In the client's chair – Being seen

"First session back after the break: I sat down feeling tense, but too self-conscious to stretch. Whilst I tried to un-knit my muscles through willpower alone, I looked at my therapist’s hands."

In the client's chair - Left behind

"I’m writing this at the beginning of a break from therapy, because my therapist has abandoned me. Or gone on holiday, depending on how you look at it. I miss him."

In the client's chair - The therapy maze

"I approached finding a therapist the way I approach most decisions in life - with a rational analysis of the options. Or at least I tried."

In the client’s chair - Walking alone

"On Tuesday my friend Rachel sent me a text; she was in need of urgent advice. She had had three sessions of therapy following an initial assessment. She had left the last session early, convinced that the therapist was not for her."

In the client's chair – Change is happening

"My therapist reminds me that we are nearing the end of our sessions of CAT (cognitive analytical therapy). I don’t remember there having been any discussion about the precise number of meetings we were to have, but I am happy to bring matters to a conclusion."

In the client's chair – A possible connection

"Some while back I dreamt about talking to my therapist on the phone on the way to a session and being told that if I extended my time with him like that, his head might catch fire. I made myself tell him about it, although I felt silly and childish doing so."

Learning zone

Dilemmas

This month's dilemma: Cameron gets on well with his therapist. They have developed a quasi-supervisory relationship during his counselling training and now he thinks she might be an ideal supervisor

Student column

We’ve always been told throughout the counselling course that the journey each of us will follow during training will change us

Counselling and Psychotherapy Research (CPR)

is a peer reviewed, quarterly international journal. Visit http://www.cprjournal.com/ to read abstracts, receive regular e-bulletins and access the research glossary

In the client’s chair - Writing about therapy
by

Orla Murray

Obviously we needed to talk about me writing this column. I was really nervous about discussing it – heart-racingly nervous. I’m often anxious in therapy, but not full-on, fight-or-flight scared.

I could see that writing this might make an already complicated process more difficult. I was also worried that he would think I’d be no good at it. I can’t quite get rid of the feeling that I’m expected to perform in therapy. I can’t stop trying to figure out what I’m meant to be saying. On an intellectual level I understand that’s not what I’m there for, which makes me self-conscious about being unable to stop trying to get it right. If I had to watch my stumbling attempts at therapy, I would doubt it was possible to write anything interesting about them. How much can you write about tormented silences?

Sometimes I make lists of things I want to talk about there. Initially I stopped myself doing this because I suspected I wasn’t meant to arrive with an agenda. Even once I started making lists, I would memorise them in the waiting room rather than produce them in the session. Despite this column being top of the list, I found several things to talk about before I finally mentioned that I wanted to write it.

I said I didn’t want the column to become another way of talking to him. Whatever I write here is a communication of sorts, even if it’s only presenting myself in a particular light. He agreed we’d need to find a way to prevent it from happening in parallel and said that he thought we could find a way to accommodate it. I felt really grateful that he was trying to find a way to help me, as though he had understood this was important to me.

There were two possible sessions where I could have read my first column to him before he went away on holiday. As I got up to walk into the first of these sessions I started feeling sick, as though I was about to be interviewed. I didn’t connect this with the column as I hadn’t planned specifically to read it that day. The sick feeling remained and a few minutes before the end I realised that all I could think about was not having read it and having to worry about it for another week. On the way home, each time I imagined reading it, I panicked.

The following week he suggested that perhaps I could talk about it rather than read it. But I felt as if I needed to read it the way it was written, because that was how he’d read it, if he was going to read it at all. I wasn’t worried that he’d object to the content, nor was I concerned about having to talk about it. I was just terrified he would think it was no good. I knew he wouldn’t praise it or criticise it and that I would have no idea what he thought, but that didn’t stop it being terrifying.

I said I wanted to make sure I stayed present while I read it. I knew that I’d probably disconnect from my feelings and just get on with reading, since that’s how I cope with being scared of doing things at work. Part way through, he stopped me, to remind me that he was still there. At the end, I thanked him for doing that. It helped. He said it seemed important to check that I hadn’t got lost and that I knew he was still there, listening, attending, as he was now. Hearing him say that made me feel connected again, and made me realise how much of the time I don’t really trust that he’s there and paying attention – the idea seemed new.

We talked about how writing the column might impact therapy – whether publishing it would undermine the freedom for movement, for revising my story and understanding it differently. I don’t think it will. I write to think, so many of my stories are scrawled in notebooks, or captured in emails. I know that what is true as I write it down can be changed by the process of writing it, or sharing it, and that the ‘truth’ expands over time to include more possibilities.

I’m more worried that it will make it harder to participate fully in therapy. When I started writing lists, I also started to write about my sessions for myself. These notes became the place where I worked things out. I wonder if this reinforced my tendency to try and find all the answers myself and made me even less able to initiate or respond spontaneously in the sessions. Perhaps it blocked the possibility of creating a new understanding together, and with it the feeling of being connected?

I’m trying to stop working everything out by myself. I hope that writing this will prove to be a prompt rather than a problem. That sharing something in a way that feels exposing to me will help me keep taking the risk to trust him.
Orla Murray is a pseudonym.