Healing Qualities of a Counselor

When I have a client that's stuck in patterns, showing depression, or similarly, a client who's isolated and doesn't reach out to friends, but it's due to anxiety, and they're really stuck in the patterns because of those emotions. What are some strategies I can give them or ways that I can go about trying to get them to try on new behaviors?

I mean, the first thing is that they're unquestionably having shame and embarrassment and fear as it relates to going out. And so you're doing your very best to have a loving relationship to the shame, embarrassment, and the fear. And so you're outing that, and you're asking them what their deepest feelings are that are stopping them from going out is the best they're aware of. And when they finally get to share those feelings, your love of them, the healing quality of your heart, being with them is the primary healing agent. And then once that's there, you can move towards the encouragement and the specific goals and criteria that you're trying to meet in a given week that you're going to make one effort and you're going to report back to me what you went through, and you come to a concrete agreement as to what they're going to do. So if they're going to go out one time, you're going to say that and then ask what the experience was like. The main thing is the love of the vulnerability, and then having them start to focus on the healing quality, which is courage, accepting the vulnerability, and then basically reporting back to you how it went.

So you're saying them being able to internalize my love for them is kind of like the thing that gets the engine rolling.

Yeah. And the important thing is that it may take quite a while. And what happens for most counselors is when it's taking quite a while, a subtle frustration or a subtle helplessness comes in. And you need to be able to greet those feelings with hello, helplessness. Hello, frustration. And what my client needs is to feel my faith in them, my trust in them, my empathy for how difficult it is, and thereby my love for them and you sustaining in that quality is what's going to allow them to incorporate those feelings towards themselves. And of course, there's a lot of empathic statements that are needed, like, I know how difficult this is for you. So they don't feel that you're trivializing it and that your subtle impatience or your subtle helplessness isn't the feeling that they're internalizing. One of the most precious statements that Jung made was that the unconscious is really what transforms the patient, the therapist's unconscious. And so if your unconscious is feeling helpless or frustrated, or your unconscious is actually feeling love and empathy, that's what's really going to be the key ingredient. And so you're working constantly with your own energetic experience. And what you're verbally saying to them is probably 25% important. And 75% of what's important is how much you're able to stay in a state of trust and faith and empathy and love.

Okay. I think that for me, the love is actually fairly easy to build and develop with most of my clients, and that I do waver with feeling helpless and feeling a loving empathy for where they are and genuinely feeling that part of it. So there's not a consistency of staying in the empathic state.

And then the other thing is, you can help have them dramatize their emotional state, their fear, their anxiety, their paralysis, and do a little bit of a psychodrama where they go, I'm petrified. And have them experience the fear so openly, because when they really out it in a big way, they probably will have a vision of maybe I'm exaggerating what really could happen. And so you're really using exaggeration and psychodramatizing it by asking them, well, tell me how horrible it really could be. Tell me how inadequate you really could feel. And then after you do the dramatizing, then you approach them and ask, is it possible you could be more trusting? Is it possible you could be actually reaching out to somebody and asking them a question? And you also may include giving them practical skills as well, where you're saying, can you ask questions? What would be a comment that would be appropriate in a social situation? And so you have them sort of loaded with both information they can use as to what they could really say, a kindness towards their own emotional states and the encouragement, the trust, and the empathy to go with their vulnerability.

Given those ingredients you're sharing, if they are still genuinely stuck, it's about me being able to stay in my empathic state for them and feel my love for them. And when the feeling frustrated, helpless comes up, me recognizing that early on and kind of working to shift my own state so they. They can feel my consistency. Exactly. Okay.

And you being able to recognize that as kind of classic countertransference, right?

Yeah.

And you being able to be kind towards yourself, not critical, hopefully, and say, good for you. I recognize my counter transference now. I want to put my intention as much as possible towards empathizing towards being present with them and really giving them some love and tenderness and empathy to walk out of the room with.

So does that mean you check in with yourself in sessions intermittently to see where you are when your states?

I would say anytime I'm not in love, anytime I'm not in empathy, anytime I'm not in trust, I check in automatically. And there's a certain kind of vibration, a certain kind of tone that when I'm not in my heart, I'm in a continuous state of inquiry of how can I be in my heart? Where am I? How can I support the client more optimally? And also at one level, how can I support myself? Because I know if I support myself, I'm going to be supporting the client more.

Right. That's helpful.