What is psychotherapy?
Psychotherapy is a gradual experience and understanding of ones inner life and it’s relationship to the outer world. The therapist’s job is to help illuminate this process. This illumination is physical and mental. A person feels things, experiences things and learns how to relate to all of it, and in fact use all of it, to make life meaningful. Psychotherapy should improve one’s life, even though it can be painful from time to time. If it doesn’t, then it is time for a different therapist or a different method of healing other than psychotherapy. Improving may be surviving, learning how to go through a storm. Psychotherapy can guide you through something outside of your control.
Trusting?
Psychotherapy is a gradual trusting. First trusting yourself that you need help. Then trusting to share your vulnerability with a therapist. There is anxiety and anger about this, rightfully so. “Why do I need someone else’s help?”, “How can I trust someone that I don’t know?” It can seem unimaginable that someone you do not know in the beginning, could understand you in a way that is helpful and comforting. Each time something vulnerable is shared there is an opportunity for growth, relief, and understanding. For example, to share a dream, a memory, or a problem feels tender, but it could provide the needed illumination. A primary part of the growth is how you see the therapist and how the therapist sees you.
Therapist as a guide
As a psychotherapist, I learn a lot from jokes, sarcasm, and downright anger about psychotherapy. It shows me, that in general, there is a conflict and source of emotional pain for people. There is a desire to be understood and a fear of getting hurt in the process. There is a desire to be known by another and then guided to know one’s self. This knowing is a primary medicine. This deep desire is vulnerable, and with vulnerability comes anxiety that someone could actually know and guide you to yourself. The anxiety of not being seen, and the hurt from being judged is where these jokes come from.
Many of the jokes are describing male psychotherapists who are analyzing without love and true concern. Or, female psychotherapists that are caricatures of unconditional mothers that continually ask, “ How does that make you feel?”. Both depictions are shallow. They describe how psychotherapy has failed people and the rightful cause of anger and jokes. There are times when one outgrows the therapist they have been working with and it is time to move on.
It also defines a balance that therapists have to regulate within themselves. It is a fluid balance between intellect and feeling, wisdom and love. Intellect needs feeling to be grounded and useful in relationships, otherwise it is cold and distant. Feeling also needs intellect to direct and channel its expression in a fulfilling way, otherwise feeling becomes a poisonous attack to one’s self and others.
This will be a continuing exploration of psychotherapy and it’s evolution. What makes it work and not work? How does it function? Where is it’s place in the culture and not?
