Helping Others Without Hurting Yourself

I emphasize to my students that you have to give up the idea of helping, of being the doer of the therapy. This is not only the truth in my opinion, but it saves you from large areas of entrapment in transference and
counter-transference.

To the degree that you need to help your client or want to help your client(in a way that creates internal stress) you are really self-involved and not there for the process(note I say, for the Process not the client!).

Having an emotional investment in helping vs. a dispassionate commitment to help is a deadly trap.

When you add the client's process to your imbalance of needing or wanting to help, you get the deadly mix. Hopefully, you have been trained in the notion that it is good to get the client to take control of their process -- to put them at cause over it (e.g. suggestion to him to intensify his symptom.) It is important to understand a deeper aspect of why you do this -- it's not just a neat trick. You put them at cause because they truly are at cause already -- just not admitting/noticing it.

For example, if your client is presenting vividly as a victim, you may become caught up in believing in his problems -- believing he is a victim -- and ONLY a victim. You can never be ONLY a victim except in the midst of an actual attack by an attacker. If you are in the on-going attitude of victim, you have to have internalized and become the attacker with a portion of your psychic energy(another portion becomes victim).

You consciously identify with the victim process, but the persecutor/attacker process is installed in the so-called unconscious so you can believe consciously that you are a victim. (Be careful not to believe in overly solid notions of conscious and unconscious minds as distinct things, when in fact they are just labels for certain manifesting aspects of a seamless continuum of choices and behaviors)

If, as a therapist, you are the least bit desperate to help, then you become the mark for the persecutor aspect of the client who can gleefully beat you up, without being noticed, as you struggle to help the perceived "victim."Furthermore, please note that the client's persecutor is not the only persecutor in the room. How do you think you become a desperate helper?

In such a therapy scenario, what is really going on is that 2 split people are engaging in a drama where their conscious victim/helper-victim are being beat up by their unconscious persecutors. When the session is over the persecutors can stick their heads up into the conscious mind. The client walks away thinking, "He/She can't really help me, etc." and the drained therapist walks away thinking, "What's wrong with me? Maybe I'm not good enough to help him; maybe I can't be a good therapist."

You have to go beyond hope/fear of success/failure. Even with an apparent success in therapy, you have to contemplate and digest the elation you may experience. To the degree that is a result of confirming your need to be a good helper, it is just the flip side of your susceptibility to be drained when you "fail" or struggle. I'm not suggesting you can't feel it -- just that you have to contemplate and "digest" it rather than simply and naively enjoy it while it lasts.

Good luck. Hope this helps. Take care of yourself in the therapy.

©Jack Elias, 2008, www.FindingTrueMagic.com