Therapy As An Escape From Loneliness (a Story From Practice)

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

I have one client. Very successful and attractive. Nice, with a family, a lot of good and useful acquaintances, quite a successful start-up business, which we initially dealt with together with him. Contrary to the favorite topic of psychologists, he had excellent relations with his family, understanding with his parents and friendship with other relatives. Some of my first impressions of working with him were admiration, bewilderment and surprise that he came to me, a lack of understanding of what I can give such a person … such a PERSON … This impression was with me for a long time, despite the fact that he kept coming and coming, sometimes bringing with him his doubts, failures and disappointments, but more often - successes, joys and victories under a subtle sauce of annoyance or guilt. I sincerely believed that a person in such a cool situation did not need the help of a psychologist and even tried to convince him of this at first, but later, much later, I realized how badly I was wrong.

And now I am not sharing the story of a successful and simple path, not how I - so cool and all-knowing - easily saw how to help a person, and did what no psychologist before me thought of doing (and there were several of them), but rather a powerful failure. A very valuable failure that taught me a lot. He taught me to look deeper, to be more attentive and closer, no matter how paradoxical it may sound.

The main request for working with me was support in the development of his business, as well as small problems with excess weight and large ones with an emotional state. To me they looked small, to him they looked gigantic. The same applied to his actions in the way of organizing the business. From his position, they looked like destructive inaction, and not as for me - trial and error of a beginner. It is worth noting that I very much even understand that "from the inside" everything always looks completely different than "from the outside", and I myself often face such catastrophization when the conversation touches my life.

We went through a lot together. During this time, he managed to acquire a stable stream of clients and new useful connections, to deal with the habit of "seizing stress" and bring his weight to the desired result, to learn to appreciate small daily joys and pamper himself with them, the emotional state leveled off as he approached his cherished goals. And only after a year and a half… a wife first appeared in our communication. All this time I was never even surprised that not a word was said about my wife or friends, but then, when my wife appeared, I suddenly felt that she was missing. And his wife, meanwhile, appeared under the sauce of an absolute discrepancy with his expectations and resignation to the fact that relations with her would never improve. I met the same expectations when I accidentally found out about my friends. He had no friends. Since he did not consider these topics for work worthy of attention, I did not delve into them. We continued to work in line with the demands that sometimes still interfered with ourselves. I think it is very important how I saw this work: for me it looked like already polishing the work done. There is no need to explain why the further development of events shocked me.

The moment that I have been waiting for all the time since the beginning of our work has come - the client said that he is what he can and wants to be, that he accepts himself with all his advantages and disadvantages. In our communication with him, this is exactly what it looked like - he showed both victories and failures, focusing his efforts on the possibilities of further development or humility, and not on his failures and shame or guilt for them. I was happy for him and together with him and prepared to complete the work. But then at the next meeting I heard something that I did not take into account from time to time. He brought another failure, felt the echoes of good old guilt and said that he would gladly share it with friends or wife, and not with a psychotherapist, that the greatest support for him now would be to listen to what problems they also have, to get a reproachful look for that he is soared over trifles, and even depreciation with ignorance. At this point, I realized that his main problem all this time was a wild feeling of loneliness and that I fit into his destructive mechanism, helping to keep my feelings "in myself" and continue to be ashamed of myself in front of "ordinary people" and not psychotherapists " for money".

This, of course, was not the end of the story. I am quite impulsive or spontaneous, so I immediately shared my discovery with him and received denial and even aggression in response. He said that he did not at all strive to be close with someone, that this did not in any way relate to the tasks of our work, and even accused me of having made several mistakes, as a result of which he did not really get close to me either. comes out and never comes out. At that moment, he left work, and I doubted my actions for a very long time and tried to understand what I had missed. I blamed myself. Before understanding the lesson of the situation and coming to terms with it, I took it to the intervision and just pondered a few moments from our work with him and seemed to chew them up. Now I know that it simply could not have worked out otherwise, but then - my dazzling perfection was pretty shaken)

Imagine my surprise when, six months later, he returned. Having comprehended what was happening, he drew many valuable conclusions for himself, apologized for the last meeting and with great enthusiasm returned to work with new tasks. Here I was shocked for the third time and realized that it was not worth planning anything in advance:)

Love yourself, love your friends and loved ones and be yourself, no matter what happens!

And I am always ready to help unravel - contact;)