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 questioned himself in an enviable manner. The rock group, which was the best-selling live act of the 1980s and made groundbreaking music for 30 years, was treated as a religion by adoring fans, supporting and providing a living for hundreds of people: band members and their families, road crew, administrative staff, tour guides, merchandising staff, sound engineers, and construction and transportationet alwas led by Garcia and arguably ended without him (and this was proven after his death in 1995). But Garcia felt brave enough to ask, “Are the dead a good thing?” Some believe that he felt unable to dismantle the body of the Dead organization because he had sacrificed his conscience to serve such a large community that depended on him and the band for their livelihood.

Now for the analogy: I have questioned and re-questioned therapy many times, and there are stated and implicit goals. Essentially wondering if it works, I mimicked Garcia and asked, “Is therapy a good thing?” Of course I'm not the only one who does this.

From Crocodile Dundee, who spoke in the voice of the common man when he remarked about someone seeking advice: "What, doesn't he have any partners?" For the well-known, rebellious Jungian analyst James Hillman, who co-authored the book We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse, psychotherapy has had its critics in droves.

The criticisms are legion, familiar and familiar: Can people really change? Don't therapists just try to get their patients/clients to think and feel? You're just after your money. What do they even know?

In an early study, Hans Eysenck concluded that two-thirds of psychotherapy patients/clients improved or recovered on their own, regardless of whether they had received psychotherapy or not.

The history of psychotherapy is certainly filled with suspicious examples of so-called healings. From Sigmund Freud's celebrated "treatment success" of Anna O, about which Jung declared it was "nothing like that" (she was institutionalized after being arguably misdiagnosed in analysis), to the modern account of Paris and Donovan's verbal and emotional abuse of power at the hands of an abusive therapist((see Richard Zwolinski's book Therapy Revolution), reasons to doubt or at least be cautious about therapy seem to make sense.

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

As a therapist, I am of course biased. But I am also naturally curious and have integrity. I really don't want to waste my time on a pursuit that has no positive impact, that I cannot pursue in good conscience, and that is fundamentally flawed in its approach and effectiveness.

Sometimes therapy doesn’t work – or doesn’t seem to work. However, this is a tricky matter that is difficult to measure, track and evaluate. I remember a man in a personal growth group with whom I had an incident where we argued and he left the group. A mistake? A few months later he wrote to express his gratitude to me. In the meantime, he had realized that he had transferred his father complex onto me (originally a psychoanalytic term meaning redirecting feelings onto another person). The incident in the workshop had opened all sorts of useful inner material that he had addressed and transcended in individual psychotherapy, resulting in profound healing for him. So was this a failure turned success?

But 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 supervisor, an analyst with a wealth of therapeutic experience, encouraged me to choose one of my clients and focus on them each week. The idea was that intensive monitoring of a single therapy client would impact my entire practice.

However, the result was that as a young, ambitious and aspiring therapist, I was focusing too much on this client. I began to care about him too much as supervision deepened my involvement in his life. One day he appeared in my consulting room and looked terrible. I asked him what happened. He explained that he was trying a new, not yet completely safe or tested medicine for an allergy he suffers from. I was outraged, not so much at him as at the medical authorities who would allow such a practice. The medication obviously didn't do him any good at all. To my continued regret, I told him to stop taking the medication. He stormed out of the room. I had entered directly into the transmission of his parents, who were always telling him what to do and denying his right and ability to choose in matters affecting his own life. After a vituperative final session he left and I never saw him again.

Of course, we have no way of knowing whether or not this client later had insight or clarity, like the previous one, who transferred his father to me and thus benefited in the long run from my overprotectiveness. Likewise, we cannot know whether the customer who later benefited from it took a negative turn to his detriment in the long run or not.

And what about the grateful customer? Perhaps people in therapy today are keeping quiet about it when the stigma of seeking help has reasserted itself in direct contrast to the self-proclaimed and shared glory of the 1970s in raising personal and collective consciousness. But my walls over the years have been covered and covered with cards containing enthusiastic expressions of gratitude. Nowadays, of course, emails are replacing cards. But as I was putting together my website recently and my web designer was grappling with the weight of testimonials, we made a mutual executive decision to minimize and use a few so as not to appear too “full of ourselves.” This is despite the fact that, by and large, most clients who are likely to achieve therapeutic success do not write or email their therapist.

My point is not to show how great a therapist I am, but rather that the therapy works, and if it works, it doesn't necessarily have to be shouted from the rooftops by the beneficiary or grateful client.

Still, we must be painfully aware that not all therapists are good. It is beyond the scope of this article to address what we should or can do about it when short-term, inadequate training produces therapists and healers with many descriptions, and the general public is completely ill-equipped to distinguish between one and the other. qualified, effective and talented practitioner. The new requirement for a university degree as a prerequisite for psychotherapeutic training cannot create greater trust in the user of therapy services. Most therapists are aware that untrained therapists can be quite capable and often of higher quality than trained ones. The nature of the work is such that compassion, wisdom and intuition, which are arguably essential, are unlikely to be taught.

My conviction has lay in my persistent objections and criticisms in the field of psychotherapy. I maintained a surgical approach to unhelpful, murky theories, approaches and methods that I found suspect. Fortunately, I have spread myself so widely in the field of therapeutic endeavors that over the years, through writing (no better way to uncover unclear thinking) and therapy practice with individuals, couples, groups, and communities, I have formulated my direct experience of an understanding that includes a philosophy and psychology of how therapy works, and I have summarized these as the three stages of awakening.

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