A recorded conversation between two married family therapists, Robert Strock and Dave Knapp, exploring how to sensitively counsel terminally ill people. They discuss cultural taboo around death, the shift in therapist role from problem-solver to caregiver, and the intense feelings of helplessness and exposure to personal mortality therapists face when working with dying clients.
Welcome. My name is Robert Strock, and I'm here today with my friend and colleague Dave Knapp, both of us being married, family therapists. And today we're here to take a look at death and dying counseling and how to really approach somebody in our practice, or perhaps even in our families, in a sensitive way when they're terminally ill. As counselor, as people, the subject of death, the process of dying has been taboo. In your experience, how do you see that taboo, and what do you see it doing to interfere with the ability of us as therapists? Well, it's kind of like we are raised in a culture where we have a black paper in front of our eyes. I'm not solving problems. There is no future. How do we adjust as therapists, as counselors, to that? What do we need to bring to it?
I think the key thing that we need to be ready for when we're going to shift from being a therapist to someone that's caring for the dying is the realization that we're going to be exposed, first of all, to our own mortality, and secondly, that we're going to be left in a state, oftentimes of feeling helpless or maybe even feeling inadequate, because we're not going to be able to help give the person what they want most, which for most people will be to live longer. And so we're going to be in this state of inadequacy and helplessness that's even deeper and more pervasive than we would feel ordinarily as a counselor. And what we need to recognize, and this is a very subtle but very important point, that if we don't feel helpless, something's wrong. That when we feel helpless, it's because we have this tremendous desire to be helpful.
