I continue to dispel myths on the subject of “psychotherapy”, taking upon myself the burden of psychological education. I hope my articles will help someone and my work will not go unnoticed. Today I want to talk to you about “what happens in a psychotherapist’s office” ? Due to the fact that the author himself belongs to the Gestalt community, the conversation will rather focus on psychotherapy within the framework of the Gestalt approach. At the very beginning I will say: I don’t know which therapist will be good for you, I don’t know what you want and what you are ready for. There is a saying in Gestalt circles among experienced clients: “It doesn’t matter who your therapist is, it’s important how you treat him . It reflects very well the essence of psychotherapy. Now let's get it in order!
How to be a client at a psychologist's appointment?
You have at your disposal: a psychotherapist, you, the time of the therapeutic session (usually 50-60 minutes) and office space with at least two chairs. That's basically it. No shaman's tambourines, no chicken feet for Voodoo rituals, not even a crystal ball with candles will be provided to you.
We will look at options for how you can manage time. Usually, at the very beginning of therapy, the client says: “I have a problem and I would like to do something about it,” this is also called a “request . There is simply an idea that you need to contact a psychologist with a certain problem, and the psychologist himself will certainly inquire about the reason for your visit. "Rule?" - you will think. Not at all! It's just that you need to start the conversation somewhere.
With more "advanced clients" there may be a different situation where the client may say: "I don't know what I would like to work on, but I would like to talk."
This is a completely normal situation, because as a client you are not required to clearly understand the essence of the request. Your desire is enough to get the job done. More “advanced” clients (who have visited a psychotherapist more than once) may generally state that they have no desire to work or come to therapy, and they would like to work with this. In the end, you have every right not to want to work at all, but you just want to be with a normal person, and not just a psychotherapist, chat about life’s ups and downs, drink tea together. Sometimes you just want to see a person outside the context of psychotherapy and see his living human reactions and assessments of how different he will be from his role as a psychotherapist. At certain moments or days, you have the right to spend time on your own (separate from your psychologist), but remember that you still pay money for it. Use the office space in a way that is convenient for you, and you can sit down yourself so that it is convenient for you (distance, posture). Take care of yourself, it will be useful and will have a fruitful effect on the entire process of psychotherapy.
When to see a psychologist
Starting cooperation with a psychologist may be a good option if you have the impression that you are not able to cope with the situations and feelings you are experiencing. It happens that the closest people cannot provide sufficient support, and previous methods do not bring relief or are a source of further complications.
If, as a result of your own observations or suggestions from someone close to you, you decide to use the support of a specialist, you should take care of a few more details.
What does working with a psychotherapist involve?
I want to focus on the word “work”. Because there is work ahead, internal work on oneself, sometimes hard, sometimes exhausting, sometimes inspiring and revealing new horizons. Like any work, it is duly rewarded.
And the more you put into the work, and the more serious it was, the greater the results and rewards await you. You will have to invest your own: time (which you will spend on psychotherapy), money (payment to your psychologist) and most importantly, your own efforts.
And you will agree with me that it would be naive to believe that spending an hour of your time and about 30 dollars is enough to seriously change the quality of your life. The most unpleasant thing in this situation is that no one will do this work for you, not even your psychologist. But on your own (without the help of a psychotherapist), in order to achieve results similar to those of full-fledged psychotherapy, you will most likely spend more than one year of your life, and perhaps you will never get it. In this case, your psychologist is a guide who knows the shortest paths from point A to point B, and his task is not to walk this path for you, but to walk with you, insuring and providing support in difficult moments, and forcing you to speed up the pace, if you are too relaxed.
And how many times have I heard about what people are “ready for” in order to change their life and its quality, but at the same time they are not ready to devote one hour a week to working on themselves. But let's continue our conversation!
How to find a competent psychologist
It is necessary to check who exactly the specialist we are planning to contact is. The fundamental difference in the types of support and the scope of services provided depends on who you turn to - a psychologist, psychotherapist, coach or psychoanalyst.
