Breathe
By Valeria Villa
For better and for worse, it became fashionable to go to therapy and talk publicly about mental illness. For good, because the stigma has been enormous and no one wanted others to think they were crazy just for going to a psychologist. For good because no one should feel shame for going through depression, suffering from generalized anxiety or an eating disorder.
For bad, because saying I go to therapy is not a guarantee of recovery or that the type of therapy is really useful to work on the reason for consultation. In my experience therapies such as hypnosis, brief therapies, family constellations, cognitive behavioral therapy, can give the impression of working in the short term but they do not solve the structural part of the person that is the origin of the suffering.
Also, as happens a lot on social media, some people turn their mental illness into a personality. Everything is traversed by their diagnosis, which certainly has an impact on life, but no one should be defined by their illness. We are all much more than a diagnosis. Also, everything in the networks has a touch of exhibitionism that I personally don't find valuable or helpful or healing for anyone. When you have to shout something out, perhaps you lose the preciousness of the inner world, which should not be accessible to just anyone.
I think that what is really useful is to work on the deep change of the psychological processes with which the mind operates. That which we call personality structure. A successful therapy is not only the disappearance of symptoms but the change of the person, so that he/she can feel more comfortable with him/herself. Give me tools, many patients say. The central tool and the one from which everything else is derived is our way of relating to reality. Therapy should allow patients to live more freely, without so many ties, without dwelling too much on the opinion of others. Also with more richness, daring to explore unknown territories, beyond their obsessions.
In therapy, an assessment is made of the unconscious mind: intrapsychic conflicts, defenses, fantasies, unconscious motivations, internal and external object relations, transference, self experiences, strengths and weaknesses of the self.
The work would then have to be oriented to develop more mature ways to defend against pain. Projection, for example, is an immature mechanism for dealing with what makes us suffer or what we don't like about who we are. Blaming others for what happens to us or our reactions is the most common form of projection. Denial, not realizing the obvious, deceiving oneself as a way of coping with the difficult, should also disappear after good therapeutic work.
Also to stop deluding ourselves with self-idealizations, convincing ourselves that we do things because it is the right thing to do without being able to be honest about the genuine motivations for why we do things.
Paradoxically, it is a sign of therapeutic work to accept that we know very little. It is not the one who does not know who is stupid, but the arrogant, the omniscient, the one who thinks he already knows everything. A good therapy makes us humble and helps us to recognize that there is much we do not understand about ourselves and others.
Therapy is also a pause from the mania of wanting to solve everything but fast. It is stopping to contemplate what hurts and stop running away. Or to stop the compulsion to sedate anxiety. In a therapy there should not be tips to stop feeling it but to be a safe space to go through it, to allow it to become existential anguish, that is to say, a question about what it is that deep down has us in that state of nervousness that makes us eat, smoke, drink, fall in love, work or anything else, in an obsessive-compulsive way.
In therapy as I have experienced it, as a patient and as a therapist, the compass is transference and countertransference. How the patient feels towards his therapist and vice versa, as a fundamental means to understand the inner world. We therapists identify with parts of the patient or with his or her internal object world.
In the clinical situation, the reconstruction of the patient's story allows to understand his way of loving, hating, feeling dead or empty, as a way for him to develop a broader narrative of himself. The patient tells his story and the therapist retells it in an empathic way. It is a process of dialogue, which also involves all the internalized voices of the patient's world. Another therapeutic objective is to relocate these voices so that they are not confusing. Sometimes we hear our mother's voice in places that do not correspond.
Therapy is not a treatment that can be performed by a technician with minimal training, while following instructions from a manual. Therapy is not a series of steps that apply to everyone. As Malcolm Gladwell put it, mastery in any area is achieved after 10,000 hours of practice.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
More than 150 opinions from 100 columnists await you for less than one book per month.
Comments ()