Who And What Is The Source Of The Crisis In Psychotherapy?

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

The therapeutic situation of experiencing, in turn, initiates the dynamics of ever new phenomena appearing in contact, each of which, let me remind you, develops to a form and degree determined by the current situation of contact. Considering dialogue psychotherapy as a therapy for a controlled crisis, it should be noted that the current state of therapy is determined by the presence of a specific design of crises actualized at this stage.

Relying on a therapeutic ideology, which is based on the concept of therapy as a process of a controlled crisis, it is necessary to remember some of the features of this process.

First, in a productive process of therapy of a controlled, initiated crisis, it is important to adequately distribute power. If the therapist is responsible for the therapy (for example, excessive care), then there is no crisis, therefore, no change is possible. In addition, therapeutic interventions to resolve the crisis before its peak is a way to avoid experiencing it. On the other hand, if the power in the process of therapy shifts towards the client, then he is deprived of the opportunity for support from the field and the resources necessary to resolve the crisis, available outside. In both cases, the therapeutic process is either slowed down or blocked altogether. Awareness of this situation puts forward the methodological requirement for the decentralization of power, which was already mentioned earlier.

Secondly, in the therapeutic process of a controlled initiated crisis, tactically, one should rely on the category of the zone of proximal development. This means that the volume and degree of novelty of the neoplasms, which the therapeutic process is simultaneously oriented to, should be difficult, but in principle accessible to the client. On the one hand, the lack of the necessary tension to resolve the emerging field situation, on the other hand, the inaccessibility for experiencing the phenomena that have appeared in contact can equally stop and freeze the therapeutic process.

I repeat, the degree of difficulty of the initiated crisis should be optimal. However, based on the provisions of the phenomenological approach, it is obvious that it is absurd to be able to control the degree of crisis initiated in therapy. The severity of the new requirements of the therapeutic field, creating a crisis, is a fundamentally unpredictable factor, especially when working with clients whose psychological difficulties are quite severe. Therefore, in the dialogue model of gestalt therapy, the place of control of therapeutic interventions that initiate a crisis is taken by tracking the balance of support and frustration in the field of therapy.

Considering the occasional need in therapy to “raise a chronic low-level emergency to a safe high-stress emergency in which attention is directed by anxiety and which, however, can be controlled by an active patient” [F. Pearls and P. Goodman; P.100], the authors of Gestalt therapy write: “The technical side of the problem is (a) to increase the tension under the right guidance, and (b) to retain the ability to control the situation, however, not to control it” [F. Perls and P. Goodman; P.100].