More ways of listening
You will be fed up with me soon: all I talk about is listening. “Yes, yes,” you say, “I know therapy is about listening.” But then you know everything – or you know everything if you can listen – because it is painful to listen. That is why we give advice (I don’t mean therapists give advice, I mean we, everyone). We can’t face any more of the other person’s anxiety, pain, void, so we try and change the reality by giving advice. We hope they will go “Ah yes, of course”; their mood will change, and so what we see [a happy friend not a hopeless one] will cheer us up.
Anyway, their mood does change – I believe – but not, I believe, by giving advice.
Another way of listening
So, what are these other ways of listening? Well the normal way is to listen to the words, to try and follow the story, or the feelings, or the point of what is being said.
But, in all this, someone is also telling you how they are by the way they tell the story.. For example, each time a client comes to a therapy session, they can tell a story – but they are always late to the session. Well, I think, that’s Ok, I’m a therapist, I’m being paid for this, maybe the traffic was bad, they are doing their best, my job is to listen. But, really? Really, I am annoyed, I feel used. And I feel worried, maybe they are going to leave me; and I need their money, my bank account doesn’t look so good. And I feel a bit useless – a good therapist would have this client ringing the bell bang on ten o’clock; the client would be pouring their heart out and the therapist would be sitting there looking concerned, hardly needing to say anything.
So that I think is the real message that the client is trying to get across: their lateness and all the emotions around that: in this case feelings of worthlessness, anger, hurt, rejection, anxiety. Let’s also just keep an eye on my fantasied ‘other therapist’ – the one who was Miss or Mr Perfect: they have crept in to the picture too very comfortably as though they have a right to be there.
Hard to hear the other message
This second message is much harder to hear because of my embarrassment. Look, you can’t honestly think I enjoy telling you, or admitting to myself, that a client matters to me because of how much they pay me. I would far rather stay with this image of myself as the limitless, caring therapist who is unconditionally devoted to his patient. But my work is to suffer a little – to get used to embarrassment, to get familiar with my own humanity. Not just out of masochism but so that I can hear what my client is saying: “I want to give you little digs, to remind you that you are not really up to it, that you are worthless; and I will hide the digs with a smile and verbal appreciation of what you do – so that you can’t touch me for them. I will make up plausible excuses etc etc.”
How healing happens
That is surely the big question. A client is paying money and they want (at some point) to feel better. How does that happen? They want the therapist to hear that they are treating him badly, and to wonder together why that happens. Of course, if a therapist jumps in on session one and says “I think you are doing such and such”, it will all go pear shaped; because it takes a long time for a therapist to realise what the patterns are – “No, I really am late just because my dog died half an hour ago; it’s got nothing to do with making you feel rubbish, Mr Therapist. Gosh you are so self-centred, thinking everything is about you.” [Very well put – a therapist will be very lucky if that client comes back again].
Even if the therapist waits till they really do believe there is something there, and takes their time and says it gently, clients are going to be embarrassed to admit it, so, often they say “No, nothing like that at all – I am a nice person.” It is a defence, a defence to being ashamed – quite natural, you can see why someone does not want to be ashamed or embarrassed. So the work is about allowing the client to come to accept that there are dark parts to themselves, parts that they wish were not there. Some people can take that on board – some less so.
These dark parts sometimes feel dark because they have never been brought out into the light. I sometimes say that a monster can sound terrifying in the dark, but when you switch the light on, you see that to some extent he is just a scarecrow – perhaps he was scared of the dark too, and that was why he made such a noise.
How does healing happen?
If you will allow me to use posh technical terminology, healing happens partly by integration – by bringing together the light and the dark of ourselves; by not underestimating how frightening the dark parts can seem before this happens – giving them, as parts of ourselves, due respect.
And you may pick up that inevitably this takes us back to past experience, because that significantly is who we are: what has happened to us in our pasts. And that, I am afraid, does often launch us towards our childhoods, because that is when we have been at our most exposed, our most vulnerable and impressionable. So, just as babies are, the work can be very delicate.
Till next time
Anyway I would like to say more about babies and how they feature in another post. Meantime, if you would like 2 ½ minutes homework, go onto Google and look at ‘Tronick’s still face experiment’, and see what you think.
Go well and tread gently.
Comments welcome on contact@anthonybedell.co.uk