by: Dov Moshe Litwin, MSW, JD
I train many students. My ethic is not to teach…but to CREATE. Students studying to be psychotherapists need not only to learn things that they can read in books, rather they need to CHANGE….change who they are, how they look at the world and at people, how they pick up, notice things, how they question…how they split their focus in three parts…one, totally connected, one, introspective, and one, with a global perspective, having a broad view AT the client, INSIDE the client’s head and SURVEYING the dynamic between the client and himself. The terms are VERSATILITY and FLEXIBILITY. Only then can a student hope to be ‘on the road’ of becoming equipped for his professional career.
A therapist is a contradiction in terms…he is hyper focused while holding a holistic perspective. He is critical yet approving, he is ‘safe’, though challenging. He accepts, yet he scrutinizes. The finesse of working in many different opposite realities at the same time is the hallmark of a good therapist. Patient…without which the work cannot be done properly. Resilient…attacked by his client, verbally, aggressively…yet composed and focused, helping his client through his triggered memories.
“I want to be a therapist because I like to ‘HELP’ people”. Yes, of course. But a student under my domain re-trains his attitude to the word ‘help’. Clients expect challenge. Dismissing cues, patterns of thought, extreme impassioned or dubious expressions, in favor of sparing the client not to
‘feel bad’, is not just not helpful, but it is frequently, negligent and unprofessional.
It takes many years. Commitment, perseverance, tenacity, and trust…questioning, though malleable to change. Yes, it is normal for the therapist to have his own ‘shadows’ of conscious and subconscious prejudices. Though in fact, he is mandated to engage in an honest venture of unlocking and exposing the ‘unpretty’ of himself. Without uncovering one’s ‘parts’, the effect on one’s efficacy as a therapist is seriously limited and even worse yet, he can induce detrimental reverberations onto his client.
People need to find ‘meaning’ in their lives. Without purpose, real happiness is hard to achieve. One of the basic difficulties that client’s struggle with is the acceptance of their situations…not finding the ‘purpose’ in why their childhood was what it was, or how their personality is what it is. They want something other than the suffering they are going through. Yes, therapy is about change, though without true acceptance and feelings of purpose…’change’ becomes a pursuit of a dream that can never really be achieved. The acceptance that ‘I am good’, that ‘I am a survivor’, that ‘I am “ME”’, that I am a product of a world that was carved out for me when I was born, which seemingly I had no choice to be in. Clients need to wear the things that they could not control as a ‘badge of honor’…a testament to their resilience and their overcoming and enduring adversities, deprivations, challenges and pains. They need to rewrite and reclaim what was ‘taken away’ from them, they need to see themselves as strong and powerful, and view their ‘unhealthy’ thoughts and ‘dysfunctional’ behaviors as expected and normal outcomes of factors that impacted them in every dimension of possible experience. To act as if one is immune to those thoughts and behaviors may be characterized as ‘unnatural’, ‘unhealthy’.
The therapist therefore allows for process; changing of mindset; working through difficult blocks in cognitive reasoning. He sees that which is concealed beneath the superficial, ‘mapping out’ with the client past present and future, querying on occasion even the most apparent, noticing the ‘not said’.
Usage of ‘self’ is the distinctive feature of the proficient; dynamically impelling the client to experience psychological repercussions, impressions and shifts in an inner world that only the most masterful can grasp. The therapist is attuned to what is yearned for, and engages himself as the significant instrument for cultivating transformations, empowering the maturation of innovative channels of awareness’s.
Psychotherapy is a master ‘art’, a specialization of precision techniques bred through the intensely dynamic supervisor-trainee relationship. It requires extensive, comprehensive and disciplined instruction. The fully proficient practitioner’s dedication will metamorphose the apprentice into a vehicle of change. The unseasoned trainee can expect to be consumed in an all-embracing milieu of inner transformations and profound maturations. The result – an impressive and superiorly proficient professional.
