60- Tales from Therapy-2

            “All I want is for you to do is to help my son!” She must have said it three or four times, angrily insisting that she was fine and that she did not want to change anything about her.  No, Mrs. Olsen had brought her Jimmy in for help and she might as well have stuck her fingers in her ears and sung the Lalalalala song whenever I suggested that it was not a good idea to refer to her husband as “the Jerk” or her husband’s girlfriend as “The Bitch” when she spoke of them to Jimmy.

            I had met with Dad and, to my surprise, he was a reasonable guy, relatively happy and well adjusted, if a little sheepish about falling in love with a fellow choir member while he still had his original family (yes reasonable guys make BIG mistakes and I trust Karma to take care of all that in due time). There are two sides to every story and, often, I do not like or agree with either side.

            But this time it was plain that Mom’s negative remarks about Dad and Dad’s refusal to communicate with Mom were putting Jimmy squarely in the middle of their drama and the stress was more than he could bear. He was afraid to love his father and unable to assuage his mother’s pain and so he walked around for days on end, ready to explode and convinced that no one on earth could understand his pain.

            After that first session I suspected that the only way to ease Jimmy’s suffering was to somehow convince Mom to ease up and to hurry and get over the loss of her marriage, and therefore the theft of, in her interpretation, her identity and her life. And to convince Dad to talk to her and take whatever abuse he had coming.

            But I was forgetting one of the rules in counseling: find out what the client wants help with and ONLY help with that problem. It is very common for therapists to encounter a person, recognize a serious problem and work hard to resolve it, only to find the person working against you at every turn. The wife who complains bitterly about her husbands drinking does not necessarily WANT help getting him to stop, even if she is ASKING for help getting him to stop. She might want help summoning the courage to leave him, or want help to be able to protect her kids from him. Or just be looking for someone to whom she can complain because her family and friends have all had it up to HERE with her complaints without a willingness to take action. And as long as she can blame him, she doesn’t have to look at her own issues, or work hard to change.

I have to ask a person what they want help with and then listen carefully to the answer. A great therapist ,Donald Miechenbaum, once told me that the client would tell you all you need to know to help them, within the first five minutes of the first session. But you have to hear what they say. And what they don’t say. I ask at the start of every session what the problem the person wants help with that day because, who knows, maybe to original problem has been solved (problems do resolve themselves spontaneously sometimes!). Perhaps a new issue has developed over the week, or maybe they just don’t feel up to working on anything that day, but still had the appointment and so they just showed up! I ask or I else won’t know.

So when Mrs. Olsen refused to look at herself or her own role in hurting her son, I spent no more clinical time on it, granting her the time and space she needed. We were only at session four, after all. I could wait.

Jimmy and I talked a while, me asking facilitative questions (Dr. Walters taught us that in graduate school—a good Facilitative Response merely summarizes thoughts and feelings in the person’s previous statement. It is hard to pull off convincingly, conversationally, but it’s amazing how well it works to open the other person up. Even when I TELL a person what I am going to do, so that they can learn to do it for themselves, and suggest they resist the urge to respond with feelings, they still respond with feelings, it is almost irresistible!) and him responding on queue--- “So when your Mom is stressed out and takes it out on you, you get mad but feel helpless, too?” “Yeah, and then she punishes me and that makes me even more mad!”

Jimmy complained about summer school, about how weird Dad’s girlfriend’s kids were, talked about how nice Dad’s girlfriend was (“but I could never tell Mom that”), about how much he missed his dad at home and how MAD he was at him for leaving (“but I could never tell Dad that”). He went on and on.

We talked about everything, and nothing. We laughed some and sat in silent thought. We got tears in our eyes when he told me he spent the first six or seven sleepless nights after his Dad left, staring out his bedroom window, up the darkened street, wishing and willing his father’s car to round the curve and pull back into his life.

And when the hour was nearly up and I asked my standard ending question. “Was anything particularly helpful about today’s session and was there anything that was not so helpful?” I have learned a great deal about therapy, and about people, from the responses I get to that question. And just asking sends the message that therapy is important and that the client is respected.

How did Jimmy answer my question?

 “ It sure does feel better having someone to talk to about all this”

Therapy isn’t always about solving problems or some great puzzle to be solved. Sometimes it’s just about sharing your time and yourself and your spirit with another human being for a little while.

Dave Seward