Therapists need to have had therapy
You may have had enough on listening, but I want to say a bit more. To train to be a psychotherapist, you have to be in therapy at least twice a week for about seven years. The most advanced therapists have been in therapy four times a week, week after week after week….Why’s that? We all have issues, and therapists probably more than your average person. Most therapists have gone through some very difficult experiences – being in therapy gives you the chance to work them over again and again. When you listen as a therapist, clients bring up a range of emotions and experiences. If as a therapist you have not worked over an area enough, what you do is avoid that emotion – you don’t pick it up, or you hear it but you can’t place it, or you choose to hear something else rather than what you find most difficult. From a client’s point of view, it comes over that the therapist isn’t hearing what you are saying – or isn’t hearing at the deepest level. And that doesn’t meet your need.
There is an unconscious
Therapists just believe this. They believe that dreams have meanings, that people say things accidentally that they mean (Freudian slips), that we all do some things believing that we are doing them for one reason but actually having another motivation which we don’t necessarily realise. I accept I can’t prove this, so some people won’t believe it – I simply believe that there is part of me that is not in view to me.
How does this affect listening?
Carl Jung (another analyst, worked with Freud for a time then set up on his own) suggested that when a therapist listens to a client, the client has an unconscious which has feelings, thoughts and wishes, and that unconscious can communicate with the therapist. The therapist can hear the client’s unconscious.
Does this sound barmy? Think of the times when you have finished someone else’s sentence because you just know what they are thinking. Think of times when you have wondered whether telepathy had any truth in it. If I haven’t convinced you, perhaps read on.
So as a therapist, when you are listening, you are not just listening to the words of the client and the emotions they are obviously feeling (their conscious). You are noticing what feelings you yourself are having. I know this sounds strange on first read. Let me give an example.
A client is telling me a story which to all appearances is sad. But I am bored. I wasn’t bored before the session started but I really don’t care about what the client is saying. What I don’t do is to tell myself off – ‘How terrible, you are being paid for this, and you just aren’t interested; you are a rubbish therapist!’ [By the way can you hear a really harsh parent inside me – wonder where that came from?]. No, I ask myself, why have I got bored? Is it my boredom or is it the client’s boredom, perhaps their unconscious boredom? What might it mean if the client were bored? It is as though the client might have inside them an uncaring part who just is not bothered; a part of themselves who shrugs indifferently at suffering.
So, I might think that they had had someone in their experience who had been indifferent to suffering, heartless, disengaged – just as I was disengaged. I don’t know this, but I might at some point wonder out loud, if it was appropriate: “I wonder whether part of your experience has been someone who had no time for people who were sad or suffering,’ and I would wait to see if that comment found a home, or was batted away.
I would use my own experience (boredom) as a possible barometer of what might be going on deep down for the client. I wouldn’t say that it was definitely the case – I would wonder. Therapy is an exploration where two people are involved. So, if I am irritated, I wonder whether this is ‘my stuff’, or whether the client is irritated or angry but not aware of it.
Listening with the body
In the same way, as a therapist I listen with my body. Psychotherapists believe that the body holds, represents areas of our experience that are out of our conscious range but that are very important. You will have heard of psychosomatic diseases I guess: illnesses that show in the body but that represent our emotions.
In the same way, I try to be aware of how my body is reacting whilst I listen. Sometimes my stomach tenses up. I don’t know why but I presume that I am anxious. Again, I wonder if this is my own anxiety and tension, or whether the client is communicating to my deepest level their tension. In the same way as before, I don’t assume that it is the client’s stuff, but I would wonder and I might possibly ask if there were tension around for them. Sometimes my stomach tension then disappears – as though it were a feeling that was longing for recognition, but no longer had to knock on the door once it had been heard.
So, listening to my own body and to random feelings and thoughts that enter my mind are all possible parts of my listening to what the client wants to say.
Comments welcome contact@anthonybedell.co.uk