The Gift of Therapy

There are few human situations in which we are permitted, let alone encouraged, to comment upon the immediate behavior of the other. It feels liberating, even exhilarating—that is precisely why the encounter-group experience was so compelling. But it also feels risky, since we are not accustomed to giving and receiving feedback.

It was my recognition of this process that permitted me to avoid responding critically (that is, take it personally) but to realize this was a pattern that he had repeated many times and that he, at bottom, wanted to change

“Mary, let me tell you something. For the last several minutes I notice that I’ve been feeling disconnected from you, somewhat distanced. I’m not sure why, but I know I’m feeling different now than at the beginning of the session, when you were describing your feelings of not having gotten what you wanted from me, or last session, when you spoke more from the heart. I wonder, what is your level of connection to me today? Is your feeling similar to mine? Let’s try to understand what’s happening.”

It is important to make that distinction, because if it is the patient who evokes your boredom in the therapy hour, then we may confidently assume that he is boring to others in other settings

you will begin to know how much of the boredom or confusion is yours and how much is evoked by the patient

Therapy is invariably energized when it focuses on the relationship between therapist and patient

His feelings toward me were an analog of his feelings toward his girlfriend, and the experience of expressing them without a calamitous outcome was powerfully instructive

the extent of her absence and how shut out I felt by her,
Mildred began to appreciate the extent to which she exiled her husband

gentle exploration of how she had coarsened her relationship with me proved so useful that months later some very astonished elderly gentlemen received her phone calls of apology

In the final analysis I feel certain that this here-and-now therapeutic work was far more powerful than a “then-and-there” investigation of the crisis with his son and that he would remember our encounter long after he forgot any intellectual analysis of the episode with his son