Empathy: Looking Out the Patient’s Window.
The therapist’s worldview is in itself isolating. Seasoned therapists view relationships differently, they sometimes lose patience with social ritual and bureaucracy, they cannot abide the fleeting shallow encounters and small talk of many social gatherings.
My work is to love my body, all of it. Whole and entire. The whole aging mortal troublesome failing miraculous intricate breathing doomed cancerous warm mortifying unreliable hard-working imperfect beautiful appalling living struggling tender frightened frightening living dying living breathing temporary wondrous mystifying afflicted mortally-ill assemblage of the atoms of the universe that is my self, is me, for this space of time.
No rose without a thorn. But many a thorn without a rose.
I’m not ready for a committed relationship with anyone and that I have a ton of work to do on myself.
He was persuaded of the reality and significance of human choice; he believed that experiential learning was a far more powerful approach to personal understanding and change than an endeavor resting upon intellectual understanding; he believed that individuals have within themselves an actualizing tendency, an inbuilt proclivity toward growth and fulfillment.
All I can do in one session is to be real, to leap into the patient’s life, to offer observations in the hope that he’ll be able to open doors and explore some new parts of himself in his ongoing therapy.
Should we not create – should we not become – before we reproduce? Our responsibility to life is to create the higher, not to reproduce the lower.
It’s often pretty hard to speak to others about my cancer. I have a number of pet peeves. Many folks are overly solicitous. They can’t do enough for you. There’s that Kaiser nurse who keeps asking “Isn’t there someone who can drive you here?” And some people are too prying. I think they are voyeuristic and attempt to satisfy their morbid curiosity about having cancer. I don’t like that and have sometimes wanted to say, “Go get your own damn fatal illness.
Why does the same book elicit such a range of responses? There must be something in the particular reader that leaps out to embrace the book. His life, his psychology, his image of himself. There must be something lurking deep in the mind – or, as this Freud says, the unconscious – that causes a particular reader to fall in love with a particular writer.
Beginning therapists must learn that there are times to sit in silence, sometimes in silent communion, sometimes simply while waiting for patients’ thoughts to appear in a form that they may be expressed.
Like you, I have often wondered why fears reign at night. After twenty years of such wondering, I now believe that fears are not born of darkness; rather, fears are like the stars – always there, but obscured by the glare of daylight. “And.
There is no human deed or thought that lies fully outside the experience of other people.
It’s not ideas, nor vision, nor tools that truly matter in therapy. If you debrief patients at the end of therapy about the process, what do they remember? Never the ideas – it’s always the relationship.
But you, like me, have good eyes. You looked too far into life. You saw that it was futile to reach wrong goals and futile to set new wrong goals. Multiplications of zero are always zero!” Breuer.
Some said living with cancer had made them wiser, more self-realized, while others had reordered their priorities in life, grown stronger, learned to say no to activities they no longer valued and yes to things that really mattered – such as loving their family and friends, observing the beauty about them, savoring the changing seasons.
Friendship between therapist and patients is a necessary condition in the process of therapy – necessary, but not, however, sufficient. Psychotherapy is not a substitute for life but a dress rehearsal for life, In other words, though psychotherapy requires a close relationship, the relationship is not an end – it is a means to an end.
The sentiment that one “should have done something more” reflects, it seems to me, an underlying wish to control the uncontrollable. After all, if one is guilty about not having done something that one should have done, then it follows that there is something that could have been done – a comforting thought that decoys us from our pathetic helplessness in the face of death.
Just as the bones, flesh, intestines and blood vessels are enclosed in a skin that makes the sight of man endurable, so the agitations and passions of the soul are enveloped in vanity; it is the skin of the soul.
He is civilized, polite, a man of manners. He has tamed his wild nature, turned his wolf into a spaniel. And he calls this moderation. Its real name is mediocrity!