The End of Therapy
What does the ‘end of therapy’ really look like? Is ‘true healing’ ever possible? How will we know when our clients are ‘better? And, most importantly, can these questions truly be answered?
This article starts very much as a therapy session might. There is a question, a ‘problem’ or a ‘place’ we appear to be ‘stuck’ in. We come from a position of ignorance; we don’t feel we have the answers. We want to understand what ‘healed’ really looks like, but there appears to be a chasm between ourselves and the place we want to get to – the ‘knowing’.
“I just want to feel better”, is something we are told frequently by our clients. There appears to be a disconnect inside them when they say this… a lack of awareness or understanding. A ‘gap’ between who they are now and who they want to be…
It is our privilege as therapists to hold and stay with this apparent split, listening to our client’s story and ideas they have about themselves and others until, like a peeling onion, they come to realise how much unnecessary ‘stuff’ they were holding onto.
Is what was at the core of this ‘onion’ there in our clients from the start? Absolutely! And as therapists we can of course see (or rather ‘intuit’) it. It can feel baffling to hear the ideas and judgements our clients have about themselves when there appears to be no evidence to back these thoughts up but, as we all come to realise through the therapy, it is really the thoughts that are causing the majority of our clients’ problems.
For most of us, our minds are racing at a hundred miles a minute. We have endless ‘to do’ lists, as well as thoughts that have absolutely no practical use or bearing on reality whatsoever. We attempt to go about our daily activities, but are bombarded throughout by thoughts like ‘you’re not doing that right’, ‘shouldn’t you be doing X instead?’ ‘Don’t forget Y!’ No wonder we so often feel stressed and overwhelmed. We are constantly fighting against and attempting to manage something – the voice in our own heads.
A common question in therapy where a client mentions a thought or belief they might have is “whose voice is that?” This is usually asked in response to a judgement, such as ‘I’m stupid’, or ‘my hobbies are a waste of time’. It can take some time before our clients no longer give us a quizzical look and reply “mine, of course!” in response to this. It is a good layer of the onion peeled when they begin to realise this is actually not their voice at all.
It can be an amazing liberation to finally see that who we are is often an entirely different person to the one we were told we were. When we have successfully ‘unpeeled’ all the layers of conditioning and ideas about ourselves, what exactly remains of us?
Discovering the answer to this question can feel quite frightening to the protective part of our psyche. The part of ourselves that has adopted this ‘conditioning’ in order to be compliant and stay safe within the culture and society we are born into.
Jungian analyst Donald Kalsched talks about a ‘self-care system’[1], rather generously misnamed, as of course what he talks about does anything but care for the self in what we might understand the use of the word to be. However the idea is that as a young child, we create a defensive structure around ourselves as a protection against our overwhelming emotions in response to external stressors. These can range from extreme abuse to more mild ‘traumas’ including busy parents who do not always ‘see’ the child, or who may be inadvertently dismissive of their attempts to individuate or be seen by the parent. As a way to keep safe therefore, the child adopts what Winnicott may call a ‘false self’, keeping the ‘true self’ safely hidden, while the rigid, adapted false self, or ‘self-care system’ acts as the person’s interface – an effective way to ‘be’ in the world.
This is a very good system, and appears to be a protector, or ‘circuit-breaker’ against too much external stress, yet unfortunately also acts as a person’s prison as it means their interactions with their environment are never fully authentic. There is always an ‘adapted’ or ‘scripted’ nature to them, and the person is not free to be their true, emotionally expressive self.
While some people seem unaware of this, others (perhaps those with more sensitive or inquiring natures) come to a point where they begin to ‘seek’ in their lives. There is perhaps an intuition that this is not who they really are, and they long to connect again with that spontaneous, free, playful self they have a vague awareness of, as if it was a person they had once known but long since forgotten. The disconnection from our true self can cause extreme suffering, yet what is tragic, is that we don’t know what is causing our pain as often on the surface ‘everything looks fine’. Therefore many people live their lives continuing to believe this is ‘just the way it is’, getting on with things or even ‘giving up’ on returning to this place of creativity, authenticity and freedom. Yet of course this is not always the case, and many of us come to realise something is ‘wrong’, there is a place to ‘return to’ and so present for therapy.
For these people, there is a real willingness to re-connect with themselves. There is a ‘seeking’ in them, a longing to return to their true wholeness, and they see the therapy as a means to help them ‘get there’, and the therapist as the one who can show them how.
