Therapeutic Relationship and Past Issues - Essay Example

In what ways do you consider that our past affects our current situation and how would you assist a client in identifying the connection between their past? 1. Introduction “The relationship between the present and the past is a fascinating one” (Jacobs 2006, p.28). The importance of past experience applies as much to the earliest weeks and months of infancy as to any later time in a person’s development. The relationship of mother and baby though is in no way infantilizes the client but support the sensitivity of the therapist instead. This is because the way people make or break other relationship frequently has parallels to the way in which early relationship having been experienced. As adults, people tend to have many frames of reference since we have memories to support our knowledge to be able to recall the past like remembering the warmth and joy of summer when it is winter and believing that it will return a year after. In the same way, some excruciating feelings can be so intense that it is not achievable to imagine that good feelings will come back (Jacobs 2006, p.51). 2. Therapeutic Relationship and the Exploration of Past Issues An extended and better expressed grasp of the unconscious significance of one’s life experience, an appreciation of the effect of intra-psychic divergence, and an enhanced understanding for the ways in which we unsuspectingly replicate our histories and find our parents and significant others in present relationships frequently contributes to psychological freedom. Consequently, this will result to a more established and valuable sense of identity and self-esteem, and to a reduction of anxiety, dejection, and other indicators. This development and exploration of unconscious meaning and representation is achieved in distinctive psychodynamic ways through a comprehensive inquiry into past and present relationships, fantasies, dreams, behavior, and feelings, and through the systematic buildup of hypotheses and conclusions about the links between past and present, intra-psychic and interpersonal, aspiration and fear that ultimately leads to elucidation and understanding. Past insight and inter-actional insight function in a reciprocally influential way. Knowledge of the role of the past in determining the present help the client achieve greater comprehension of her or his present interactions and the ways in which these relationship keep the past alive (Feindler 2006, p.283). The disparities among this type of therapy and traditional psychoanalytic psychotherapy come out most appreciably when exploration and insight do not realize their desired ends, in that an exploratory, interpretative method does not reach or influence particular conflicts, meanings or other psychodynamic issues. Clients frequently must learn fresh skills or to leave behind maladaptive ways of coping in order to change unconscious meanings and processes. These intra-psychic variables can have massive staying power in the face of interpretation and insight. Introduction to a feared situation, experience, or emotion can lead to the discovery of new meanings, memories, and conflicts, which neither the client nor the therapist had learned about through standard psychodynamic technique (Feindler 2006, p.283). A second essential change process is the new, ameliorative experience provided by the ‘therapeutic relationships’. This is essential and at times adequate source of change at all three stage of experience. A secure, encouraging, and mutative interpersonal experience with the therapist let client to face the challenges of psychodynamic exploration, as well as to make use of active cognitive, behavioral, interpersonal, and emotional interventions. The therapeutic relationship is understood to be exceptional interpersonal circumstances in which the client’s inner representational world, psychodynamic conflicts, cognitive processes, character traits, interpersonal style, and variety of emotional experiences are demonstrated and are observed and experienced in vivo by the therapist (Feindler 2006, p.283). With each kind of psychotherapy according to Sperling et. al. (2004), there is an inherent conformity that the therapeutic relationship is a significant factor of the therapeutic process. In normal situations like mourning for instance, the bereaved anxiety is reduced, his moral fortified, his evaluations made less harsh, and the actions required to meet a new situation chosen and planned more sensibly when there is a friend with whom he can re-experience anguish and acknowledge loss. Correspondingly, the therapist becomes a companion with whom a person can share the same experience (p.322). Although the heart of psychotherapy is that it establishes the therapist as caring figure, this should not conceal the truth that the person’s active use of this secure base is essential to achieve change, that, change needs exploration as well as attachment. Sperling et. al. (2004) referring to the work of Bowlby (1988) explains that dependence upon the therapist as protective figure establishes a secure base from which he can explore a range of unhappy and excruciating phase of his life, past and present. Many of which he finds it complicated or maybe impracticable to think about and reconsider without a trusted companion to provide support, encouragement, sympathy, and