Fantasy impromptu #3

In my last few weeks at this job, before moving out of state, I have been looking at some old and recent clients in a different way.  Strangely, each has become a person with a problem that can be understood and solved in a session or two.  When I had no end time in sight, and it was expected that most would be attending for a while, there was the typical understanding that clients could be helped only through a relationship in time.  I suspect that each counselor sees – unthinkingly or thoughtfully – the therapy process in his or her own way.  My own view has been that the client has to be worn down (in a manner of speaking) over months to a place of trust and truth, to a certain amount of regression, leaning on me or on the room.  I find the notion that we help change a person by having him Endust® his surface – improve his adult thinking – idiotic: botch therapy.

But right now, I am picturing the ailing individual as someone who can be helped by showing him his pain and getting him out of his lies to himself.  This is where our patients are: They have survived by lying to themselves, in the form of defenses.  These could also be called self-medications, or misdirected energies.  A new client (one of the last, before I converted to doing triage and transfers) has the tough-gal character.  It is a character of defense, after a girlhood where her stepfather raped her and her mother put up with him.  When you sit in my room, you are in a place where your pain is not merely nodded to, saluted, but where it, and compassion, replace everything else in the room and in the world but for air.  As complex as any person is, she is simple: She is hurt, has run away, and now must come home.