101 stories from the therapy room

(A non-clinical approach to psychotherapy and counselling)

The client I was working with was finding it hard to get out of a relationship, but it was also difficult to stay in it. We agreed to explore the client’s struggle of being stuck. While explaining her difficulties in relationships, romantic or otherwise, she said an interesting  sentence, “I am  everything for others and to them, I am nothing”. I wondered about the sentence and decided to work on it with the client. The sentence was charged with so much underlying meaning.

There were two parts to the sentence and as a therapist, I had the choice to start working on either the first half, “I am everything for others”  or the second half, “I am nothing to others.”

“I am nothing to others” was a weakening sentence while “I am everything for the others” had a lot of energy. So, I initially thought of working with, “I am everything” since there is a feeling of grandiosity attached to it. However, after a while I thought instead of challenging this perspective, I would go in another direction. I told her that I would make some changes in her sentences and she was to repeat them and we could build on that going forward. She agreed to this exercise. I reframed her sentence to “I am something to others.” She said the sentence out loud and sat in silence and thought about it for a while and then said “Of course, I certainly mean something to my mother, to a cousin of mine and to some close friends.” She said they paid attention to her and cared for her. She was able to say that she was not “nothing” to others. 

I did not challenge her grandiosity but instead chose to reframe the other part of her sentence into something more realistic. This approach helped her revisit her belief and clarify it for herself. “I am not nothing to others – I do mean something” gave the client a middle ground between the grandiosity of “everything” and insignificance of “nothing”.

The healing process in the therapy room is like peeling an onion – when one layer is peeled, you come in contact with the next layer. Once she was able to accept that she meant something to others, it gave her a base to break through from being stuck.

The belief of “I am nothing” also drew attention to the grief and despair the client feels in relationships that have failed in the past. At that moment, in my head, I heard what my therapist Beulah once said to me, “Heal the grief not as a victim but from the strength.”

Initially, I chose not to work with the belief, “I am nothing” but once the client was able to account that this was not true, it paved a way for her to connect with grief while also acknowledging that she had people to support her and who value her.