on occasion, guidance (p.322). Therapeutic relationship has formed the basis of various approaches to psychotherapy with adults and children. In an early work by Alexander and French (1946) as noted by Pearce and Pezzot (2006), describe this affectionate, positive relationship with the therapist as a curative emotional experience that instills optimism of something better in the client (p.182). They also added that therapist compassion, agreement, and collaboration around goals, and the quality of the therapeutic alliance correlate with therapy outcome. The personal attributes of the therapist such as flexibility, sincerity, trustworthiness, confidence, kindness, and being interested and open, enhance this alliance. However, personal qualities are not the only factors to strengthen this alliance since exploration, reflection, identifying past therapy, achievement, precise interpretations, facilitating the expression of affects, and attending to the patient’s experience are also essential (p.183). The therapeutic relationship is seen as the very heart of the therapeutic process and without a bifocal vision, one, which sees both the light and the shadow in the client, the efficiency of the work, will be greatly reduced. Devoid of genuine human relating, trust will not be established between the therapist and the client, and without this indispensable element, little growth is possible. Moreover, a primary strategy is to distinguish the clients as having a spiritual identity, as well as an individuality, which is struggling to address its problems (Feltham and Horton 2006, p.309). Feedback, going both ways, can also be a way of strengthening the therapeutic relationship, especially be helping issues to surface as early as possible. Therapist need to remember that there are two parties to any contract thus they have rights and responsibilities. They should not confuse eliciting feedback with attempting to find ways of ‘pleasing the client’ since it is somewhat inconvenient fact that many of the best learning experiences are not comfortable ones. This is because a therapist who becomes inordinately concerned to prevent discomfort getting on the agenda will not get far in achieving lasting change. Even though it is uncomfortable, exploration of past experience continues and eventually revealed some useful material (Sills 2006). 3. Clients’ Consciousness of the Past and Its Effect on their Presenting Issue By learning to pay less attention to negative environmental cues and by focusing less on the past or the future, Nocross and Goldfried (2005) argues that clients learn to be fully immersed in the present reality to process environmental information as needed and to be positive that they will be able to deal with smaller or bigger challenges to come. Certainly, they added, the ultimate goal in therapy is to move from erroneous expectations about the future, to comparatively more precise expectations, and finally to no expectations at all (p.250). Fundamentally, most therapist attempt to help clients to live in the present and to focus on their immediate experience with others rather than paying attention to the past and future. Thus, clients learn to focus on what they currently want from others, as well as on what others want from them. The task of therapist is to get a sense of the client’s interpersonal history. Open-ended questions about relationships with the past and current significant others are aimed at providing the therapist with a general understanding of client’s perceptions of their interpersonal needs and fears, as well as their typical attempts to deal with them (p.251). Mindy, an intelligent and cheerful girl was living with foster parent after being removed from the custody of her mother at the age of 12m following grave sexual abuse and disorganized way of life. The first few months of her therapy, she exhibited traumatic experience through dramatic and excruciating recollection of experiences in the past. She seldom include her therapist in her activities thus there is not much therapeutic relationship. One day her therapy had to be cancelled because of therapist’s sickness, Mindy was enraged when she heard the therapist spoke to her foster mother on the telephone claiming that she heard voices of children in the background. This is actually the first real feeling she had shown in months. Mindy felt left out and frightened that the therapist was looking after her other children. In addition, she felt that she somehow had caused her therapist to become ill. This incident stimulated Mindy’s strong feeling of rejection and loss that originated in her relationship with her mother. According to Winston and Winston (2002), the above incident indicates transference exploration in the here and now of the patient-therapist relationship. It is therefore preferable to explore fully the transference reactions in the therapeutic relationship before turning to their origins in the past. They also explained that even Freud (1912/1958) indicated that although transference derives from application of a past relationship to a current one, the term refers to the present, to the current relationship between patient and therapist. The here and now of the transference relationship generally is compelling, immediate, and emotionally charged, enabling the patient to have give-and-take experience with the therapist. Thus, turning to the origins of the transference before exploring current manifestation of transference reactions may promote intellectual process that is less therapeutic (p.60). The past must be thoroughly addressed in terms of liberating the client from their childhood and historical conditioning, which continue to inhibit self-acceptance and self-expression. The early-learned behavior patterns, which are distorted and dysfunctional, must become conscious in order for the client to be liberated from their destructive impact, and creates consciously new and more congruent ways of being and doing. These are ways, which contain more of the client’s unique qualities and capacities (Feltham and Horton 2006, p.309). 