What Do You Allow Yourself !? And You Call Yourself A Psychologist

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

Good afternoon dear friends!

We continue to develop the topic about therapy, about its stages, about the attitude to the client's therapy at its different stages.

A couple of days ago I mentioned that there is a phase when the therapist and the client start working on the "border of contact". Let me explain what it is, just in case. Such work can happen when the client is not just content with receiving recommendations from the psychologist, makes discoveries with him in his life, etc., but already notices the psychologist as a living person and notices his reactions to him. From the client's relationship to the psychologist, work about this relationship arises (about the relationship between the client and the therapist as a whole). And in the process of therapy, this is this very work on the border of contact. This is a work about what happens between the client and the therapist in their interaction, in their communication, in their relationship. Happens here and now

But, for example, although it can show that some kind of resentment against the psychologist refers to the past, but there are feelings now, the tension between them is also present now, something from this feeling is happening or not happening right now. This is all we are investigating and discussing.

And work on the border of contact, as I wrote, begins at the stage when the client noticed the psychologist as a living person and … (it happens quite often), he attributed something to him, some projections showed up on the psychologist. Of course, the client does not yet know that projections are projections.

It is then worth mentioning what projection is. For example, the parents of the client in childhood were scolded for being late, or said that no one would wait for him, they were ashamed for not understanding something, they were angry with him, being tired.

Now imagine the situation that the client was late for the session, ran, thinking that the psychologist would not wait for him. I came, a psychologist is on the spot, but somehow tired (the evening is already, suppose). We started to work, the client has not yet regained his breath and has not heard the question of the psychologist put to him.

We all get used to what we see from childhood. So our client also learned to expect only such reactions. He did not see other people in childhood as often as his parents, and now he thinks that the reactions of all people to him can always be just like that. And what should he feel in this situation? That he will be scolded for being late, ashamed for not understanding that the therapist is already tired and will be angry anyway. Here our client can withdraw into himself, or start attacking the therapist, accusing him of not loving him, not accepting him, shaming him, getting angry with him, and so on. And the therapist is not the client's parent at all, he is quite sympathetic to being late (after all, people, and sometimes they can be late), and to the fact that someone may not hear and understand him, and is not at all irritable when he is tired, but he is not at all tired, as it may be, but it’s just evening now and the client is used to thinking, using the example of all the same parents, that all people get tired in the evening.

So, seeing that something is wrong with the client, that his reactions somehow do not correspond to the situation, the psychologist can assume that this is the transfer of feelings that were addressed, as in our case, to the parents, to the therapist. The client expected only a judgment reaction from the habitual therapist. So the psychologist studies what is happening, why the client reacts in this way.

Well, in the process of such work, all people cease to be like their parents, acquire their own unique features, communication with them becomes easier and easier, new friends appear, quarrels stop with old ones, the family becomes calmer.

Thank you for attention!