101 stories from the therapy room

(A non-clinical approach to psychotherapy and counselling)

“The Second Key” 

The role of a therapist in a therapy room is unique to each client. It is not quite rare for a therapist to make a significant intervention in one sitting, but it is rare that a therapist is able to make two interventions in the same session. In the earlier article, I wrote about how attuning to the internal state of the client helped him regulate and feel at ease with himself. 

In this article we will pick up right where we left off – and I worked with the client to resolve some more of his inner contradictions. This led to the discovery of a second key that helped the client unlock his ability to discover parts of himself that were hidden.

I brought to the client’s notice how I sensed the following contradictions:

• Highly critical of himself of how he is now but wants to have a natural flow
• Believes that what he wants will come naturally to him but is finding it difficult to manage the frustration of waiting.
• Believes that his personal goals are mundane to work on, but social goals are glorifying.

Listening to these contradictions that I had observed, the client said, “I was fulfilling the responsibility in front of me and hoping that one day I will get to the space to focus on social transformation. I have been waiting for a long time and now I am over 40 years old.  I am frustrated and losing hope that I can achieve those social transformational goals.”

I felt like the client was struggling with the wait. An intuition to unravel another key sparked and I grabbed on to it. “Waiting?”, I asked him.

This question opened a deeper reflection – that his eye was always on future goals. And then he said “I also have the fear of not being able to match the expectations  of the organisation I work for. I feel I don’t have much social skills and I may not have the competence required to take up new roles. To avoid facing the lack of competency, I am always focusing on future possibilities.”

This insight reflects the client’s self-criticism, “you are not adequate” and this makes it difficult for him to be open about his lack of competence, to learn, to make mistakes, get feedback and gain the required competence.

While the client has gained this insight, I realised that it was a big shift from the grandiosity of changing the world to being in contact with the reality of giving attention to himself.

Once we had crossed this obstacle, I had another dimension for the client to become aware of – his tendency to judge the regular work as mundane (inferior) compared to the social impact he wants to make as a superior. This is not congruent to the client’s claim that he has methods to help the world live with contradictions and not get polarised. 

The next exploration we had was to understand if this inner judge was helping the client. How will the client let go of the judgement that “regular work is mundane and social impact goals are superior.”?

Learning to be competent in his day-to-day responsibility and to be of service to the society are not two different goals, but polarities. If the client only focuses on self, then he loses the need to belong and if he focuses on social aspects then the self gets neglected. We worked out a plan on how he could give attention to both and be out of the “either-or” struggle.  We focused on how the client will take small steps to satisfy both needs simultaneously and gain serenity.   

The key pickup which supported the client to explore, gain insight and to get direction was lifting the word, “waiting” from the narrative of the client. Then rest fell in place.

To search for keys which only the client has is challenging and an inspiring task for the therapist.