#57- Is Therapy Hard or Easy to Do?

from Paradox Outta Da Box Hosted by nsobel19

If you ask most therapists whether doing therapy is ‘hard or easy’ the majority would say that “Doing therapy is hard”. After all, it’s not so easy to get people to change their behavior. You have to convince, encourage, motivate, or reward them. And with a little luck - maybe, maybe, change will eventually happen; but only if the client puts in the ‘time and effort’. But there’s a problem here! If the therapist thinks it’s hard for people to change, then automatically the message the client gets is that ‘changing must be hard’. So very often the client ends up confirming the therapist’s bias. The podcast has a short video segment from a reality TV show called ‘Couples Therapy’. It follows a therapist as she works with different couples. To be honest, I felt sorry for the therapist because her expectation was that the nature of therapy is that it’s going to be a struggle, and therefore she herself was working ‘very hard’ to process their issues. As a result, the clients were also very intense and serious during sessions. I found the atmosphere to be very heavy, with everybody, including the therapist, struggling. So it was no big surprise when each couple discovered that they had deeply ingrained problems that would need a lot of time and effort to overcome. I got exhausted just watching how hard therapy is ‘supposed to be’. But maybe there’s another way. When the therapist learns to do therapy easy, then clients pick up on that – and the therapy process becomes relaxed and open – which allows change to happen in a light and EZ way…