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After another psychotherapeutic session, I call my mother. “Well, how did it go?” Mom traditionally asks. And then, as if in jest, he continues: “Were you a good fellow? Did you get an A? Mom, I say. I don’t get grades from a therapist, good or bad. And this is very important. These are the terms of the game. And it’s very cool.
Once I got a good mark from a therapist. Estimate escaped from her, in my opinion, by chance, inadvertently. I then complained to her that I feel incapable of being organized, collected, responsible, and in this I feel my inferiority compared to others – who naturally succeed in fulfilling their obligations, even the smallest ones. “But in fact, you are the most organized and responsible client of all my clients,” the therapist said, and at that moment I felt a pang of pleasure.
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- What protect the boundaries of one’s own “I”
But then, on reflection, I realized that I did not like it. I did not like to hear praise, an excellent assessment of my qualities. Why? Probably because psychotherapy is, in principle, a non-judgmental space. The therapist does not praise the client – but this means that he never scolds the client. And if he praises once, it will mean that I will wait for his praise every time.
“Please don’t praise me anymore,” I told the therapist in the next session. This incident made me understand that I live for the sake of evaluation from the outside, for the sake of this external evaluation I correct my actions in many situations, and I do not want to continue striving for this in the future. I don’t want to get a D, and I don’t want to get an A. I don’t want to get external ratings, I want to have my own internal rating system: to decide for myself whether I’m good enough or not, without blindly focusing on the opinions of others.
Read more:
- Victor Kagan read for us the book “The Clinical Psychology of Self Loss”
Yes, I don’t want to get grades at all, because I just want to be. To experience the emotions that I experience, to have the values that I have, to be who I am. By the way, what am I? This is exactly what I would like to discuss with my therapist – and not whether my “I” deserves a perfect score or a deuce.
Yes, if I have received praise once, I will want to receive it further. And yes, the day I am proud of this or that quality or achievement of mine and do not hear approval from the lips of a therapist, I will feel that I did not try hard enough, I was not good enough, I was not good enough.
In psychotherapy, no one evaluates: the client shares, the therapist listens. He can give his “feedback”, say why, in his opinion, it hurts me, and this seems to me so important, he can draw my attention. But to rate? No, because there is nothing to evaluate: I can only correspond to myself, and not to some scale of success and failure.
I told my mother: yes, everything went well, very well. I understood something. I now have a pleasant sense of perspective: by understanding myself, I can make my life better, richer, more understandable. For yourself – and not for someone who, having come from outside, decides to evaluate it.