WHAT SHOULD NOT BE DO WITH A PSYCHOTHERAPIST?

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

Psychotherapy with relatives, friends, partners - you shouldn't do this

Psychotherapy is a very specific context for a relationship between two people. This context is very saturated with energies, feelings and meanings so that sometimes the temptation to expand contact becomes very real.

This applies to friendships, romantic relationships, or intimate relationships.

Why shouldn't you initially engage in psychotherapy with relatives?

Because family relationships, as well as any other relationship, are also saturated with meanings. And this is a completely different context.

Imagine a situation where the same person is both your psychotherapist and your son at the same time. You could even protect yourself by agreeing on a framework in advance. But the same phrase can have a different context, and you will surely come across something that you do not understand - a person says it like a son, or like a therapist.

The same phrase, in this case, has two meanings. And these meanings sometimes destroy each other. At best, they cancel each other out; at worst, you just ruin the relationship.

Friends are needed in order to be friends with them. And clients - in order to engage in psychotherapy with them.

But imagine a different situation.

Your friend tells you a story related to family relationships. Based on this conversation, you may notice non-constructive ways of building a friend's contact with a wife or son. Your job as a therapist is to direct his attention to this. But as a friend, you cannot say this, because people come to you, as a friend, for support.

If you want to ruin your friendships, try psychotherapy with friends

Take a more radical situation as well.

Any psychotherapist's code, regardless of direction, assumes that the therapist should not have sex with his client. And this is not an ethical issue, because from the point of view of ethics, every adult is able to choose with whom he has sex and with whom not.

But what happens in the first session after the intimacy has taken place?

Your phrases start to have double meanings. The invasion of another context makes the meaning of your words sometimes so polarized that a clinch occurs in the client's head.

- Are you saying this now, as a lover, or as a therapist?

One phrase begins to destroy what another might create

It is from this that misunderstandings, conflicts, difficulties, resentments occur, which the client or therapist begins to consider as a wound. The therapy stops there.

However, even if you give up therapy for the sake of a relationship, you will experience the same difficulty. Why do some ethical associations discourage or even prohibit having sex with their clients unless a certain amount of time has passed since the end of therapy?

Because when a client comes to a psychotherapist for therapy, he already considers him as a special person. As soon as you find yourself in the deep layers of your psyche, you begin to view the therapist as a strong, intelligent, educated person who can help you, because he notices what other people have not noticed for 20 years. If, say, six months after the start of therapy, you decide to close this aspect and enter into a relationship with this person, it turns out very quickly that the picture that you drew about the therapist has little in common with reality.

The therapeutic context, emotionally always very strong, will begin to invade your sex life. Both contexts overlap and cause an explosion.

As a rule, nothing good comes from mixing contexts. Although this is more a matter of comfort and methodology than ethics.