What happens in good therapy is hard to explain to someone who has not yet experienced it.
Why is that? Because the person who enters the therapy room often isn’t the person therapy will reveal her to be. Her very goals and definitions of who she is belongs to her pre-therapy self.
If she is like most people she is used to the idea that life consists of a series of problems to be solved. She views herself as a kind of processing machine that takes in information or challenges, uses logic and planning to tackle these challenges, and produces an output or performance. Her score card is life. She asks herself: Am I married? Do I have a good job? Can I deal with stress at work? Am I happy in my relationship? And if the answer is no, she extrapolates, it must be because she isn’t doing things right, isn’t using the right logic, doesn’t have the right attitude.
She feels like a machine that is broken; a person who cannot deal as effectively with life’s problems as the the next person. She feels deficient, lacking skills that others seem to have, and needing knowledge that will help her deal with life in ways that will make her feel effective and successful again. She needs to get fixed!
However, this is the person’s ego speaking: the ego who believes she is the queen of her own castle, who problem-solves, who plans, and who thinks she is in control.
Therapy, however, is not for the ego.
Encountering a Different Self:
Therapy does not focus on who you are and what you want. Instead it seeks to give you an experience of who you do not know that you are and what you did not know that you wanted.
Instead of focusing on providing knowledge about well-defined problems, therapy seeks to take you to the unclear edge of what you do not yet know. Here at the edge, your own experience can teach you something new. Here you can access feelings you had not previously been aware of, or rediscover fragments of your experience which you had previously forgotten.
Here at the edge of your own experience, you encounter a different you; a “you” that is larger and more complex than your well-defined ego, or image of self. And as you bridge this abyss between who you have been thinking about yourself as, and what you are becoming, change happens to you: Therapy becomes therapeutic.
Will You Trust Me?
It is hard to explain this process of metamorphosis to someone who thinks the solution to their problems lies in techniques, knowledge, or wisdom that they can receive and implement in some rational and planful manner. Because what I am saying, this part of the self cannot understand.
And so you must trust me enough to dare to leave your preconceived notions to the side. You must take me up on my invitation to speak freely, to speak what you do not want to say, to speak about that for which you have no words, that which is farfetched, childish, has no form, makes no sense, or is slightly beyond reach. And here at the edge, is where new experiences take shape; where the self is in the making.
The Role of the Therapist:
Your therapist is there to help you stretch beyond your own capacity, push you towards insights that is slightly beyond reach, notice where the body betrays a consciously held view, where the voice stammers, where emotion hides, or where novelty lurks.
Therapy is not the doing of the therapist, nor the doing of the client. It is the happening of the unseen, the unsaid, and the unfelt from a place “between” the two; the arising of something that neither could have produced on their own.
Therapy is also not the linear execution of a solution to a predefined problem. Change in therapy is not something you implement, it is something that happens to you. And it happens to you always from a place that was initially outside your awareness.
What is Good Therapy?
Therapy is therefore about welcoming in experiences that lead to a revision of previously held understandings or that help you discover something about yourself from a place that was not previously accessible.
Therapy is about growth, revision, becoming. It is about gaining contact with an aliveness and self-evidence in your own experiential depths that will change how you feel about yourself and who you can become.
We don’t know the answers, nor the outcome, before you enter therapy. Therapy itself is the pursuit of these answers. It is through therapy that the mysteries of your existence, of your choices, and of your hang-ups shall be unraveled. Not from a place of universal knowledge, but from an experience of your own personal truth.
About me: I am Rune Moelbak, Ph.D., a psychologist in Houston, Texas.