Each of these specialists provides completely different services, so it is worth deciding in advance who we want to meet. Before choosing a specific person to whom you plan to entrust your difficulties or personal development, it is worth checking his education and credentials as a specialist. In order to become an expert in the field of personality development and other psychological services, you need to invest a lot of effort and time, gain education and experience (confirmed by diplomas and certificates).
A professional should not feel insulted if a client asks him to see permits or certificates because he earned them through hard work. Therefore, he will probably show them with pleasure and even brag about them. This kind of verification is the most effective way to protect yourself from scammers or pseudo-specialists.
What will be required from the client?
Now let's talk about you and how you will use yourself. What you do with yourself largely determines how the therapy process will go. Essentially, there are two trends: customers seek new experiences or avoid them in every possible way, maintaining the status quo.
In Gestalt there is only one “correct” way to use yourself - consciously. The main task, if it can be formulated this way, in Gestalt therapy is awareness, which in itself gives freedom, freedom of choice to live or act in accordance with your desires and needs, and not follow an unconscious series of events in your life.
At every moment of time you make a choice: to be aware or not to be aware of what is happening to you. Just remember that you make the choice anyway. And if you come to a Gestalt therapist, then the first thing you will learn is awareness (of your feelings, desires, actions, choices, relationships, addictions, unfinished situations and life scenarios, ways to build your life). How does it help to realize? Draws your attention to yourself. He asks: “How do you feel now? Who or what is this feeling related to? What would you like? Get it or get rid of it? Why do you need this? What will you get and what will you get rid of? How else can you achieve what you want? What do you choose? What are you doing? How do you like what you are doing or have done?”
What and how to talk about with a psychologist?
Sometimes it is difficult to express what is happening in the soul. Moreover, explain this to a psychologist, a stranger. It’s probably really worth preparing for a conversation with a psychologist. Someone writes down the main questions or problems that they would like to discuss. And he even thinks about the conversation plan, what to talk about first and then. This approach helps you concentrate better and not forget anything, and also partially cope with anxiety (and turning to a psychologist is, of course, an alarming moment, this is natural). However, it does not help to really use the meeting with a psychologist in the best, most effective way. What should you focus on? I will give my version of the answer, which is based on the methodology of analytical (Jungian) psychology, but can be useful to you when contacting a psychologist of almost any direction.
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What really worries you will not go away and will definitely want to be expressed at the meeting in one form or another. You can trust your soul, which decides what, to whom and how it is appropriate to tell. Thinking too hard about a conversation with a psychologist will not allow you to see and feel more than you already know about your problem.
Often it is the planning of the conversation that leads to the fact that a person ends the conversation with the feeling: what has changed since I told things that I already know? This happens when only the mind is trusted to act, using logical, consistent and consistent thinking.
It is able to understand and present certain patterns that you have already understood for yourself. However, it often makes it difficult to move on and see something else that does not fit into established beliefs and ideas.
It is precisely for this expansion of the field of vision that the psychologist makes efforts, and the client’s task is to try to tune in to such a more open and free perception of his life in general and a specific task/problem in particular.
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Therefore, in a conversation with a psychologist, it would be useful to imagine how a musician, feeling the need to play, takes up an instrument and, without a specific idea, plays some first notes and then follows these sounds, allows them to behave and watches how the music is born. Working with a psychologist is not playing according to notes written by someone (even you). It's more of a free improvisation, a jam session for two, where you set a theme, and the psychologist responds and helps to better grasp and develop it so that both can feel its meaning, energy and purpose.
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In practice, it looks like this: you come with some more or less specific problem or question. First, state it the way you have it in your head. The psychologist is listening to you, but you are also listening to yourself, partly as if from the outside. How do you like what you heard? What next “sounds”, ideas, images are being born to you now? Even if it's something that isn't obviously related to the main statement, let it speak as well.
