Building a safe relationship is the responsibility of the therapist. But what if, having built up trust and convinced the client of his reliability, the specialist understands that the only thing this person came for is to destroy his loneliness?
I have a beautiful, but very constrained woman at the reception. She is about 40 years old, although she looks at most thirty. I’ve been in therapy for about a year now. We are rather viscous and without obvious progress discussing her desire and fear to change jobs, conflicts with parents, self-doubt, lack of clear boundaries, tics … Topics change so quickly that I do not remember them. But I remember that the main thing we always bypass. Her loneliness.
I find myself thinking that she needs not so much therapy as someone who will finally not betray. Who will accept her for who she is. She won’t frown because she’s not perfect in some way. Hugs promptly. She will be there when something goes wrong … At the thought that all she needs is love!
And this treacherous idea that my work with some clients is just a desperate attempt by the latter to fill some kind of void does not visit me for the first time. It seems to me sometimes that I would be more useful to these people if I were their friend or close person. But our relationship is limited by the assigned roles, ethics helps not to overstep the bounds, and I understand that in my impotence there is a lot about what is important to pay attention to in work.
“It seems to me that we have known each other for so long, but we never touch the main thing,” I tell her, because I feel that now it’s possible. I passed every conceivable and unthinkable test. I am mine. And tears well up in her eyes. This is where the real therapy begins.
We talk about many things: about how difficult it is to trust men if your own father never told the truth and used you as a human shield in front of your mother. About how impossible it is to imagine that someone will love you for who you are, if from an early age you only hear that no one needs “such” people. To trust someone or just let someone closer than a kilometer is too scary if the memory keeps memories of those who, coming close, cause unimaginable pain.
“We are never as defenseless as when we love,” wrote Sigmund Freud. Intuitively, we all understand why someone who has been burned at least once is afraid to let this feeling into their life again. But sometimes this fear grows to the size of horror. And this happens, as a rule, with those who from the first days of life have no other experience of experiencing love, except along with pain!
Step by step. Topic after topic. Together with this client, we resolutely made our way through all her fears and obstacles, through her pain. Through horror to the possibility of at least imagining that she could allow herself to love. And then one day she didn’t come. Canceled the meeting. She wrote that she had left and would definitely contact when she returned. But we met only a year later.
They say the eyes are the window to the soul. I understood the essence of this saying only on the day when I saw this woman again. In her eyes there was no longer despair and frozen tears, fear and resentment. A woman came to me with whom we did not know! A woman with love in her heart.
And yes: she changed her unloved job, built boundaries in relations with her parents, learned to say “no”, started dancing! She coped with everything that therapy had never helped her cope with. But therapy helped her in other ways. And again I caught myself thinking: the only thing we all need is love.