It is important that we allow our clients to become ‘dependent’ on us in the initial stages of therapy. Kalsched likens the process to the Grimms’ fairytale of The Woman with No Hands. In this story, a king comes across a handless maiden and, seeing her as whole despite her apparent disfigurement, falls in love with her. He crafts for her a pair of ‘silver hands’, as a therapist might lend a client ‘hope’, and from the union, a child is born – a symbol of the potential in this partnership. In the story, as sometimes happens in therapy, there comes a moment of crisis. The king goes away, and the maiden, with her son, Sorrowful, is exiled into the forest. Here they live alone in misery and poverty, and the king is unable to find her when he returns from his trip. Yet it is from this place of desperate urgency, that the woman begins to grow her own hands – she reclaims her power.
Kalsched talks of how this sometimes happens in therapy when the therapist goes away, or there is a perceived ‘betrayal’ in the eyes of the client, who perhaps realises the union isn’t the ‘happy ever after’ it might seem in fairytales. This is important, as it is the moment the client ‘takes back’ the projected hope in the therapist, realising they are what they have been seeking – they finally see their true selves reflected in the ‘mirror’ the therapist presents, and this is the point they at last see themselves as whole and complete. They got what they came for, although, as in Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, they find that the destination in many ways appears quite the same as the beginning! Although of course it is also not.
The only thing that can really ‘get in the way’ of this process (or at least appear to, as to the therapist at least the client is already whole and complete), is the fear of losing control or letting go of these rigid defences; the ‘false self’ or ‘self-care system’ referenced by Kalsched and Winnicott. This is the point where many clients leave therapy, as they have an intuition that if they continue their entire defensive structure will crumble, and the defensive structure (whose existence is entirely to maintain its survival) resists this in sometimes very clever and subtle ways.
This is the part of the client who wants to ‘go back’. Who wants to live again in the safe familiarity of society, operating from their conditioned mind, accepting the ideas and beliefs about themselves which they have internalised from others throughout their lives. It feels too frightening to journey forward any further. This is entirely the place of the unknown.
And so here we circle back to the beginning and the questions posed at the start of the article. We so often want to ‘know’ the answer to things, and therapy is no exception. We want ‘quick fixes’, or a magic pill, or to be told exactly what is ‘wrong’ with us and how to fix it.
Ironically though, in asking the unknowable questions (without any agenda or pre-conceived ideas), we may arrive at our own conclusions. After all, we have addressed and answered our questions here. We do know what is ‘wrong’ and how to ‘fix it’.
It is often said that ‘knowledge is power’, yet we do not always consider the source from which the knowledge comes. Ideas, beliefs and judgements are all what I would call ‘second-hand knowledge’. These are someone else’s ideas about the world, which are thrust upon us through our education system and in much of our training. This is of course often helpful, and provides a good blueprint for those who are still developing their ability to trust their own authentic knowing.
Yet we need to also know there is a place beyond this ‘second-hand knowing’. This is the space in which we are entirely free and can trust ourselves to ‘know’ by the very virtue that we have ‘no (pre-conceived) idea’. This is when we live in harmony with ‘what is’ (life around us). This is where our mind is quiet and our thoughts arise as helpful prompts, guiding us to follow whatever path is the best one for us. It appears that few people reach this place of total equilibrium, or equanimity, but for me at least it is always the ‘goal’ in therapy. And really, it’s a wonderful goal to have as we come to realise that all we need to do to have it is remove our beliefs that we don’t already.
And so this is what therapy could be said to be. It is the peeling back of the ideas and conditioning, often decades worth, that appear to stand in the way between us and this truth. There does come an end point. We ‘run out’ of thoughts. We accept who we are at our very core and breathe a sigh of relief at how simple and easy it all was in the end. We can forgive our fearful selves, our defensive, rigid, judgmental selves. We only knew what we were told. Yet the real ‘cure’ is in realising that we didn’t need to be told anything about ourselves. We have it within us already. And it is this deep ‘knowing’ that is the true peace we seem to long for until we realise we never really lost it in the first place. This is the ‘feeling better’, the ‘real healing’. The end of therapy.
[1] Sieff-Kalsched-2008-Unlocking-the-Secrets-of-the-Wounded-Psyche-compressed.pdf