Balancing Support And Frustration In Therapy

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

On this topic, I want to share my thoughts based on working with clients and on my experience as a client. And although they are not the ultimate truth, I rely on practice.

So, about the balance. A good therapy process allows the client to move forward by both receiving support and experiencing frustration in contact with the therapist. The balance of the one and the other allows you to achieve balance, but in finding it, it is normal to fall in one direction or the other.

Overfeeding with support can take away from the client the right to the anger that energizes the change process. If you are often frustrated in order to cause this anger, among other things, you may suddenly find that the client has finished therapy with you and has gone to where, after all, they will first let you cry …

Despite this, it should be understood that, by and large, the same interventions of the therapist can be both support and frustration for the client, depending on many factors of contact.

The constant support trap lies in the client's inability to see their contribution to the situation and relationship in which they are suffering. Realize your responsibility. Then assign it. Be horrified at this contribution of yours. Start choosing in what ways to live on, learn these new ways to use. But this is not possible, being in the warm mother's womb, which the therapist creates with her endless support.

The trap of frustration is in its premature, untimely, excessiveness. The result can be retraumatizing the client, holding back anger, running away from contact, stopping in the internal process instead of advancing in therapy. This does not mean that the therapist has to hold on to any of his feelings if their presentation can become frustrating for the client. The difference is that the therapist knows how to deal with the feelings that arise, but the client may not be ready to face what is not yet very accessible to him. For example, with anger, disgust, or boredom.

The therapist's anxiety about whether he is effective enough awakens the desire to disperse, grow up the client, literally bring him closer to instay, preferably to several at once. However, our relationship with the client is a priority. After all, Gestalt therapy is a relationship therapy that brings about healing. Therefore, any intervention that destroys the relationship with the client is not therapeutic.

The time it takes to build trust provides an opportunity to swing the pendulum of the balance of frustration and support. This can clarify what is best for the client and in what form. The therapist's own skill of self-support and resistance to frustration with life is not transmitted to the client by airborne droplets. You can share your ways of both. The therapist himself is the client's first way to cope with what he certainly cannot cope with alone. Whether it sustains him or forces him to deal with the difficulties of contact, the benefit is that contact with the therapist happens in a different way than it was in his life before.

The client's ability to present himself in a relationship with the therapist or, on the contrary, to remain in the image and lie in something, is directly related to the therapist's own appropriated right to be or not to be himself. The expectation that the therapist should always be supportive and the client should be selflessly honest are fortunately not in line with the reality of ordinary human contact, albeit within the framework of therapy.

I know how I am supported by the opportunity to cry in therapy next to another person who does not pity me, does not voice his “oh” and “ah”, does not make a mournful face and does not try to hug me to his chest. If he can withstand my tears and can be with me in this, I will come to him again. If he shares his feelings in response to mine, I will be with him for a long time.

But the therapist's desire to pull out my anger, asking a lot of questions that do not affect my experiences right now, just in case, at least once to say “I don’t believe, you lead me around the bush” so that I try to convince him that I am telling the truth - such frustration stops me and does not advance me in any way. And the return of responsibility to me, the appeal to my adult part, with a careful attitude towards the child, promotes very well.

Why am I - check yourself: did you fail in support, did you overclock with frustration? Look for balance. And listen to your client.