2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
Therapist's limitations as a possible resource
The psychotherapist using his own sensitivity
detects client “points of no freedom”.
Today I want to speculate about one famous phrase among psychotherapists: "In psychotherapy with a client, one cannot advance further than the psychotherapist has gone on his way."
I do not want to dispute or prove the truth of this phrase. I accept it as an axiom, repeatedly tested in the course of my many years of therapeutic experience.
Here I would like to talk about how the therapist in his work can discover these limitations of his own and what to do with them?
In discovering his professional limitations, the following reflexive questions can help him:
- What phenomena am I afraid to encounter in therapy? (Violation of boundaries, closeness, separation, rejection, loneliness …?);
- What feelings are difficult for me to experience in therapy? (anger, guilt, shame, rage, depreciation …);
- Which clients are the hardest for me to work with? (Borderline, narcissistic, obsessive, depressive …);
- What client topics am I losing sensitivity on? (Crises, trauma, choice, addiction …).
The central question here, in my opinion, is the following:
How do I lose my therapeutic freedom? At what points in the therapeutic process do I become unfree?
Therapeutic lack of freedom can manifest itself in various modalities that the therapist poorly understood:
- In sensations (feeling of tension, awkwardness, anxiety);
- At the bodily level (bodily stiffness, tension in the body, loss of "body sense");
- Emotionally (anger, fear, shame, apathy);
- Cognitively (impotence, dead end, feeling of "moving in a circle").
Example. A therapist with unprocessed aggression in therapy will lose therapeutic freedom in situations in which aggression occurs. And then he can only react polar - either aggressively, responding with aggression to aggression, or freeze, trying in every possible way to avoid situations of aggression in therapy. Both one and the second indicated polarities lead to the breakdown of the therapeutic contact.
The psychotherapist, with the help of his own sensitivity, discovers the client's “points of lack of freedom” that make his life stereotyped and stereotyped, and creates opportunities for him in therapeutic contact to go beyond the boundaries of his “neurotic matrix”. Similar processes unfold in supervision, where the supervisor, together with the therapist, searches for and investigates the points of the therapist's lack of freedom.
The above does not mean at all that a good therapist should be universal and one hundred percent worked out. A good therapist knows his limitations. Having met with the points of his lack of freedom in the therapeutic process, he notices them, realizes and in the future either works them out in his personal therapy and supervision, or more clearly defines for himself and for potential clients the border of his professional capabilities, indicating in his questionnaire preferences and limitations in work. For example, I don't work with addicted clients.
Do you know your "points of not freedom", colleagues?
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