Psychotherapy is a relationship, a joint practice, not a commodity

People suffering from depression or despair are in dire need of therapy and counselling. How can therapy meet those needs, particularly when it is less of a commodity and more of a relationship? What does this mean exactly?

Therapy won’t do it for you; it will not solve your problems, give you a cure, or give you a corrective or drug-like dose to change your mood or the conditions of your life. From short-term counselling, or symptomatic counselling, to deep or major psychotherapy, which takes place over many years, as well as all stages in between, this is the case. The client, or patient, cannot just show up and spend time in therapy; they are required to participate in a real, motivated, purposeful, application and persistence manner. This is not a simple matter, because we are human beings with a mixture of conflicts, sub-personalities, voices that disagree and modify other voices and different points of view; we are a melee, a Hieronymus Bosch image of what the Buddha called suffering.

In the midst of all these conflicting forces, the client really has to want to change. One of the common responses in the field of psychotherapy when change does not occur is resistance. But it is rather simplistic, condescending, and denigrating to offer resistance like the great sine qua non of the chore and of the therapeutic aspiration, because it represents the obstacles or blockages without which the therapy has nothing to work with. We need to have respect when an individual makes the decision, from any level of his consciousness, to persist in the emotional and behavioral patterns that he has learned as an adaptation to survive.

It is always a matter of choice. Consciously or unconsciously, we are choosing all the time and that is one of the essential intuitions for effective therapeutic work. After all, if we were not ultimately responsible for what happens in our lives, we would not be able to change. since we is it so Ultimately, we, those responsible, can do something about it through therapy, self-discovery, and awareness practices.

And this requires our conscious cooperation, because therapy does not provide a cure, as medication, for example, may claim, nor does it exert an active force on us, the passive recipients of therapeutic cure. Rather, we have to participate and do at least as much as the professional we consult. As customers, we may have to do more. It is a joint practice.

As therapists, we need to assess ourselves in therapy practice from the point of view of personal involvement in the client’s healing process. When we are thinking between sessions, or trying to solve problems, or get ideas, dreaming, fantasizing, or imagining our client’s recovery, we are probably taking responsibility for the self-healing that rightfully belongs to the client. We have to stop doing it, because we are removing responsibility from the client. It manifests in our tone, our attitude, how we approach, speak and interact with the customer. Ultimately, it can disempower the client, although it may be the transference of the client that causes a reaction in us. This transference can be summarized as “Take care of me”, “Do it for me” or “I can’t take care of myself”. So it’s essential that we challenge that in the customer at the right time, as well as refrain from buying them by reacting.