What Happens In Therapy?

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

What happens in therapy? What's happening? The client enters the office and sits in a chair. The office is twilight, the lights are off. It's easier this way. We sit opposite each other. Not friends, not acquaintances.

Who are we to each other? Formality depresses me a little, I want to be part of a single whole, I want discoveries and depth, but this is mine. The gaze is distant, as if instead of me there is a bright lamp, a slightly narrowed gaze. Something starts happening. Some call it a therapeutic alliance, some call it a psychotherapist-client relationship, there are many explanations for this. For me this moment is like the moment when you fall asleep. This very moment, which is so hard to catch, which constantly eludes you. This is that fraction of a second after which everything is no longer the same as it was before. At that moment, something starts to happen. I feel it and cannot find any explanation for it. Probably the time has not yet come for this. At this moment, I begin to feel that I am entering some other dimension (the dimension of consciousness), in which things begin to happen, which are ultimately called psychotherapy.

What's happening? I watch the client gradually become himself.

Once, I told him: “Use this hour as a unique opportunity to be yourself. You will be accepted as you are, without rejection and without criticism, without condemnation. You will just be yourself. A smile appears on her face. She really suits my client, he blooms. Sadness, fear, embarrassment, shame. I'm ashamed to be myself. It's a shame to be yourself when someone is looking at you. But here it is possible. And at that moment something happens. It is like a cloud that gradually penetrates the office and fills the entire space. It enters our lungs and we begin to inhale it. We become it, and it becomes us. This cloud serves as a medium of exchange, a kind of buffer, between me and the client. Our communication takes place through him. In this cloud something arises that later, when the client leaves the office, will become himself. He will take it with him and take it for himself. Although it was his from the very beginning.

It is something that is fraught with something real that we so desperately want to find in our meetings, this is something that is buried deep inside. The cloud is very soft, it is not felt, it is invisible, it can only be felt. This delicate substance opens the steel gates of our souls and draws from there what we are looking for, and in the amount that we can take outside the walls of the office. It carefully extends to us our hidden essence, our self, our nature and takes away our mask, takes off our carnival costume.

What happens in psychotherapy?

There are many interpretations and explanations of what is happening. Everyone has their own answer, the answer will be individual and will come in the form that is most convenient for us to learn.

For me, it has to do with realizing who I am, why I am and why all this. For me it is to be. For me to be aware of this. For me, it's living.

My attention has always been drawn to the interaction between the client and the therapist.

What happens in between when a customer purchases what he wants to purchase?

The cloud is still in the room, it is still in us. We breathe it, and we are equal through it, at this moment we are close. Doubts and fears, shame and sadness, long-lost joy and laughter, the laughter that was interrupted by the parental cry, float in the cloud. Years and decades are drowning in the cloud, storms and hurricanes of unfulfilled hopes are raging there, in the cloud everything disappears without a trace and everything is resurrected forever. The cloud becomes here and now, it becomes everything and nothing.

I look at the client. I see him this way, I accept him this way. And between us it is something that makes him happy. How it happens, I do not know, I just know that it is happening. I see this sincere smile, I see tears that run down my cheeks and fall in drops of dew on my knees. At this moment, everything becomes different, everything acquires other features, different meanings and other roles are assigned, everything becomes what it wants to be.

What's happening? It doesn't really matter. I am sitting opposite, the client is sitting opposite. We say we live this short life together. And we will never be the same again. Everything will remain in a cloud that will disappear the moment the office doors close behind us.

Something happened.