As a licensed professional consultant, I am interested in what is helpful or effective for my clients. As a client in therapy, I'm equally interested in what helps me to alleviate my own suffering and develop better navigation skills in the larger world in which I live. Therefore, I consider myself as a student in both respects. The clinician in me is learning to gain more skills and experience, while the client side of me is always sensitive to what is helpful in everyday life. I've had a lot of experience both as a clinician and as a client, affecting my approach, depending on which chair I'm sitting on.
There is a special experience that I have had in therapy and that it has taken me years to integrate and use for positive purposes. At the time, I had been with a therapist for a few weeks. I was there to overcome some of the old resentment and anger that held me and interfered with an otherwise good life. A trusted colleague and friend had referred me to this special clinician, an older man with years of experience and a positive reputation.
After a few sessions, I remember thinking that the therapist was somewhat distant for my taste and maybe a bit too professorial. He was nice, but distant. I felt he was not thinking of me or my problems after leaving the office for a day. When I think about my experiences with him, I realize that it was not what he did, but how he taught me what to do.
I tried to solve some of my anger problems with his help, but I was a bit stuck. He pointed to a large, cube-shaped pillow on the floor in his office, which was about a meter long on each side. I have not paid much attention to this object until then, which is strange because a large, cubed pillow in an office makes me realize afterwards. The therapist told me to hit the pillow repeatedly, verbalizing the very things that upset me. I looked at him in disbelief and remember that I specifically thought, "That's stupid."
I expressed my reservations and told him frankly that I would not have thought to hit a pillow and let my anger go that way would be of great help. He smiled at me, trying to calm down, encouraging me to try the exercise despite my concerns. And so I did it.
It's not surprising that I felt stupid. I was a grown man, standing in a quiet therapy office, banging on a large, cube-shaped pillow and trying to get real rage in the hope that it would overtake my embarrassment. It has not. Instead, I felt like an irritated child who did not prevail. Later, I would actually feel the anger that was hard to feel at that moment, but my anger would be more directed to the therapist than to the other people in my life.
What went wrong?
Immediately afterwards, we processed this event in a somewhat superficial way because I was now angry with the therapist. I told him that I felt stupid, and he listened without comment. He was less interested in how the exercise affected him than in my experience with it. The session ended with an anti-climactic note. I left his office and decided not to return. I should note that I could have given him more decisive oral feedback about my experience or continued to inquire about his intentions or technique. I did not do any of these things, so in a way I cheated on him to seize the opportunity to learn and grow. I console myself with the thought that his education and development was not my responsibility.
After thinking, I realized that this therapist had ignored valuable information and feedback I had given him during the session. He used an intervention with me that he'd probably used on other clients countless times before, and maybe with some success. After all, he had taken the trouble to buy this strange cube-shaped pillow. Despite my obvious resistance, he did a technique because he thought he knew better than me, which could be helpful. My experience was that I felt unimportant, unheard and embarrassed.
After thinking about this slightly smaller event, I finally understood some of the dynamics that had taken place in this room. The therapist used a technique without a soul – or in other words, without first establishing an emotional attachment or connection to me. Because he had not made such a connection with me, the intervention was a miserable failure. He assumed that the technique alone was strong enough to overcome my reservations or, as I said earlier, he knew better and I just had to trust him. I trusted him in my attempt to be the good customer and he showed me that he had not earned it yet.
A basic criticism of this method is that it does not translate into my life in the world. Beating objects when angry is of no use in the real world. We can not sit on the table repeatedly when we get angry in the middle of a board meeting. This method does not encourage the development of other skills; it rather reinforces a negative human behavior habit.
Although it took me many years to understand what I had experienced in this therapy session, I finally came to an obvious answer: I assumed that the therapist was indeed an expert, but the person who assigned me The pillow was simply a flawed human using a flawed method. Like me, he is learning and growing, and as such, he still makes mistakes. I accept this and I accept it as being in progress.
Reason for Reflection
As the recipient of this intervention, I received permission to truly investigate their effectiveness or lack in my own life. This little experience has also led me to think about how often I – and maybe us as a clinician – use techniques mechanically and disjointed, whether we learned these methods at school, from a trusted mentor, or from a prominent therapist to have . I have come to believe that we are promoting and accentuating the academic concept at the expense of a human connection.
What benefits our customers have, of course, is up for debate, and reasonable people can not agree. We learn a variety of evidence-based practices, techniques, and theories to alleviate the pain and suffering of our clients. I have colleagues whom I trust very much and I respect very much who view the therapy from a more scientific point of view. They have a toolkit of interventions that they use for a variety of presentation problems. Presenting problem A gets intervention B and so on and so forth. I also know brilliant clinicians who pursue a primarily interpersonal approach, where the central and ongoing interventions are friendliness, consistency, non-judgment, and acceptance.
I would be willing to gamble and say that the majority of therapists artificially mix the scientific with the interpersonal. What is scientific in counseling is, by definition, methodical, detached, and evidence-based. What is interpersonal is, by definition, emotional, involved, and subjective. There must be no tension between these two terms. Clever therapists weave them together.
Carl Rogers, the founder of client-centered therapy (also called person-centered therapy), concluded that the interpersonal approach actually leads to scientific, measurable results. I will not delve too deeply into the discussion of duality and what might be the superior approach (partly because I do not know), but it is up to the professional adviser community to redefine what is effective and ineffective every day.
My conclusion was that at that time my therapist relied on purely scientific techniques that lacked warmth. So what I experienced was his detachment from me and his failure to respond to the verbal and non-verbal feedback that I conveyed to him at that moment. My bias is, of course, the golden thread in all this experience: I mainly rely on Rogerian as a consultant, and my therapist had failed to acknowledge one of Roger's key insights – that I'm the expert on myself. My therapist has assumed the role of an expert, a natural result of his unique life experiences, training, education, prejudices and blind spots.
Undoubtedly, the therapist's approach over the decades that he has been in practice has been helpful and effective for many people. With the enormous diversity of people on this planet, a tremendous variety of counseling styles and approaches is deserved.
From this experience, I have come to the conclusion that technology without a soul is dead. The cold application of scientific knowledge in the therapy office lacks humanity. However, the use of heat and empathy without technology can be amorphous and unfounded. Occasionally, I would like to use technology alone to finally cast a spell over it-that it is an intellectual and finite concept and therefore easier to understand. On the other hand, relying too much on an interhuman relationship as a Rogerian, I feel it in a different way than limiting.
For me in my development process, the interpersonal connection is that which builds trust, and that is what makes it possible for techniques to thrive and gain ground. When techniques are successful and helpful, and clients experience real change, the interpersonal connection thrives. In this way, skilful pairing of these approaches strengthens the strength of both.
Despite my obvious criticism of my former therapist, I have tremendous empathy. I could easily see then and now that he meant well. I also have the advantage of being able to rate his approach while my own approach is not under his scrutiny. In that sense, I have an inherent advantage because nothing I've done is under the microscope. Apart from that, readers of this article may find fault with my analysis, and I welcome a solid debate. I am unusually grateful to him for showing me what kind of therapist I do not want to be: distant, professorial, knowledgeable. I strive to become more and more who I want to be as a consultant: someone who is dedicated, humble and allied with my clients. In short, I strive to become the specialist that I needed in his office that day.
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Peter Allen is a Registered Professional Advisor at East Cascade Counseling Services in Bend, Oregon. Contact him at [email protected].
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