Psychotherapy and the grateful client: failure and success in psychotherapy

Psychotherapy and the grateful client: failure and success in psychotherapy

Sometimes I feel like Jerry Garcia. The leader of the Grateful Dead interviewed in an enviable way. The rock group, which was the best-selling live act of the 1980s, which made groundbreaking music for 30 years, was treated as religion by enthusiastic fans and supported and offered hundreds of people their livelihood: band members and their families, street crew, administrative staff, tour guide, merchandising staff, sound engineers as well as construction and transport et al was listed by Garcia He (and this was proven after his death in 1995). But Garcia felt courageous enough to ask: "Are the dead a good thing?" Some believe that he did not feel able to dissolve the body of the dead organization because he had given up his conscience to serve such a large community that was dependent on his livelihood.

Now to the analogy: I have often questioned the therapy and questioned again, and there are defined and implicit goals. I essentially ask myself whether it works and mentched Garcia and asked: "Is therapy a good thing?" Of course I'm not the only one who does this.

of crocodile Dundee, who spoke to the simple man's voice when he noticed about someone who was looking for advice: "What, does he have no partner?" For the well -known, rebellious young analyst James Hillman, who has included the book "We had a hundred years of psychotherapy and the world is getting worse", psychotherapy has had its critics on droves.

The criticisms are Legion, known and known: Can people really change? Don't therapists just try to make their patients / clients think and feel? You are only after your money. What do you know anyway?

In an early study, Hans Eysenck came to the conclusion that two thirds of the psychotherapy patients / clients have improved or recovered, regardless of whether they had received psychotherapy or not.

The history of psychotherapy is certainly processed with suspicious examples of so -called healing. From Sigmund Freud's celebrated "treatment success" by Sigmund Freud, about whom Jung said that it was "nothing of the sort" (she was institutionalized after she was probably diagnosed incorrectly in the analysis) to the modern report on Paris and Donovan's verbal and emotional abuse through an abusive therapist (( see Richard ZwolinSki's book Therapy Revolution) to doubt reasons or at least be careful with the therapy seem to be useful.

So back to Jerry Garcia's question about the dead. To paraphrase: "Is therapy a good thing?"

I am of course biased as a therapist. But I am also naturally curious and integrot. I really don't want to waste my time with a persecution that has no positive effects that I cannot pursue with a clear conscience and which is fundamentally incorrect in its approach and effectiveness.

Sometimes the therapy does not work - or does not seem to work. However, this is a difficult matter to measure, follow and evaluate it. I remember a man in a personal growth group with which I had an incident in which we argued and he left the group. A mistake? A few months later he wrote to express his thanks. In the meantime, he had found that he had transferred his father complex to me (originally a psychoanalytic concept that means to redirect feelings to another person). The incident in the workshop opened all types of useful inner material, which he had addressed and transced in individual psychotherapy, which led to a profound healing for him. So was this a failure that became a success?

But at other times it really doesn't work and mistakes are made. I remember a client who ironically was the focus of my supervision sessions. My superior, an analyst with a wealth of therapeutic experiences, encouraged me to choose one of my customers and concentrate on him every week. The idea was that an intensive monitoring of a single therapy client would affect my entire practice.

The result was, however, that as a young, ambitious and emerging therapist, I concentrated too much on these clients. I started to take care of him too much when the supervision deepened my commitment in his life. One day he appeared in my consulting room and looked horrible. I asked him what happened. He explained that he tried a new, not yet quite safe or tested medicine against an allergy to which he suffered. I was outraged, not as much about him as about the medical authorities that would allow such a practice. Obviously, the drug was not doing well at all. To my persistent regret, I told him that he should put the medication off. He stormed out of the room. I had entered the transfer of his parents, who always told him what to do, and his right and his ability to vote in affairs that concern his own life. After a last session he went and I never saw him again.

Of course we have no way to know whether this client had insight or clarity later or not, like the previous one who transferred his father to me, and thus benefited from my excessive care in the long run. Likewise, we cannot know whether the customer who had later benefited from this has taken a negative turn to his disadvantage or not.

And what about the grateful customer? Perhaps people who were in therapy today are silent about when the stigma of the search for help has resolved in direct contrast to the self -proclaimed and common fame of the 1970s in personal and collective awareness of consciousness. But my walls were covered over the years and covered with cards that contained enthusiastic declarations of thanks. Nowadays, of course, emails replace the cards. But when I recently put together my website and my web designer dealt with the weight of the testimonials, we met the joint decision of the management to minimize and use a few so as not to appear too "full of ourselves". And despite the fact that, on the whole, most clients who are likely to have therapeutic success, neither write their therapists nor send an email.

It is not about showing how great I am as a therapist, but that the therapy works and if it works, it does not necessarily have to be shouted by the roofs by the beneficiaries or grateful clients.

Nevertheless, we have to be painfully aware that not all therapists are good. It would go beyond the scope of this article to respond to what we should or can do about it if short -term, inadequate training provides therapists and healers with many descriptions and the general public is completely poorly equipped to distinguish between them and several. Qualified, effective and talented practitioner. The new requirement of a university degree as a prerequisite for psychotherapeutic training can also not create greater confidence in the user of therapy services. Most therapists are aware that untrained therapists can be capable of higher quality than trained. The type of work is such that compassion, wisdom and intuition, which are probably essential, are probably not to be teached.

My conviction was in my persistent objections and criticisms in the field of psychotherapy. I have kept a surgical approach for non -helpful, cloudy theories, approaches and methods that I thought was suspicious. Fortunately, I have distributed myself so strongly in the field of therapeutic efforts that I have formulated my direct experience over the years by writing (no better way to uncover unclear thinking) and therapy practice with individuals, couples, groups and community.

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