Suzie Chick

“Psychotherapy is a tool for correcting our self-ignorance in the most profound ways”

The School of Life

Welcome to the third instalment of my series exploring the weird and wonderful world of therapy. This time around I want to try my very best to explain how therapy works. 

Often, we can’t quite articulate what exactly happens in therapy. I’ve often heard clients comment that they know the therapy has helped them, but they’re unable to pinpoint why or how. This adds to the slightly magical aspect of therapy but does make it a tad frustrating in other ways. Trust the process as we like to say!

The aim of psychotherapy at its very basic level is to make the unconscious conscious. This idea being that once we become conscious of ourselves, then we can choose to respond differently, as opposed to when we’re unaware and we act unconsciously.  An example of this could be someone suffering with a phobia. Through therapy, we begin to understand the origins and context of the phobia (i.e., our unconscious becomes conscious) and therefore the phobia becomes less unknown and scary and easier to control. 

For me, there is one key element which determines success in therapy, this being the R word- Relationship. Meaning the relationship between client and therapist.  It is the relationship which heals. 

The therapeutic relationship

One the most profound aspects of therapy is when healing takes place through the creation and continued connection of the relationship between client and therapist. 

Through this relationship we can often get to experience something which may have been previously in short supply. This being a stable, supportive relationship cultivated through reliable boundaries. For the first time we feel heard and held. For the first time we have a space which is truly our own. For the first time we feel safe. 

Therapy can become our first good relationship. Our therapist can become the good parent we never had, we have a chance to regress in a safe and secure relationship and revisit our past and change our relationship to our experiences. 

As The School of Life explains (in their wonderful little book “What is psychotherapy?”), “The relationship with the therapist becomes a template for how we might form relationships with others going forward, freed from the manoeuvres and background assumptions that we carried within us from childhood, and that can impede us so grievously in the present.”

Play and Transference

This precious space created through therapy can allow us to fully explore, without agenda or judgement, aspects of ourselves which were previously hidden or unknown. Winnicott, paediatrician and psychoanalyst, said that there cannot be therapy without some aspect of play. I really like this idea. Through the therapeutic relationship, as clients we can feel safe and confident enough to play and be curious about ourselves and try different ways of being. 

An aspect I also particularly relish is when the client’s way of relating to others, get enacted in the therapy room. We call this transference, when an issue comes alive in the therapy (and counter transference when the therapist reacts to the transference). For example, if say a client struggles to communicate their needs clearly to others and then it happens in our relationship then we can explore it in real time. We then have a golden opportunity to not only observe and comprehend our ways of relating (from both sides) but also to adjust our ways of being. 

The Wounded Healer

A therapist is often described as the “wounded healer”, a concept devised by Carl Jung. This suggests that as therapists have been wounded and healed, they feel compelled to help others. Our wounds as therapists help us in our work with others.  

I like to think of it that as therapists, through our training and intensive personal therapy, we are comfortable with our own pain and so we can sit with others in theirs. As therapists, we should have the courage and confidence to go with our clients into their dark spaces knowing that this is where the potential for transformation lies. Carl Rogers says it beautifully; “it is only as the therapist views himself as imperfect and flawed that he can see himself as helping another person.”

Therapy isn’t easy. It’s hard work and it takes time. Susie Orbach likens it to learning a new language, something which takes several years to adapt to. Therapy is not quite like how it is in the movies which huge insights and profound breakthroughs. What happens is normally far more subtle, gentle shifts over time, which allows for longer lasting changes.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash