Contents
Coming to a psychologist with specific questions, many do not suspect that starting a course of psychotherapy always means going in search of yourself. And along the way to make a lot of unexpected discoveries.
“All my life I depended on someone or something,” admits 35-year-old Elizabeth. “Thanks to psychotherapy, I felt that I can take responsibility for my own life. For me, dependency is more familiar than making decisions myself, and it was not easy for me to part with this perception of myself and my life.
Many of us actually see the causes of our failures in external circumstances, as if someone else decides whether we can build relationships with children or find a good job. Psychotherapy helps to see your life situation from several points of view, gives you the opportunity to change perspective – to take the position of your partner or to realize that our beliefs actually belong to our parents …
Asking a question, in the depths of our souls we already know the answer to it, but far from always we can find it ourselves. Different types of psychotherapy help to hear this answer in different ways: it can come as an insight in a moment of childhood memories or it can appear in the form of our drawing on a free topic. With the help of a psychotherapist, we learn to decipher this knowledge, which allows us to see ourselves in our life play not only as a victim or savior, but also as an author who can change the plot.
Allow yourself to drown in words
Find the therapist in you
In order to emerge from self-identity therapy, we need a rapport with the therapist. But after several sessions, we may find that we are having internal dialogues with him, that he has become a character in our dreams … “Thanks to therapy, his own,“ internal ”psychotherapist can wake up in the client, who sometimes (for example, in a dream) can acquire the features of a real specialist – explains Alexander Orlov. “This authority is inner wisdom, which can go to waste, like a talent buried in the ground, but during therapy it gains strength, and later, with its help, a person begins to solve his problems on his own.” Having cultivated in ourselves our “internal therapist” who will support us, we have the opportunity to gradually become a person who is less dependent on the opinions and views of other people, able to distinguish what is useless for ourselves from what is good, our true intentions from fictitious ones and be responsible for our choice.
“Before starting the course of psychoanalysis, I was sure that in order to get to the depths of your own “I”, you need to articulate your thoughts very clearly,” says 32-year-old Oleg. “And I was very surprised when my psychoanalyst asked me … to stop thinking and reasoning, but to fantasize more and give freedom to my feelings.”
During meetings with a psychotherapist, we talk about ourselves, but the beauty of speech, clear formulations do not matter here: inconsistency, ambiguity may be more important than verified, logically constructed phrases. The word in psychotherapy plays a different role than in ordinary communication: we must allow this word to be born without censoring our thoughts, without trying to present ourselves in a favorable light, without demonstrating to the therapist how smart and insightful we are. “The real thing that is in us can be revealed with the help of an inaccurate, clumsy phrase,” says psychotherapist Ekaterina Mikhailova, “true feelings are not always beautifully framed.”
At a meeting with a psychotherapist, it is necessary to stop holding back emotions that we usually try to control. “Having admitted to ourselves that we have anger, anger or envy and that they are capable of being bigger, stronger than us, we notice how they become much weaker and no longer have such power over us as they used to,” says psychotherapist Gleb Lozinsky. “During therapy, resistance arises when the psyche desperately strives to never meet the “monsters” of the past, to preserve the old ways of adapting to the world,” adds Jungian analyst Madina Slutskaya. “It is very important to observe yourself and your feelings and share them with the therapist.”
Having ceased to restrain and hide jealousy, fear and other feelings, we learn to coexist with those facets of our “I” that we preferred not to think about for so long. We allow ourselves to be freer in relation to our own feelings and thoughts, to accept them in ourselves and interact with them without denying them or controlling them: it is not necessary to tell another about our dislike for him, but it is necessary to admit it to ourselves.
Know how to complete the job
“It seems to me that I will not be able to part with my psychologist,” Anna, 28, worries. Getting used to our therapist, we sometimes begin to need constant communication with him. “One of the conditions for successful work,” explains Madina Slutskaya, “is the establishment of a “healing alliance” between the psychotherapist and the person who came to therapy. Their relationship makes it possible to restore a sense of trust in oneself and others.”
Have a question?
- Moscow Association of Analytical Psychology, tel.: (495) 208 8429; www.maap.ru
- Society of Family Counselors and Psychotherapists, tel.: (495) 951 4928; www.supporter.ru
Sometimes a client almost falls in love with their therapist, because we tend to find those who understand us so well irresistible. “When a client is more pleased and attracted by communication, rather than self-change, therapy becomes unproductive,” says psychotherapist Alexander Orlov. – A competent specialist will understand this state of the client and help him sort out his feelings. But, as a rule, the client, realizing that he received what he came to psychotherapy for, completes the communication himself.
No radical change
“I hoped that after working with a psychotherapist I would become a confident person,” says 30-year-old Elena. “Of course, now I accept myself for who I am, but at the same time I don’t feel that I have changed so much.” “A psychotherapist does not make his clients different,” says psychotherapist Marina Khazanova. “The goal of therapy is to free a person’s strength, which he spends on overcoming his fears and holding back negative emotions, for life and creativity.” We do not need to become completely different people, because it is impossible to erase the life trajectory that made us who we are.
Our “I” is like a big onion, the core of which is hidden by many scales – all our social roles, behavior patterns … Freeing ourselves from “fake” ourselves, we are able to understand why we chose this or that behavior model for ourselves, preferred this or that mask. After all, this choice in the past fulfilled some specific task: to protect us from fear, to achieve love, or to support someone who is dear to us. Realizing and accepting this, we are able to throw off the masks. “During therapy, a person can, in a safe environment, without risking anything, realize what he did not dare to realize before, and try to do and try out what he had never allowed himself before,” explains family therapist Ekaterina Khmelnitskaya. “After all, therapy, by stimulating creativity, allows us to enjoy life much more than we have been able to until now.”