«The problem is the problem. The person is not the problem». Steve de Shazer
Psychotherapy is complex and hard to define in a few words. Courageous is the one who embarks in the honest and deep experience of self-discovery. Psychotherapy can be both powerful and challenging but mostly promotes a better type of relationship with the one we care about. Psychotherapy is a luxury, out of the daily stress, the choice of building and allowing oneself the time for reflexive practices deepen and encourage a higher quality of experiences for life.
The largest predictor of success in psychotherapy is the therapeutic alliance, which requests the utmost active and full participation, presence and honesty in the participation of therapy.
Psychotherapy welcomes couples, individuals, groups, families allowing them to face and overcome life-s trauma, to develop different life-s narratives less saturated in problem and develop coping mechanisms and effective coping strategies.
In order to be effective, psychotherapy does not need necessarily to be long, nor painful, the over whole experience should be experienced as a healing path, promoting peace of mind and strengths throughout.
There should be as many therapies as patient. This means that each therapy should match adjust individual needs and should be tailored to respond to the very specific needs of each person.
Each client, prior to entering my office have tried so many different ways of solving their problems. This takes an enormous amount of courage to pick up the phone and consult for the first time. One of the very effects of problems is to make people blind to the vastness of their skills and resources. Momentarily, some people in pain can only see the darkness, the obstacles.
Change is part of life. It is constant and inevitable. Psychotherapy’s functionality is to encourage and initiate change so that the clients may obtain a more functional equilibrium. Often a very sudden change is needed to produce tremendous effect in many aspects of a person’s life.
A story about psychotherapy for you:
Therapy resembles this… One day you decided you could not handle it anymore. Fed up by this awful dust and dirt around your house that these people had made, long before you moved in. You decide to handle the situation your way, because you are brave and courageous. You take all your cleaning material and work so hard on tyding up, dusting the dirt, uncluttering, sponging off, purifying the entire house. Did I mention how much you dislike cleaning? Anyhow, from morning through the night you work as a titan so hard that this work almost seems to have emptied you of your very core, of your very substance.
Hurray! You did it, Exhausted and satisfied. You stuffed most of the dust under the carpet before falling exhausted on the couch. Enjoying the huge work you just accomplished. One week after , as you are already getting used to the delightful and clean new environment the wind is blowing so hard and you start sneezing, sneezing harder and harder. It does not matter, you will not let a sneeze disturb your good life. Unfortunately the area you live in is so windy and the wind just keeps blowing again and again, each time harder and each time the sneezing becomes more disturbing more acute. Leaving you less and less of a chance to ignore what seems to become a real allergy.
Therapy resembles that story you see. In some ways you are facing this gigantic task of cleaning this house, your inner house, you do it alone and you can do it with an astute professionnal. You can do it more efficiently, mostly less painfully. Of course you would be able to keep living like that with the sneezes, it never killed anyone before. That is right. That is your choice. Think twice the choice also could be to get the help you need to place the dirt that doesn’t belong to you in the garbage once and for all, so that you may start living fully. That seems like a good option as well.
Kind regards, Fabienne Kuenzli