Clients who can't be helped #3, aka I appear to be ChatGPT "regenerate"*

This is another of my very unpleasant posts whose only redeeming value is that it speaks the truth. There are many therapy clients who will not change, think better, feel better, act better, improve one whit, whether they attend for three weeks or three years. I’m not just talking about those with personality disorders whose character, outlook and feeling nature are a whole wide world of self-soothing that hovers over and protects their infant that never left the crib. They won’t change, though they may want to believe they did. The narcissist will not become humble, though with the right acid therapy he may see that he’s wrong to feel so right. The dependent personality will never feel right to be on her own. The borderline may think Dialectical Behavioral Therapy day and night, but it will be a loose straitjacket, easy to shake off in a fit.

 

Many clients are enthusiastic about, or just keep coming to, therapy, who are there to – without realizing it – entertain and reject insights and uncomfortable feelings almost as a kind of spectator sport, just as we admire movie war heroes but wouldn’t want to be where they are. There’s the psychosomatic man who will never walk back into the fire of his childhood to burn it away, the psychosomatic woman who is still little and can’t become an adult. There are the “ADHD” adults who have been sprinting away from feeling their whole lives, either because of birth or a bad family. Feeling would reverse them at the speed of light to their helpless childhood. There are the many thinkers and intellectuals who can never, quoting Fritz Perls, lose their mind and come to their senses. Feeling would be darkness and death to them – unexistence. I suppose all these clients feel that something must be happening in therapy, and that wish may sustain them for quite a while.

 

But I would say “don’t be sad.”** It’s hard for anyone to change. Maybe the most somber truth is that clients come to therapy with the hope for some life-changing epiphany or decades-delayed feeling expression, but then find it not enjoyable to stay in their underground place where the sharks and gold are. After some powerful exposure, they instantly find themselves back in their waking dream of the here-and-now.

 

I want every single one of my clients to become different. That’s my hope when they first come in and each time they appear. Four months down the road, though, I know they are – without realizing it – more stubborn than I am. They are “winning.”

 

But then I’m stubborn again and try again to move something in them. It’s not a battle or a sport, just all that therapy can do.

 

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* When I had completed this post, I remembered that I had addressed the same problem three years earlier. This is a somewhat flaccid version of the more intricate earlier one:

https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2020/04/self-destruct-1-clients-who-cant-be.html.

 

** Inspired by Charles Bukowski, Bluebird, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmWZOsVtqR0.