4. Client’s Overall Sense of Self in Relationship to their Past Mindy had a need to keep her therapy and her external life separate. Mindy perceived here therapy as somewhere where she dealt with painful issues from the past, including her abuse. Linked with abuse were feelings of disgust, contaminations, guilt, anger, and extreme badness. Mindy felt she had to protect her external life, where she was coping reasonably well, from the impact of her past. This leads here to react with extreme distress to any attempt by anyone to make links between the two. Seemingly, benign questions from her foster mother about how she got on today in therapy would cause Mindy to tell her to shut up or no longer interested with the therapy. At that stage, she needed to keep her experiences separate, to do otherwise felt life threatening. 5. Diagnosis of the Link Between the Past and the Presenting Issue The act of returning, remembering, and reliving one’s origins is to fulfill a person’s ontological need for restoring and recreating the self. They reflected on the relationship of their present life to their past and future, looking for causes and themes, ordering their life story into a narrative that conveyed important truths about themselves and established a sense of self-continuity across time. The very act of reflecting on their past, present, and future served as a form of self-mirroring that strengthened their identity. The return to the past involves the need to recapture something that was lost and to idealize their child self-representations (Suler 1993). The aim of the therapy would be for Mindy gradually, over time, to begin to integrate these experiences in a safe setting. She needed to grasp emotionally that, although what had happened to her was bad, it did not make her a bad person, and that the abuse was but one of many experiences that made her the person she was. 6. The Treatment and Resolution of the Issues from the client’s past Jungian psychotherapy is really about therapeutic relationship and it is not about dreams or archetypes. It works in the context of a personal emotional interchange and it is not only for the patient but also for the therapist. The therapist is unavoidably involved in an inter-subjective process and changed in a two-person interchange. It is about specifically therapeutic kind of emotional experience, at unconscious as well as conscious levels, that takes place between a therapist and patient. The psychotherapeutic relationship is incorporating the transference relationships of the past and new, unfolding the relationship in the present. Therapeutic relationship evolves from collaborative working on or working through of the past relationships, yet this repair of the past is also founded upon the connection in the present (Sedgwick 2001, p.2). In Mindy’s case, what she sees or imagines about the therapist may have substantial legitimacy to it and therefore personalizes the therapeutic relationship. Thus, this particular mix of personalities becomes more significant than technique as the relationship is more individualized. We can easily notice the transference in Mindy’s behavior when she demonstrated her specific feeling about the therapist. This feeling is therefore may be founded on something else in the past since current feelings may be influenced by past ones. Work Cited List Feindler Eva L., 2006, Anger-Related Disorders: A Practitioner's Guide to Comparative, Published 2006 Springer Publishing Company, ISBN: 0826140467 Feltham Colin and Horton Ian, 2006, The SAGE Handbook of Counseling and Psychotherapy, Published by SAGE, ISBN: 1412902746 Jacobs Michael, 2006, The Presenting Past: The Core of Psychodynamic Counseling and Therapy, Published by McGraw-Hill International, ISBN: 0335217664 Norcross John and Goldfried Marvin, 2005, Handbook of Psychotherapy Integration, Published by Oxford University Press US, ISBN: 0195165799 Sedgwick David, 2001, Introduction to Jungian Psychotherapy: The Therapeutic Relationship, Published by Psychology Press, ISBN: 0415183405 Sills Charlotte, 2006, Contracts in Counseling and Psychotherapy, Published by Pine Forge Press, ISBN: 1412920655 Sperling Michael B., Berman William H., and Weiss Robert S., 1994, Attachment in Adults: Clinical and Developmental Perspectives, Published by Guilford Press, ISBN: 0898625475 Suler John R., 1993, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Eastern Thought, Published by SUNY Press, ISBN: 0791415775 Winston Arnold and Winston Beverly, 2002, Handbook of Integrated Short-term Psychotherapy, Published by American Psychiatric Pub, Inc., ISBN: 088048814X Read More