I was fascinated by a discussion on a recent Future Thinkers podcast between author/healer Cris Beasley and co-host Euvie Ivanova about unconventional approaches to therapy. Cris and Euvie discussed the benefits of short bursts of therapy as opposed to the months and months (and sometimes years and years) of therapy advocated by many clinical psychologists across a range of therapeutic disciplines.
Cris talked about the benefits of deep, intense therapy sessions followed by months or years of putting the insights gained into practice before returning to do more therapeutic work. Euvie talked about the problems inherent in a healing system that creates dependency between therapist and patient rather than giving the patient sovereignty over their body and mind.
I found myself nodding along vigorously as I listened. I’ve been to therapy twice: once for around four months to deal with a creative block and once for six months to confront past traumas. Each time I ended the course of sessions prematurely and against the advice of my therapist. When I wanted to end the first course of therapy my therapist persuaded me to ‘ease out’ of the experience with three or four closing sessions (which I never saw the point of). After the second course, my therapist counselled me very strongly against ending the sessions abruptly, and unusually for me I ignored her advice and just quit by email without even attending one session to say goodbye. Immediately after doing this I felt a great weight lift from me and have not regretted the decision once.
In spite of this, I respect both of my therapists hugely – both were a tremendous help to me, and both very quickly enabled me to achieve the results I had been seeking to achieve through therapy. But I knew very clearly when it was time for me to end each course. I knew I needed time to reflect and absorb everything I’d learned, and that things would be ok (better, even) if I just stopped. I was confident I could return to therapy later if there was more I needed to do. But this is not how therapy works, and it takes a lot of strength to go against the advice of the expert counsellor you’ve made yourself so vulnerable to. It takes a lot of strength to recognise that sometimes you know what you need better than your healer does.
That said, I fully recognise the power and importance of the therapeutic relationship and have seen it work absolute wonders for friends who have been in therapy for multiple years and some who may stay in it for even longer. Not all courses of therapy can or should be short; just perhaps a lot more of them than the therapeutic profession likes to admit.
From my experiences, I have observed that therapists are trained to see their patients’ problems through particular lenses and these lenses can be extremely powerful, but they can also obscure and distort. My therapists both saw me for 50 minutes each week and during those 50 minutes I would often be mute, tearful, frightened, aggressive, angry or miserable. During the other 10,030 minutes of the week I would be mostly fine, but they never got to see any of that. We needed distance between us in order for me to trust them enough to allow them to help me, but in showing just the worst of me, I concealed the best parts. They seldom saw my capacity for joy, for laughter or for calm equanimity: of course they thought I was too vulnerable to quit therapy. How could they not have picked up a distorted picture of who I was and what I really needed?
What if therapy could be experienced in a much less prescriptive way? I once asked my therapist why therapy sessions are always 50 minutes long, and she didn’t know the bloody answer! Just think for a second about how ridiculous that is. Why can’t therapy comprise a single five-hour-long session, like an intense workshop? Or three one-hour sessions, at the end of which the therapist says to the patient “Here are a couple of things to think about and a couple of things to try for the next few months – come back to me if you’re not seeing any results?” Of course a lot of people who seek therapy need a much more sustained, gradual course of treatment than that, but can it really be the case that every single person who seeks therapy needs months and months of weekly 50-minute sessions? We soldier on, vulnerable and confused, not knowing what to expect, not knowing what success looks like, often wondering if we are being conned in order to keep the therapist in regular income: this uncertainty surely does not facilitate more rapid or effective healing.
Riffing off this theme, I’m also coming to think that a daily meditation practice isn’t the panacea that so many people claim it to be, and that periodic or even sporadic sessions of meditation can be equally important or useful – but I’ll save that for another post.
(I’d be happy to receive a rebuttal in response to any of this, by the way. I’m being somewhat provocative because I don’t hear enough discussion about the benefits – or even the possibility – of short-term therapy.)
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