It is so complicated, you don’t understand…

The contents of this blog are my opinions and are not the opinions of any current or former colleagues. This is not to be construed as mental health or medical advice and does not constitute a relationship with a professional therapist.

I had a thought a few weeks ago, right around the turn to the new year. It felt like a flash of insight. I learned something about a past therapeutic relationship and began to apply it to the present.

I recalled a client I worked with a few years back. They are not the only client I’ve had who has said or suggested this to me, but our interactions formed in my mind during my flash of insight. They often insisted to me that their external stressors were far too complicated for me to understand.

“It is so complicated, you don’t understand.”

I saw them years ago, and felt I finally understood what they were trying to tell me.

“It [external stressors] is so complicated, you don’t understand” was their way of saying to me “it [my inner experience] is so complicated, you [I] don’t understand [and you don’t, can’t or refuse to, either.]” The client was expressing to me a lack of understanding into their chaotic inner world, or even a path or point of entry in beginning to understand or explore that world.

“I am so complicated, I don’t understand.”

Carl Rogers, the inventor of client-centered therapy, wrote that this understanding is the essential component to change in therapeutic settings:

For constructive personality change to occur, it is necessary that these conditions exist and continue over a period of time:
1. Two persons are in psychological contact.
2. The first, whom we shall term the client, is in a state of incongruence, being vulnerable or anxious.
3. The second person, whom we shall term the therapist, is congruent or integrated in the relationship.
4. The therapist experiences unconditional positive regard for the client.
5. The therapist experiences an empathic understanding of the client's internal frame of reference and endeavors to communicate this experience to the client.
6. The communication to the client of the therapist's empathic understanding and unconditional positive regard is to a minimal degree achieved.

I had another thought around the same time. This may come as a shock to you, but sometimes therapists feel irritated, scared, or helpless when sitting with clients who won’t, are unable to (can’t), or are unsure how to “do the work.” Sometimes therapists stay with clients in that space for some time. I have noticed parts of myself who have reactions to being in that space (my counter transference to the situation.) I might notice having thoughts (or parts of myself) that say, “if only they did the work, things would be so much better for them.” I have begun to sense this is a version of my ‘shadow.’ (I have been meaning to write a blog post about Robert Bly’s book A Little Book on the Human Shadow for some time, but I have not gotten around to it yet.) My clients can be a mirror of things within my inner world I am not attending to, or things that need attending to. At the beginning of the year this was around my habit of tsundoku (book piling); it could be anything within me that does not feel attended to. “If only I attended to this thing within me and did the ‘work’, things might be different for me.”

A question I will benefit from asking myself in the new year is, “what is this person here to teach me about myself, and what am I here to help them understand about themselves?”