Questions
and Answers
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Questions |
I am the type of person that needs directions for everything. Isn’t there some way of getting instructions on how to be an open and honest patient without causing a total meltdown of emotions?
Psychotherapy can often have an exhilarating intellectual satisfaction to it. In fact, much of the material on this website has an intellectual flavor. But there is a big difference between describing psychotherapy and practicing psychotherapy, because good psychotherapy is primarily an emotional process. Without the emotional basis to the work, the intellectual discoveries have no real, practical value.
And as I say on other pages, during the psychotherapeutic process you will experience many emotions that are similar to the intense and confusing emotions you felt as a child. Disappointment. Anger. Confusion. Feeling misunderstood. Feeling devalued. Feeling abandoned. Many different events—some of them just chance occurrences during therapy, and some of them deliberate therapeutic interventions by the therapist—will trigger these emotions. Just remember that when you feel an emotion in therapy, the therapeutic task will be to name it as an emotion and understand it as an emotion—not get caught in it as if it were your helpless destiny. For if you get caught in it, you will feel like a victim and will blame the therapist for your pain. The entire therapeutic process will feel like judgment and criticism. And then, in deep bitterness, you will want to “get away” from the therapy just as you wanted to get away from the original emotions as a child.
Now, as your question shows, in addition to your conflicted fear of your emotions, you also have a healthy respect for your emotions. After all, if everything came pouring out of you at once it would be a psychological disaster. But thankfully the unconscious, when treated with respect, has a way to protect you. Dreams, for example, tell you only what you need to know, as you need to know it, and as you are capable of knowing it. Even the experiences you have in psychotherapy are given out in healthy “doses” by the unconscious. All that matters is that you and your psychologist have a healthy respect for the dosing process. As an example, let’s assume that for some reason you decide to go on a sudden short trip. You call to cancel your psychotherapy appointment the next day. When you show up at your next appointment the following week, your psychologist tells you that when you canceled your session, you gave only 23 hours of advance notice, rather than the required 24 hours notice, and so you must pay for a late cancellation. You don’t say anything, but when you get home you send an angry e-mail to your psychologist saying that most people understand “24 hours notice” to mean “about 24 hours,” and that you can no longer trust therapy and so you have no choice but to terminate therapy. OK. Now let’s follow out a different outcome. Imagine that when you get home you’re feeling miserable and shaky. You’re hurt, but you don’t quite understand it all. You feel distracted the rest of the week and have minor conflicts with everyone. But, because you are committed to your psychotherapy, you show up for your next session. And you begin the session by complaining about how poorly you have been treated by your husband (or wife, or boss, or whomever). And you mention an example about a dispute over money. Suddenly, your psychologist interrupts you and reminds you about the late-cancellation fee and asks what sort of reactions you had to it. You hesitate. But then you start talking. You describe how you went home last week and got drunk. You talk about how you thought of stopping therapy. Your psychologist asks for more associations, and before long you’re describing how your father used to make rash, arbitrary decisions and how you always felt angry but never said anything. So you would secretly do something self-destructive, like purposely fail an exam in school. Your psychologist keeps probing. What did you hope to accomplish by failing an exam? Well, as you ponder it, you realize you wanted to show your father how much pain you felt....And on it goes, for the rest of the session. If your psychologist is really good, you will also encounter the very self-destructive impulses that led you to make that provocative 23-hour cancellation in the first place. So what do you learn from this? Well, you learn about feelings of hurt, anger, helplessness, and revenge. You learn how your current behavior is connected to your past behavior. You learn how in the past you failed to recognize your own emotions. You learn how to speak honestly about your inner experiences to another person. And you learn how irresponsible behavior flows directly from the failure to recognize your own emotions. And you learn that you can encounter your emotions in measured doses that are far from that dreaded meltdown. It all depends on your willing choice to make an honest commitment to the psychotherapy process, however painful or frightening it might seem. Because as you let off the heat bit by bit, it can never build to the melting point.
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Huh?
Donations? Freewill website?