2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
An amazing effect that I have noticed during long-term therapy.
Clients usually start to change at the very first meeting - gradually, sometimes imperceptibly, but confidently and purposefully. But it also happens otherwise. A person walks from week to week, month after month, and it seems that he is walking in vain. I don't see any changes, I don't see any progress, I don't see any effect from my work. I ask him about his personal impressions of our work. He says that he is satisfied with everything, but does not elaborate. Sometimes he says that it is more important for him to speak out, but he doesn't really need my interpretations and, in general, all my reasoning. I complain to the supervisor about the feeling of hopelessness, about the fact that I am doing something wrong, about devaluation. I cautiously ask the client what he actually gets from therapy, and again - no specifics or just a devaluation of the whole work. The person does not seem to hear me, he just nods in response to my words or listens to them with a bored look. I think about stopping therapy or referring the client to another specialist because I am confronted with my own feeling of powerlessness.
And then we have a break from work. Short-lived. Any difficult circumstances - vacations, illness, business trips. The client comes after a break - and I don't immediately recognize him. He begins to talk about his life, and I even get lost. Because he realized a lot, changed, redefined, overestimated. It turns out that all this time he heard me. It turns out that all this time the seeds that I threw into the soil, which seemed to me to be barren, were slowly sprouting. It turns out that he needed this break to integrate new information, to listen to his own response, to rebuild. And the very changes that I, impatiently, have been waiting for all these weeks, suddenly come one after another. "Do you remember, you said then …" - says the client. "And you know, I really understood …." or "And then I remembered your words and thought …" All this time there was an amazing, delicate, difficult inner work, imperceptible from the outside and secret, underground, hidden even from me.
When I first encountered this at the beginning of my practice, I was shocked. I thought it just couldn't be. I was afraid that I was doing everything wrong. Then I realized that this is a fairly typical course of events for long-term psychotherapy (short-term psychotherapy has its own laws, but even there it takes time to integrate the information received and rebuild real life for the client's mental changes). Almost all long-term non-medical psychotherapists since Freud have written extensively about the importance of a stable setting with frequent meetings, a constant schedule, and the more often the better. But some clients are useful to leave for a while, to give them time to introject what they received, to digest, to be with it. Hear your own voice, and not the voice of the therapist, think about what is happening, and not immediately "discard" information as worked out, replace formal speaking with serious reflection.
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