To be of help by ‘being present as a living being’. Four perspectives on the therapist’s role in the stagnation of a therapeutic process

ABSTRACT

In this paper I dwell on the question how the therapist’s way of being can be helpful for clients, through exploring moments when the therapeutic process is stuck and the therapist’s way of being is not helpful. My assumption is that a therapeutic process get stuck because the therapist functions in a structure-bound way, as reaction to the difficulties of the client or to the therapeutic situation. What this means is investigated from four perspectives that shed light on four different subprocesses of psychotherapy. From the point of view that therapy sees as a meaning-making process, therapists perceive the client's experience distorted and attach their own meanings to it. From the perspective of the experiential subprocess, therapists has difficulty to accept something in the client’s way of being because it touches something in themselves that they cannot relate to in an accepting way. In the light of the relational subprocess the rigid interactional pattern of the client evokes a relational pattern from the life of the therapists and lose their authenticity in the relationship. From an existential point of view therapists way of dealing in their own life with the existential issue the client is struggling with, prevents them to meet the client on this human level. After discussing each perspective a focusing-oriented exercise is offered to explore the contribution of the therapist to the stagnation of a specific therapeutic process.

KEYWORDS:

• Stagnation
• therapist's structure-bound functioning
• meaning-making
• experiential
• relational
• existential
• supervision

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. By congruence I refer to the inner side of authenticity, as distinguished by Lietaer (1993) from transparency, the outer side of authenticity. This meaning of the word is narrower than that generally used in English but is widespread in the Dutch-speaking, person-centered community.