Clients who can't be helped #2

🔆  I learned that when Muzak died, it replaced its elevator music with subliminal lectures on proctology, economics and psychology. This makes sense because people want to avoid important truths, want to just live, believe the surface is the content, and not have to worry about the underpinnings of their lives. Psychotherapy, when it’s done right, brings the scum and magma to the surface, and encourages you to invite them to dinner.

🔆  I had on schedule today three nineteen-to-twenty-two-year-old sociopaths. Two of them no-showed. The third hung up on me (teletherapy) at the fifty-ninth minute of the session. Troubled and Aspergery though she was, I could not let pass – “everything is an excuse” – the personality disorder that bathed in immaturity and justified all failure to try anything.

🔆  I am considering writing a “Teams” message request to the Director, not to send me any more early-twenties amoral autists and psychotics who cannot possibly profit from therapy now, and possibly later.

🔆  I am clearly a weather vane, no rock. As a principle, I will find sly ways to encourage dependent women to question their ties to toxic parents. Today I saw a transfer client who said her counselor had pushed her too hard to separate from her mother. Goodness! I said. That’s not right! While I did suggest that my job is, as I see it, to help people grow stronger not weaker, I would not push any agenda. Saved by my appeasement and hypocrisy!

🔆  The old and behind-closed-doors wisdom in our field is that many clients do not change, do not get better with therapy. A collateral insight is that in success, “the relationship” matters most while the particular therapy paradigm matters not at all: No approach is better than another. I guarantee you that is ridiculous. The relationship and a depth approach are what bring improvement. However, I do agree with the observation that many clients do not change, though from a different angle: Many cannot be helped at all. We can imagine the personality with its roots as spiritual strings anchored in the core of the person, extending outward to all the points of the universe. It is our life, and our meaning. To think we facilely change meaning by techniques is as presumptuous as President Trump is delusional. Only those who want progress, almost as a religious holy grail, as a crusade of self care, will profit from our special offerings.