2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
Any professional psychologist / psychotherapist periodically asks himself a question about the effectiveness of his activities, and how he can really help his client. Indeed, without an answer to this question (at least for oneself), sometimes it is literally impossible to work - to find a client, to conduct meaningful therapy, to feel satisfaction from the profession, and most importantly - to actually provide assistance to the person who applied for it.
And the same question helps and should help the client to find out whether to seek psychotherapeutic help, what real result can be obtained from working with a therapist, and whether this particular therapist is suitable for him in particular.
Often, therapists, in the process of their own professional development, try on many roles, trying to answer this question. Listener, friend, appraiser, rescuer, etc., but as a result comes to the conclusion that this role is not enough: the role of the listener is not enough to feel like a professional; the role of a friend is not enough to take payment for your services, it is not enough to partially fulfill the functions of other people, not having fully defined your own.
In different areas of psychotherapy and psychological schools, the answers to this question are also very different, and the range is really wide: from the need to teach the client the ways of living his life that are inaccessible to him (which theoretically implies that the therapist knows how to "right") to the need to follow the client and help him discover and actualize the unmanifest resources in himself (and then it is almost impossible to designate the final result of the work). There is also a great temptation to replace the answer to a semantic question with a description of the therapist's technical actions: someone in his work interprets with might and main, someone supports and empathically reflects, someone reformulates the client's life experience and attitudes, someone teaches certain mental skills, someone It establishes and tracks the way the client maintains contact. You can continue almost indefinitely. However, in essence, all of the above is a solution to the psychotherapist's tasks, but not a goal. If the goal is to help the client, then the primary question is not how to help him technically, but what exactly the help will consist of.
For me, the answer to this question was an attempt to generalize, distract from psychotherapy schools: what can a specialist provide and guarantee, regardless of the direction in which he works and how will he differ from a friend / colleague / relative / any person who is ready to listen?
The occupational therapist has a responsibility to ensure safety. Safety for the client The most difficult thing for him is to be himself. In the process of working with the therapist, the client discovers his sore spot, his own forced limitations, assessed as unsightly traits and emotions, and he is seized with horror. Unfortunately, our client inevitably has a history of encountering a situation when an absolutely natural part of his personality is rejected, depreciated, subjected to aggressive attacks, most often from significant close people. And now, having discovered this "wormhole" in oneself, a certain turning point comes - something needs to be done with it. At this point, the therapist must guarantee safety: the client needs to learn that the hitherto suppressed part of his personality is not the most terrible thing on the planet, it can and should be manifested "in objective reality" and it does not necessarily follow punishment - another rejection, depreciation, aggression or something else. The therapist will also be there, providing a minimal experience of acceptance for his client, questioning the "badness" of the client, giving the opportunity to rely on this experience and try to stop hiding a part of himself from himself and others.
To ensure such safety, the psychotherapist is forced to know his own limitations: is he really able to accept and not condemn the client when faced with something that does not fit into his picture of the world? Will he be able to try to understand a deep sadist? Pedophile? And to be able to track down and confess to the client, if it still didn't work out. In such situations, it makes sense to look for a way out together, sometimes up to the transfer of the client to another therapist who is ready to work with the emerging topic. The experience for the client is invaluable - they helped him and did not turn away, even when the therapist himself is not able to cope with the problem.
Any other options of the psychotherapist - on request, one hundred percent guarantees of the success of the therapy are impossible, but this is the minimum set of competencies necessary to really help our client, what we must guarantee: safety, acceptance, honesty. And it seems that this is not at all about professional qualities, but the very subject of our work obliges us to have a specific tool - therapeutic human qualities and relationships.
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