The Beauty of Therapy:
My many years of experience as a therapist have taught me that therapy is a beautiful experience. People change by finding connections between memories, thoughts, and feelings, forming beautiful new patterns out of the fragments of their life.
Suffering on the other hand is ugly. It is a sign of a pattern that has not yet emerged, of a thought has that been severed from a feeling, or a feeling that seems isolated and without meaning.
Beauty has flow; suffering is disharmonious.
Good Therapists are Artists:
Good therapists are more like artists than technicians. They don’t seek to produce a predetermined outcome through their interventions, but seek to join with the client, to help the musical harmony of the client’s life come to expression.
I often think of myself as a jazz musician who has to jump into a musical piece that is already being played, the goal being to add a guitar string here, and add a drum there. I think of my therapeutic interventions as producing resonance, along the lines of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who said, “You should not try to find whether an idea is just or correct. You should look for a completely different idea, elsewhere, in another area, so that something passes between the two which is neither in one nor the other”.
What is needed in therapy is not an accurate interpretation of facts, but movement in a client’s capacity to think new thoughts and access new experiences. The words and observations of the therapist have to make new connections possible. The most skillful way to do this is to insert a new element into the client’s speech or experiences that makes something resonate in a way that wasn’t possible before.
The therapist must hear something between the lines or outside of the client’s conscious awareness; something that has fallen outside of the structure of the clients conscious story line.
A client might be speaking in a way that repeats the significance of the word “eight”, which seems to pop up in multiple contexts unbeknownst to the client. The client has been in a relationship for eight years, the client likes the brand of mint chocolates After Eight, and the client complains of being overw-eight. The therapist hears the refrain that has fallen out of the clients awareness, and asks the client to talk about what happened around the age of 8. If this question resonates, the client will be able to access new important memories or feelings. Maybe his parents got divorced when he was 8. Maybe she was eight when her cousin sexually abused her. Or maybe nothing at all comes to mind, in which case the intervention would fall flat.
The point is that the therapist’s job is to listen for the music that is being played, and to re-introduce elements that might make new thoughts possible. When such connections are made, beauty or harmony is the result.
A Joint Master-Piece:
The therapist is not some master mind who offers universal truths and prescriptions, but someone who knows how to jam with the client. The therapist must receive the beauty from the client’s life story, and help the clients play their music.
Good therapy is never about applying eternal truths and knowledge to universal problems, but about creating something unique and new from out of the always particular elements of a particular person’s life.
As a result, good therapy happens not as transfer of knowledge from the therapist to the client, but as a veritable co-production.
Therapy as Creation:
In therapy, as in life, there is no clear sense of the end goal from the outset. One must discover what is possible by being open to what happens. What happens is never something that can be predicted in advance; it represents a possibility beyond one we can control and plan for. Turning towards this “unknown” happening, and cultivating it by paying attention to it, is probably where the real work of therapy happens. It is where client and therapist each become capable of receiving something new, which they had not known before. It is the place of pure creation: therapy as art rather than science.
Therapy as art allows us to receive a future that is not conditioned by the past, and to envision new goals of which we were not in possession prior to the actual therapy.
About me: I am a clinical psychologist in Houston, TX. If you would like to read more about the connection between therapy and art, read my article: On Cultivating the Therapeutic Moment.
