Space for Reflection

So the relationship between therapist and client is one that has been likened to a relationship between a violin player and a violin teacher. The client already knows how to live they have been doing it for many years but they want to improve on it.

The therapist has to enter the world of the client, I'm not sure there is a word for this but if you take a run up at empathy and go way past that you're in the right neck of the woods. So putting aside ones own world you have to look at someone else's and understand their values and their ways of being, and then you have to play these back to them for reflection and to see if there are better ways of achieving their core values.

There must be a knack to this fresh look at life. I had it just recently on Xmas holidays I drove to my sisters in Wales, which for some reason felt out of my life, maybe it was the holiday, maybe it was the drive to somewhere I don't usually go, but I had an epiphany and I had a fresh look at my life and a few ideas which were bubbling around joined and they focused and I had a new plan for myself.

To me there seems a difficulty in what Heidegger called everydayness. This is where you get sucked into life and have no perspective on life, no existential relationship to it. So I know how strong this is in my own life, where you go to work, read your paper on the train, have lunch, return home, eat your supper, phone a friend, go out, stay in, watch TV. There is a sense of not thinking, about going along on a treadmill that you have created for yourself.

Freud apparently to free up peoples thinking after free association used to tap, or even hit them on their forehead.

There needs to be something in this that therapy provides such that you can think freshly and with new perspective about your life. My best idea is scary and tactically used glove puppets, if anyone has better ideas let me know, I want to recreate for people the feeling of a random car journey, or of having a bath in a hotel you didn't expect to stay in and the concomitant(ooh get you and your dictionary) fresh thinking that ensues.

I've got to say I haven't experienced this in my therapy although there has been a gradual sense of growing perspective.

References
Again and for the next couple of weeks Emmy van Deurzen, Existential Counselling & Psychotherapy in Practice