"Therapy"

"Therapy"

Brian Lynch

"I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in." 

Kenny Rogers

I am a person that talks to people with the hope that through a good conversation, we will come to some conclusions about their lives that will help them move forward. Through serendipity, it often happens, I learn something and I move forward. That is we both learn.

So what have I learned recently? It is this, that therapy itself can be used for many purposes. Or let us say not “used” or ok “used” but unconsciously used for various purposes not all of them “good.”

People supposedly come to therapy to solve problems. But it is obvious that maybe the stated purpose and the subconscious one may be very different. It may be the proverbial one step forward and two or three back as I have mentioned before. Once that first step has been taken then fear and shame take over and progress is inhibited. It is well known that patients often will have a period of worsening symptoms before real improvement is seen.

If indeed this is the case, the case that they take a step backward, then what would be the characterization of that step backward?

I think both the patient and therapist have to be very vigilant for a time. For what? For one a physical or emotional form of “withdrawal”:

Is this person coming to me to “escape” the outer world and establish a fantasy world that is in effect one of dissociation? A world in which I ( the patient) don’t learn much about life and how to carry what I learn into the world?

Or do I use the session as another kind of “withdrawal” which is a bit more subtle and that is like a drug? I simply lose myself in the process. I become “addicted” to the process of therapy. The therapist for example becomes the only person I talk to. Then I can actually “withdraw” by not coming to the sessions. Or be “withdrawn” in the sessions.

Finally, I can spend the time in the session in various ways of “attacking” myself or the therapist.

All of this is to say that therapy is a microcosm of life, as it should be but it is one where the stakes are supposed to be a bit out of the ordinary. It is everyone’s job to come back to the straight and narrow, to the problem at hand a bit quicker than we do in normal life, that is “to solve the problem.” But “quicker” in therapy even with something as useful as these explanations can and often is nothing akin to “quick.”

Brian Lynch

I want to thank Jim Duffy, psychologist, and Melvin Hill, therapist for much of my understanding of the above.