Psychotherapy Blogbriefs is about my experiences, learnings, discoveries, thoughts and suggestions as a therapist in Santa Fe over the past 18 years, and as a human during the course of my life.
Safety is a big concern in psychotherapy. People want to feel safe to enter into what they may well have regarded as dangerous psychological and emotional territory, and they want a guide to help them do this. They want this guide to be experienced as a safe person too, naturally. Someone who will understand and appreciate them; who won't judge them for their weaknesses or their prejudices or their "failures"; who will, if the truth be told, love them carefully and well.
All of this is appropriate and wonderful in what is sometimes and generally called a "person centered" approach to therapy. Deeply respectful of the rights and freedom of each individual. Not imposing. Patient. Welcoming.
The other side of this coin is the necessity for courage in doing any meaningful psycho-spiritual work. Courage to enter into unsafe inner terrain. This is where the importance of the therapeutic relationship comes into play. This is where the necessity to develop trust and willingness becomes important. If you're going to step into danger, or at least into perceived danger, you want the person helping you with this to be trustworthy, to guide you skillfully, to not abandon you in the wilderness. These needs are relationship needs, and they are met in the context of the therapeutic relationship.
Paradox: safety, and courage, or skillful and appropriate risk taking. Both are needed for deep psychotherapy to live up to its potential.
This is The Land Of Everything Is Easy And Quick. It may startle you to realize how deeply this craziness takes hold in your psyche. After all, it's everywhere you look. It's impossible to not be affected by the cultural messages. Then, this becomes your expectation. Failing to encounter basic reality that actually conforms to this insane propaganda, the natural conclusion is that something is wrong with you. A certain precursor to unhappiness. And a certain method of keeping you off balance, dis-stressed, blinded, addicted, spiritually and psychologically adrift.
How difficult it is to make a commitment. Any commitment. How difficult it is to dedicate oneself to a path of effort and longevity. Immediate gratification is what you require. The All Holy Quick Fix. To everything. And according to the propaganda, it ought to be that way. This is after all a realistic expectation. The fast buck. The "quicky" sexual encounter. The instant soup. The magical instant transformation complete with the Hollywood style dramatic "experience" that makes everything right all at once and forever.
No wonder then that the bad news, the disillusionment of how deep psychotherapy might work is hard to take. All those insurance driven managed care companies must be right, no? 3, 4, maybe 5 sessions of "brief" therapy is all that's needed, right?
Oh, woe is you. If what you want are some "tools" to help you "fix" your life, maybe you ought to read a simple self-help book and save your time and money. Having that information should enable you to make things work pretty much over night, shouldn't it? Funny how it doesn't tend to work that way, in spite of all the advertising hype.
Anyway, deep psychotherapy is transformative, and it does take time. But who has time? Time is money! Hurry up! Don't waste my time! Part of what I enjoy doing in my work is de-mystifying therapy for people. It's really a lot simpler - not quick and easy - than you think. And as we all know, or need to know if we don't yet, the simple is generally the most difficult to achieve.
These are difficult, dramatically changing times. It may seem as though personal unhappiness - frustrations, dis-satisfactions, confusions - is increased without understanding why. Part of what is happening is much beyond the merely personal. The entire world is in upheaval, from economic crisis, to environmental crisis, to human rights crises, to wars upon wars and abuses upon abuses. These realities effects your personal equilibrium whether you are aware of it or not, and increase your experiences of dis-stress.
Why is it so difficult to befriend oneself? To treat oneself with deep respect and love? To truly care for oneself? To honor one's heart's longings and callings? What do we imagine the risks of doing these things to be? What do we fear losing if we did? How far might you be willing to go in the service of your truth? How do conflicting desires prevent you from serving your true purpose?
Who are you, anyway? What are you doing here? What master are you serving? How are you contributing to the welfare of the world? Or are you? If you're not, you'll no doubt be diminished within yourself, and will feel this in any number of self diminishing ways. The reality of happiness and sanity requires an orientation that is not merely selfish. The reality of happiness and sanity requires something other than the worldly wisdom of dog eat dog, and every man/woman for him/herself.
This is, of course, risky business. It does, of course, go against the grain. It does not conform to the "norm". It requires a certain courage, a certain willingness to swim up stream, if you will. Oh, this is nothing new, yet translating this understanding into "mental health" reality is and always has been a challenge, seemingly reserved for the relatively few. Yet in these times, there seems to be the necessity of expanding from the few into something more. Maybe it always seems that way.
Know Thyself. After all, this is what depth psychotherapy has to offer. Related to the classical quest for the good life, for wisdom, for happiness. It is in knowing oneself that one enters the possibility of true happiness, of liberation from the pettiness of selfish ambitions, and of escape from the tyranny of egoistic demands.
To know thyself is to know God, to know Truth, and, as one master told us, the Truth will set you free.
Psychotherapy has the potential to blend an understanding of basic life skills, with the exploration of deep identity. Making relationships work well; learning to work effectively with one's own mental processes; developing insight about and understanding of one's behaviors, language, thinking, and feeling; having and making choices beyond what one thought was possible or available; addressing "symptoms" and manifestations of distress and unhappiness; accessing real meaning and value in one's life; re-connecting with the lost deep ecology of one's right place in, and one's right relationship to the (natural) world; being able to love.