For example, if you have been suffering from insomnia lately:
- To begin with, you name and somehow describe this problem: it’s hard to sleep, I toss and turn, I feel stuffy and uncomfortable, dark thoughts creep into my head, I wake up in the morning with a headache.
- After taking a short pause (and the psychologist is unlikely to interrupt you, since he is determined to hear everything you want to say), you may recall some specific example, some one night - the most recent or especially painful, or vice versa, the occasion when you fall into the light and refreshing sleep of a baby. Describe this memory - how it was.
- You will probably remember some context of this incident: what happened before a particularly difficult night, what happened the next morning, and what did you think about during the night hours? Or what happened or what you thought about before you unexpectedly fell asleep quickly and well? And also, how is your sleeping place arranged? Is there something or someone preventing you from having a normal rest? And how insomnia affects your routine the next day - sometimes it is a means by which your unconscious creates a particular plot, allows you to avoid something or receive something (say, the sympathy of others, refusal of unpleasant responsibilities, etc.). )
- Perhaps a historical aspect, so to speak, would be appropriate: how did this happen before? When did you first notice that it was difficult to fall asleep? What happened during this period in life? any accompanying circumstances can be a clue: for example, concerns were caused by problems at work, or in close relationships, or health difficulties.
- It will be useful to mention the means you have already tried to solve the problem (if you tried), and what came of it. For example, did you take any medications, did you try to do something with your daily routine and lifestyle in general, did you consult a doctor or other psychologist, and what did this treatment give? This will allow you, when working with a psychologist, not to waste time on what you have already “been through”, but to rely on the experience gained and move on.
Surely, as the story progresses, some associations will come to your mind. for example, for some reason you come to your senses about some movie or book whose characters experienced something similar to your experience. Not literally (they also suffered from insomnia), but in some other way - let’s say, the heroine was as absent-minded as you are after a sleepless night. Or the hero also lashed out at loved ones, like you do when you feel unwell. Or you will remember how your grandmother, in her old age, also could not sleep and walked around the apartment, and you heard her steps and also did not sleep. Do not brush aside such memories and parallels that come to your mind - these additions help you understand such nuances of your problem that your consciousness has not yet processed or included in the usual explanation scheme. These vague associations usually contain a more accurate answer to your problem, and therefore the path to salvation.
- Dreams also belong to the category of additional associative material that helps enrich our understanding of the problem. It would be interesting to remember the dreams you had on those sleepless nights (or vice versa, on the rare nights of good sleep), as well as the dream you had the night before your first visit to a psychologist. All these dreams often also very effectively help to see the problem in more subtle and precise nuances, allowing you to create a more adequate picture of what is happening, not coarsened or distorted by the formal laws of “daytime” consciousness.
- An interesting way to see a figurative reflection of a problem is to try to draw it, to express your experience in connection with the same insomnia, without trying to depict something figuratively, but rather by conveying your experiences. You can make a drawing at home and bring it to an appointment with a psychologist, or do it at the meeting - there will always be pencils and paper in the office.
- A wonderful method of working with any problem is sand therapy (sandplay) - creating compositions from small objects and toys in a special sandbox in a psychologist’s office. Such game subject dramatization also allows you to look at the problem with a fresh look, while maintaining the complete authenticity of such a reflection of the inner world - after all, only your own genuine imagination, the creative resource of the unconscious, works in the sandbox.
Try to perceive the described sequence not as an instruction intended for literal execution, but as a rough sketch of the mood with which it is a little easier for people to enter the process of psychological work - so that it guides you, as music itself guides a musician who begins to play, as a river helps to float a yachtsman who controls his vessel himself and relies on the powerful energy of the water flow.
We cannot know in advance which of the listed techniques in a conversation with a psychologist will lead us to the most accurate understanding and solution to the problem. Rather, more than one approach works, but together they activate all the resources of the individual, including those inaccessible to consciousness, and generate a common product - the best understanding, and therefore the best way out of the situation.
(c) Yuliana Puchkova, analytical psychologist
