I suspect that the last theory most therapists would want to accept is that our job is to reparent our clients. This is in no way the meaning of Cognitive therapists’ paternalistic (but secret) sense that genuflecting at the altar of Albert Ellis bestows upon them the ability to think more logically and rationally than their clients do.
Reparenting assumes a depth therapy of pain discharge and degrees of healing of the past. Our clients are injured in time just as physicians’ patients are injured in body. Thinking is their present palliative of old pain – their drug, their band-aid, not their medicine or surgery. When we help a client regress to her childhood disaster we must be there as the parent should have been, to be the ultimate strong and caring listener and believer of her real self. The person she can finally lean on, crash into.
The notion that we are just a discussant, feeling facilitator or teacher is so wrong because it assumes our client is his adult character. He is not that: He is still a child. As are we, but it is our time to help.
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Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.