares with another colleague, this other will notice.
A therapist without his own therapy is prone to burnout, in other words, the ability to emotion will tend to zero. Accordingly, in the session it will be emotionally difficult for him, and you will feel it. It also happens that the therapist will not be able to join you emotionally, and you will feel abandoned, abandoned, misunderstood. Why is this happening? He simply is not able to survive your trauma with you, does not help to raise feelings, live them and cry. As a result, you will not be able to work through the trauma properly, and experience is the main key of psychotherapy itself in order to cope with that childhood resentment and frustration. For this, the therapist must be with you, must understand your feelings, join them, be capable of empathy, support. The shared experience, which is usually lacking for most people, is trauma treatment. A burnout therapist cannot face your pain because he cannot face his own pain. As a result, the pain will remain and you will go away with it.
Replaying is the worst option. However, there may still be a tie not to some unprofessionalism. In what sense? If the therapist has not dealt with his trauma, has not worked it out, has not come out of some difficult and unbearable situation, has not healed the psyche, he may pull you into those events that turn out to be not entirely healthy. For example, a therapist considers your pursuit of big money to be narcissistic and shames it. What can this talk about? The therapist has a narcissistic trauma, he was ashamed for this, or maybe he has the wrong knowledge (instead of figuring out why it is important for his client to earn a lot, the person is ashamed). In fact, such actions in session, when clients are ashamed for their aspirations and beliefs, mean only a very low level of professionalism. A psychotherapist should not do this, he simply does not have the right to do so - his task is not to evaluate a person, but to understand why this is happening to him, to investigate the reason, to figure out what he wants to receive and satisfy in his aspiration. The main idea is that every person is good, with good intentions, normal.
If there is some kind of narcissistic desire, what is it based on, how could it arise? The task of the psychotherapist is to find the root, and then the decision is made by the person (to get rid of this root or to realize his trauma).
Another example - the therapist himself is afraid of intimacy, as a result, in every possible way, he can push the client away from the relationship (to denigrate the partner throughout all sessions - and here he does not do the same here). One option, when this is support at the time of separation, some strong feelings, the other option is constant pressure (all partners are bad). It also happens that a person is afraid of codependent relationships, and you and your partner have become very close, as a result, your relationship was dubbed codependent, although this is not so. In fact, only a few do this, mostly untreated trauma of the therapist will be broadcast (you will be warned against what the therapist himself is afraid of). This is not to say that this is due to bad motives, on the contrary! However, there is no psychotherapeutic approach, the situations become everyday and resemble parental behavior.
An important point - do not confuse the unprofessionalism of the psychologist with your transference. How can I check this? Ask yourself if anyone treated you that way as a child? How do you feel when a psychologist dissuades you from a relationship? Who in your childhood environment (mom, grandmother, dad, grandfather) discouraged you from a relationship? Who broadcasted: "Relationships are bad, painful and terrible"? As a rule, you will find transfer here as well. So, you figured it out, and now go to therapy and talk about your thoughts and feelings (“It seems to me that you began to remind me of my mother with your behavior when you dissuade me from a relationship!”), So you can already face reality, and not by their projections and ideas.
The question of the unprofessionalism of a psychologist is rather complicated. Psychotherapists have their own ethics, and "confused" contacts with clients (going to a cafe, sexual intercourse, etc.), an abrupt change in the setting (time, place and terms of payment) and violation of confidentiality speak of unprofessionalism. Then everything varies about the degree of pressure on you, your feelings of a superficial analysis of the problems that you have addressed. You may be resisting, but one of the tasks of the therapist is to cope with your resistance, feel it, catch it, grab it by the tail, and at least tell you about it. If you feel that you are stuck in therapy, do not know that you are resisting in this zone and do not understand why, then the therapy is stuck, and your therapist did not catch this resistance (or did not voice it). Before making your final decision, take at least 3-5 sessions to clarify what's going on. Alternatively, you can apply for therapy supervision (if you do not understand what is happening in your therapy and how, contact another therapist and try to find a transference or understand the issue of the professionalism of your psychotherapist).
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