We can boast that since 2005 we have been offering our students support in solving various important problems that prevent them from performing at their best in the educational process. Over time, we have noticed several attitudes towards what therapeutic counselling/psychotherapy is thought to be, towards what they or others think is happening in the psychotherapy office, and we hope that through the following lines we can clear away some of the fog that shrouds this intimate, personal process.
If at first our students approached us out of curiosity about the novelty of the idea, little by little, precisely because of what we mentioned above, we found several attitudes that interfered with our work.
There is a myth that psychotherapy or therapeutic counselling is aimed at people with psychiatric symptoms, and although psychotherapy is gaining ground, the fear of those who seek it that they will be considered "crazy" by those who find out remains unshakeable. On the other hand, there is also the weight of accepting the fact that you are at a dead end and need 'specialist' help to deal with a common life problem that others easily overcome, that you are not used to asking for help with, that you don't fully understand or that others don't think you need help with. We often tell those we interact with in practice that it takes more strength to admit you have a problem than to run away from it. So we only work with strong people.
Another common myth is that psychotherapists have extraordinary qualities, similar to spies in the movies, to control people's minds and make them do certain actions. If we add to this passages from the CVs of our psychotherapists in which hypnosis courses are presented, we manage to put the most fearful among you on the run. As delightful as it may seem at first glance and no matter how hard we try, we find it hard to believe that we can pull it off, because psychotherapy/therapeutic counselling is all about giving the client the support they need to find their own way out of the labyrinth of their problem, through a relationship based on trust, non-evaluative attitude and the competence of the psychotherapist to give the client access to resources they have forgotten they have or don't know how to use, rather than finding out the client's deepest secrets or manipulating the client's thoughts/"brainwashing" those we are dealing with. Admittedly, we tried this in play when we were students, but gave up later because it didn't work for us and we found it hard to keep accumulating failures as we realized it was affecting our self-image.
Equally prevalent is the myth that the problem has no solution. That it is so hard and so deep-rooted that no matter who the therapist is and what the psychotherapy consists of, there is no cure, so what's the point of trying? If that were the case, then nothing in the realm of evolution would exist. Man's soul and resources are infinite, and his possibility of recovering from seemingly impossible situations is limitless. It is the mind that creates the reality in which we find ourselves. And if it created the negative, it can also create the positive. To prove this to yourself, just think of situations where you have had blind faith in something, insane courage and a fantastic "stubbornness" to succeed, and the results have lived up to your aspirations.
There are many more things to write about psychotherapy, but since we have said that it is an intimate process, where the relationship and the way it develops are the most important, we prefer to save them for the moments when we meet in order not to chase away the "magic".
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