Basic life skills: how to relate properly to oneself; how to relax and renew; how to align one's behaviors with true (ie., substantive, satisfying, grounding, beneficial) meaning and value; how to be effective in controlling oneself, rather than trying to control others; how to most effectively and beneficially change thoughts and feelings; how to develop humility, courage, and trust; how to release attachment to what one thinks one needs; how to experiment and explore intelligently and beneficially; how to cultivate the true precursors of happiness; how to surrender.
"Thank you for your heartwarming email.
I did not expect such understanding and was touched.
Please take care and continue to be blessed!"
I just wanted to share a recent communication from an intermittent client. Why? Aside from the fact that it says something good about me, it also illustrates the kind of recognition, reflection, appreciation, and client support that good therapy ought to include. As a client, you have the right to expect these things from your therapist, and they will provide the foundation for a fruitful therapeutic relationship and therapeutic experience for you.
What's the likelihood that therapy will have any beneficial effects for a client who is not motivated to undertake the journey involved?
Motivation here would include things like: being aware that you are somehow in distress, or that you are not functioning as well as you'd like to be, or that you behave in ways that are counter productive/destructive/injurious; recognizing that you need some help to "sort things out", that you have not been able to "fix" things on your own, even though you may have tried repeatedly; and then, with all of this awareness and understanding, actually seeking help.
This would be different, for example, from a man who, when asked what brings him to therapy, answers that he is doing it because he told his wife that he would. (Did his wife threaten to leave him if he didn't? Does he expect that he will be able to appease her - and maybe get her off of his back - if he appears for a couple of sessions?)
This would also be different from someone appearing for therapy because they have been court ordered to do so, while their only motivation is to avoid going to jail.
Of course, it is possible for someone in the above examples, while they may not be motivated initially in the sense that I have described, to develop some level of motivation on their own behalf if they only appear with some regularity, but this would be, in my experience, an exception, rather than a rule.
So how ought such a client (I use this term somewhat loosely here, since such a person is, by definition, not a "real" client at all) and such a situation, be approached? Of course there is no single correct answer to that question, and different therapists will indeed answer it differently. Let me then answer it only for myself.
As a bit of background information, there was a time, much earlier in my professional career, when I was willing to try to motivate unmotivated clients "for their own good", so to speak. I believed that I could indeed somehow convince these clients that the process of therapy, and in particular, the process of therapy with me, was just what they needed. It could and would truly help them, and they ought to become converted to this view.
What I discovered over some time with this approach was that not only was I wrong in my expectations, but that the process of attempting to motivate someone else to do what I believed was going to be helpful to them succeeded only in exhausting me, and did not do much good, if it did any good, for this "client". I have since settled into what I consider to be a much more realistic and intelligent approach. This consists of being fully available to any client whom I believe I can actually help, as long as they are sufficiently motivated to be helped. To put it another way, as I was taught long ago, and as I have come to appreciate as sage wisdom, the therapist should never work harder than the client in therapy.
If you are considering therapy, also consider your level of motivation for being helped, for making positive, healthy and rewarding changes, and for being willing to work at this, rather than expecting your therapist to miraculously fix you through their own efforts. I'm not sure that I see any point in beginning something that you are not able or willing to invest yourself in. mdavid-lpcc.com
It's been quite a while since I've posted anything, so I thought I'd visit and see where an aimless ramble might lead; or as one client calls it, "babbling". In reality, this "babbling" always leads to something meaningful, and unforeseen. Maybe that will be the case now.
The theme of how change might be effectively facilitated is an interesting one, and there seem to be at least two very divergent views on this. One being what I'll call the more common view, that change is best facilitated by some kind of active "assault", or effort in the direction of the desired outcome. If you want to feel less anxious, for example, you set about to reason with yourself, and even argue yourself out of the irrational ideas that you harbor that actually create and cause your anxiety. When once you've seen the light of this reason, and have managed to actively and even aggressively replace your misguided thoughts with more realistic ones - one's that accurately reflect a set of circumstances and conditions which would not lend themselves to distressing levels of anxiety - you will, naturally and automatically, so to say, feel less anxious. This strategy does indeed work, for some people, in some situations. I like it, and I use it, when appropriate.
Then there is the much less known or understood method which says that it is possible to take a more "passive", or, more accurately, a more contemplative or reflective approach to the situation, in which one learns, through practice, and through the development of the capacity for a heightened tolerance of distress, to be more accepting of oneself in all of one's moods and qualities, allowing the inevitable process of organic change to take place without too much interference.
There are some keys to the successful implementation of this approach, and they include the aforementioned capacity to tolerate distress, to "sit with" -as in sitting meditation, for example - one's experience, while learning how to let go of judgments about it and about oneself, and to relate with oneself and with one's experience more tolerantly, more forgivingly, more compassionately.
This method or approach makes certain working assumptions, of course, among them being the one that says that desirable change will occur in a context, in an internal environment, of kindness and gentleness with oneself, perhaps more easily, but certainly more gracefully than under aggressive terms. You could say then that this approach gives a higher value to this context/environment than the former one does. I like this too, in that the metaphor is closer to something like organic gardening than to field maneuvers. Let's pay attention to the soil in which we are planning to grow something wholesome and delicious. Let's cultivate it, prepare it with the proper healthy supplements, tend it and it's produce. Like raising healthy children. This will significantly increase the likelihood of a desirable outcome.
This method, it seems to me, is much more in accord with the urgently needed concepts of sustainability and conservation.
