Does Anyone Want To Do Therapy Anymore?
Pampering Is Not Therapy.
The point of therapy is to return people to wellness. To do that, clients need to be challenged. Yet, thousands of therapists pamper their clients instead of challenging them. Mental health treatment has been taken over by a “marketing” and “customer service” mentality. Giving the client what they wish for is effective in every service industry, except therapy. But, it helps them stay stuck.
Of course, a person trying to get fit would love for a trainer to show them how to without a painful exercise routine. Therapy is exactly the same. And, it’s understandable that clients in therapy want their therapist to offer a cure that will release them from their suffering or listen to them vent—without having to face the pain of changing.
Selling the promise of a quick and painless fix has always been good business. The promise of easy therapy is appealing and very profitable. Easy cures and magical potions sell. But quick fixes never last. And magical-solutions-therapy is ineffective, yet it’s the most frequent form of therapy being offered today. An ever-growing number of therapists want to be gurus, purveyors of magical cures, or expert advisors. Why go through the long process of a college education, professional training, and state licensing, to become psychotherapists and then not practice psychotherapy? True psychotherapy is difficult to practice.
It’s easy, pleasant, and profitable, to give people what they wish. Agree with people, give advice, accept flattery and return it back. But it’s hard to reflect a painful reality to a person that’s suffering. It’s hard to show a person how they hurt themselves and others. It’s difficult to accept pain in order to get better. It’s hard to be motivated to return each week for discomfort in order to improve. To engage in real depth psychotherapy is not pleasant. It doesn’t feel good to stare down the things that harm us. The parts of ourselves that need healing usually are the ones we avoid. And, it’s hard to reject being put on a pedestal.
It’s hard to resist admiration and willingly reject the self-gratification that comes with it. It’s difficult to put your livelihood in jeopardy by risking that clients leave because you don’t indulge in their delusions. It’s difficult to reject the shared fantasy that you have the power to give answers and solutions to their problems. A therapist has to reject the status of expert, priest or guru, and has to train to let go of things that a human being naturally seeks—all for the betterment of the client. If they don’t have the maturity and emotional fortitude to reject the status that others seek, they won’t be effective therapists.
Being a true therapist is hard. A therapist is someone that shows up to work and goes through a thousand little crucifixions for their clients.
To reach the depths of a client’s problems and suffering, the therapist becomes the recipient of the client’s unconscious content. The therapist receives the anger, disgust, hatred, love, or adoration that the client holds in their unconscious. The therapist becomes the screen onto which the client projects the parts of themselves that they don’t want to face. The therapist becomes the father or mother that they long for or hate. The guru that will save them. The rejecting lover that humiliated them. The therapist then holds these projections and reflects them back to the client, like a mirror. Without owning them, returning anger with anger, or rejection with rejection. The therapist feels the natural desire to react, to get rid of the unpleasant, hurtful thing they get from the client. But instead, the therapist holds them.
The therapist helps the client become liberated from their dysfunctional beliefs and emotions by keeping them and reflecting them back. Clients will then see their dilemmas, safely, outside of themselves, being shown them by a person who wants the best for them. At some point, the client will be emotionally strong enough to own the dysfunctions that belong to them. They will recognize the ways in which the dysfunctions manifest themselves in their life, then find a way to manage them successfully. This is hard work. If a therapist is immature, fearful, or eager to please, they will fail to hold the client’s worst projected conflicts. They will respond to being seen as stupid, incompetent, or disgusting, by making the client feel stupid, incompetent, or disgusting. Or, try to pacify them. The process of painfully owning the parts of us that we run from would never happen. Nothing would change.
True psychotherapists can’t accept and own the client’s projections. We can’t indulge in feeling like gurus, believe that we have the ultimate truth, or are masters of knowledge. The clients think we are, but that doesn’t make it so.
Therapists who are dependent on approval and self-gratification, who lack emotional fortitude to withstand negative emotions, or who are motivated by profit, will fall into joining the client’s projections of them. In doing so, they validate the client’s dysfunctional views, reinforce their maladaptive coping skills, irrationality, and dependencies. A therapist’s acceptance of the fantasy that they are a wise problem solver reinforces that false idea that the client lacks the capability to succeed in life independently. This, of course, is a great business model. A dependent client is a marketing dream. If you get someone to need you, they will come back.
But that is not our profession. We are supposed to encourage freedom, not dependency. Successful therapists lose their clients. And, it’s unethical to advertise and promise easy fixes, magical solutions, and pampering. That is not therapy and it is shameful to call it so.
