Any method of working on oneself is good if there is a result with which we are satisfied. Why? Psychologist Ekaterina Mikhailova explains.
- Attention: secrets are revealed!
Ekaterina Mikhailova, psychotherapist:
“Bella, really, how can you not trust yourself to such an extent! It so happened that you found yourself between two chairs (roles, if you like). The first is a normal client role: on the advice of a friend, they went to the group, it was hard, but they also endured some sense for themselves. Great, we clamp our result in a fist, we think, we finalize it on our own, what more could you want? But here the second role creeps in: a friend shares with you critical information about the approach that is in circulation in a professional and near-professional environment, attaches, so to speak, and you feel deceived, and your result can be “crossed out and spit”. Why is this? Just imagine how many scandalous details from the lives of the really great — certainly bigger than Bert Hellinger — can be found in literature! Dostoevsky was not only a gambler, he also did not repay debts. Now why not read The Brothers Karamazov as a sign of protest? Mussorgsky drank heavily — we do not listen to Khovanshchina. Tchaikovsky had a non-traditional sexual orientation — down with the Nutcracker, spit and cross out. Well, and so on. I won’t even talk about “our” greats — Freud, Jung or Moreno, so much unflattering things have been said about them, up to psychiatric diagnoses. I am by no means a fan of Hellinger constellations, but I know people — including among my clients and students — who have advanced in working on themselves through participation in these groups. And this is good. Moreover, if they got some important result for themselves thanks to the African dances with a tambourine, it would be just as good. Which does not mean that African dances are the best psychotherapy in the world. Discussions of professionals is one thing, but the real benefit received by the client is quite another. And here’s why: it’s not so much the method that works on the client’s problem, but the client himself. How much and what I could take, so much I took. The method gives it form, material and language, nothing more. You allowed yourself to depend on the unstable opinion of a psychologist friend, and you are ready to cross out your real feelings and independently drawn conclusions. It seems to me that the problem is in this, and not at all in whether the method or its author is bad or good.