On The Inconsistency Of Client-therapeutic Desires

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

On the inconsistency of client-therapeutic desires (excerpts from a lecture at an intensive course in Losevo-2015 together with VEGI)

Our clients want:

1. Regularly receive a clear and unambiguous answer to the question: how to live and what to do, but at the same time decide and do everything for yourself.

2. To become our friends, expecting that in friendship we will voluntarily, free of charge and regularly listen to them sympathetically for the same amount of time.

3. They want to meet our humanity, our mistakes and weaknesses, while leaving their idealization for themselves.

4. They want to recover faster, but at the same time they want to stay with us for as long as possible.

5. They dream that it will not be painful, not to face the unpleasant complex in themselves, but to help at the same time.

6. They often do not want to talk and open up, but they want us to understand.

7. They would like to share with us everything that is in their life: joy, sorrow, life, bed, nights, evenings, days, but they would be horrified if suddenly this happened.

8. They would like us to work for free, just out of a burning desire to see them and devote our hour to them personally, but at the same time they would not like it if a dilapidated, hungry and embittered therapist sat in front of them.

9. They want our unquenchable faith in them and their constructive process, especially when they are in a point of despair and disbelief in anything, especially in psychotherapy.

10. They crave our resilience and the ability to withstand any emotional storm, and at the same time destroy us for what once destroyed themselves.

11. They will persistently and consistently devalue us, desperately wanting us to stand up and demonstrate our professionalism to them.

12. They will persistently bombard us with their projective fantasies in the secret hope that we will be able to distinguish and separate the real from the subjective-projective and explain to them what is where.

13. With shame, they will reveal to us their terrible secrets, shameful secrets and shadowy sides in a timid desire that we, of course, will be impressed, but will not consider them so terrible and unworthy of our cooperation.

14. They will suddenly and unilaterally interrupt therapy, naively believing that they are suddenly healed, completely forgetting that their therapist is sitting somewhere, and wondering where the one for whom he came to work has gone.

15. They will easily and suddenly change us to other therapists, simply because “this training helped Vasya much faster,” and we, their therapists, paid a lot of money and spent a lot of time on supervision, trying to figure out how intricate our process is arranged with him, and for some reason it will not be easy for us to stop wanting to share this knowledge with the one who left us so quickly.

16. They will end our long-term relationship and leave us with the desire that we remember them as long as possible … and in this they will finally be damn right: we also remember for a long time those with whom we managed to share the hours of our life, approaching as much as the framework of therapy and mutual courage will allow us.

Well, for balance …

Therapists also want to:

1. So that as many clients as possible find out about them, provocatively declaring themselves in those places where there are not clients, but rather opponents of any kind of serious approach to psychology. With their perseverance and enthusiasm, they will rather cause a desire to declare all psychologists crazy than to come to them for treatment.

2. When the first clients, at the beginning of the practice, nevertheless begin to reach the therapist's office, the first meetings will take place in such tension and a desire to please that the therapists will exhaust themselves in rushing between the desire for the client to stay and confirm the therapist's qualifications with their intention to come again, and to be gone forever, leaving behind their narcissistic torment.

3. Therapists often dream of an interesting client, it is desirable that his way of life and occupation be as far away from psychology as possible, and almost immediately, in this case, they begin to resist the temptation to translate therapy into friendship, and with the desire to share each other's life. not just client neurosis.

4. The desire for the client to work on his own, and the therapist would not need to invent more and more intricate questions in order for the client to begin the process of searching and the experience will sometimes be replaced by the desire to be needed to do at least something, insert his "five cents" into your overall work.

5. The desire to delve into the vastness of the subjective world of the person sitting opposite will often confront an equally vivid desire to go out into the air, eat borscht or wrap up in a cozy blanket and sleep for a couple of hours while someone is nearby.

6. Sometimes the client's story or experiences can keep the therapist busy all day, or even a week until the next meeting. And sometimes you want to forget it already in the middle of the session, but the last forty minutes of the session last longer than a century.

7. The desire to set a price for your work, at which you could then feed yourself, protect yourself, get supervision, study further and maybe even (oh, insolence!) Start saving up for a vacation, is interspersed with the horror that for that kind of money, and even in a crisis, of course, no one will come.

8. Therapists wait so much for the client's living feelings like manna from heaven, but when these deposits accumulated over decades fall on them, sometimes it is difficult to remain in the role, giving therapeutic answers, often you just want to say in a very human way: "Enough already ! What have I to do with it ?! Take all this to your mom!"

9. When therapists decide to raise the prices of their therapy to clients already visiting them, they are tormented between the desire to somehow match the market, to make their work at least a little financially sound, and the fear that client resentment could jeopardize existing relationships.

10. When a client, with great enthusiasm, says that he “went to an amazing training last week, and everything became clear to him, and now he understands how to live, and he suddenly and clearly felt good everywhere,” the therapist is torn between joy for his enlightenment and insights, anxiety (what could he be told like that) and narcissistic torment (well, of course, all our long and painstaking work will be devalued and all the laurels will go to the training god).

11. When a client leaves, therapists feel sad and happy. Leaves - it means that part of the path has been passed, the work is done, both are great. But if a client leaves for another, then sometimes you have to cook in yourself for a long time "what did I do wrong", dislike this newfound rival in advance, torn between "well, go to hell" and "maybe you will stay, we still have everything can work out."

12. And no matter how many narcissistic wounds our clients inflict on us, we still expect it to start and continue again.