In practical psychology, there is now a very widespread opinion: during psychotherapy, a psychologist should cause mental pain to a client, confronting him with those unconscious attitudes and processes that prevent a person from living, give rise to destructive scenarios and unhealthy behavior patterns. In my opinion, as a good psychologist, such an approach to psychological assistance to a person is destructive and unproductive. Imagine that you turn to a psychologist in a difficult life situation for you (and in our country people come to a psychologist only on the verge or even beyond despair). To begin with, you expect at least sympathy and understanding, support, and ultimately, help in solving the problem. Instead, your already painful soul is inflicted with new pain by exposing your unconscious and blaming you for your troubles. When a person naturally begins to avoid this pain and skips the next consultation or stops psychotherapy altogether, the psychologist smugly and self-confidently accuses him of the fact that “the client does not want to change.” In my own life there was an interesting situation in this regard. It is known that it is advisable for every psychologist to have his own psychologist (personal psychotherapy is simply necessary for each of us, so that, figuratively speaking, with our own “cockroaches” we do not interfere with someone else’s life and soul). For quite a long time, with my humane, careful approach to people, I was looking for a specialist with the same principles - and I couldn’t find one. There was so-called “popular psychology” all around, as well as ossified templates into which the living human soul did not fit in any way. The moment came when I was almost sure: with my Good Psychology I am simply idealizing the profession of a psychologist, no one works like that. My colleagues vied with each other to convince me that practical psychology was nothing more than a “craft.” Many of my clients visited the same “artisans”, who later said that they visited one or more specialists, but no changes for the better occurred, and they were convinced that it was their own fault - “they don’t want to change.” Psychology, especially psychology The unconscious is generally a sphere where anything can be conjectured, invented and imposed on a person. Psychoanalysis by S. Freud is a vivid example of this. When the client begins to object to such speculations of the specialist, he is told that all this happens “unconsciously,” that is, it is almost impossible to check whether the soul expert is right or not. So, having already made sure that I will not meet anyone close to me who is humane, kind approach, when contacting the next psychotherapist, I said that I was ready for it to hurt me at the beginning of work. A look of surprise flashed across his face, but he didn’t say anything then. Imagine my amazement when I realized that I had finally met another Good Psychologist, that they treated me with deep understanding and did not have the slightest intention to cause pain. But I was already prepared...Not long ago a young woman approached me, claiming that she “has no personal boundaries” and needs to “get her head fixed,” while she expressively twirled her finger at her temple. She said that for quite a long time she went to see one of my colleagues, “a very tough lady,” who with great force accused her of lacking those same boundaries and inability to “love herself.” The client believed her, but psychotherapy stood still and no changes occurred. I carefully asked how long this “lack of personal boundaries” had been bothering the client. It turned out that she is perfectly socially adapted - she is loved and respected in the family and at work, precisely for her kindness and responsiveness, and altruistic help to people gives her moral pleasure. As it turned out, her beloved husband died several years ago, she fell into depression and therefore turned to a specialist. And they began to accuse her of lacking boundaries and self-love. The specialist didn’t get to the point of working through her grief... Well, what can you say? It is forbiddento climb into someone else's life and soul without understanding and trample it with dirty boots. No one would want to have an operation with a surgeon for whom his work is just a craft, and what happens is up to his luck; he is not personally responsible for it. We would not want our children to be taught by such artisan teachers who blame their students for all their own failures. The same applies to psychotherapy. Once, as a volunteer, I worked as a psychologist on a free psychological help site. The site administrator read the correspondence with clients of each specialist, and if, after exchanging a couple of messages, the client did not exclaim that he had already been healed, then the administrator advised the psychologist to stop working: “the client does not want to change.” What does “does not want to change” mean? Every adult has his own established system of relationships with people and views on the world. Helping him change something in himself and around him is the task of a psychologist, and for each we are obliged to select our own methods and approaches, to choose for each individual a strategy and tactics of work that suits him personally. There simply cannot be identical approaches here: after all, the soul of every person is an entire universe. The man did not come to us to alter his dress or redo his hair, the man came with TROUBLE, with PAIN. What kind of accusations can there even be? Psychologists know that there is such a thing as RESISTANCE. A person unconsciously tries to preserve his system of values ​​and attitudes and resists any changes in his life style. THE TASK OF A PSYCHOLOGIST is to find those formulations, that path that a person ACCEPTS as acceptable and promising for himself. In youth slang there is such a concept as “it went” - “it didn’t go.” If some of our words “do not penetrate” a person’s soul, we must choose others that are closer and more understandable to him. And for such work, a psychologist simply needs to UNDERSTAND a person. It must be said that understanding and sympathy in psychotherapy are somewhat different than in ordinary communication. Empathy, the ability to put oneself in the place of another, to feel deeply into the soul of another person, is an absolutely necessary quality for a psychologist. However, when we listen to a client, we experience more than just empathy. K. Rogers, one of the creators of humanistic psychology, once wrote: “To be in a state of empathy means to perceive the inner world of another accurately, while maintaining emotional and semantic shades. It’s as if you become that other person, but without losing the “as if” feeling. Thus, you feel the joy or pain of another as he feels them, and you perceive their causes as he perceives them. But there must definitely remain a shade of “as if”: as if it were me who was happy or sad. If this shade disappears, then a state of identification arises.” If a psychologist is capable of at least empathy, then he is unlikely to accuse a widow in deep grief (as in the situation described above) of lack of personal boundaries. However, ideally, a psychologist needs even more than empathy. Listening to a person and feeling into his inner world, we preserve Rogers’s “as if,” that is, at this time we remain ourselves - a specialist who not only sympathizes, but also comprehends the reasons and patterns that gave rise to the client’s suffering. This is the combination of SYMPATHY and THINKING that I call “UNDERSTANDING” in my Good Psychology. So, helping a person in Good Psychology is based on UNDERSTANDING - the unity of emotional sympathy for him and a deep understanding of his life problem. We empathically empathize with him, but do not become him, do not fall into “identification” - otherwise we will not know how to solve the problem. And even more so, WE DO NOT PROJECT onto him, we do not transfer our own problems and we do not impose templates of any psychological school on his life. In any case, first of all, we need to give the person the feeling that he is understood and accepted, and also immediately, at the first appointment, give him SUPPORT. Only then does the client have hope that the psychologist will help him, make him feel bettermental pain. In my practice as a school psychologist, there was a case when I accompanied one teacher from our school on a tragic trip - her son, a journalist, died in a “hot spot”, and it was necessary to accompany the mother to help her pick up the body and transport it home, to Moscow. I felt very deeply for her, but if I started crying with her and fell into the same despair, I would not be able to help her. Therefore, having taken on the hassle of transporting the body, I was thinking with maximum intensity about ways to help the inconsolable mother who had lost her only child. And then it dawned on me. In our conversations with her, even without a break for sleep (she simply could not sleep), I suddenly found out that she had a little granddaughter from her son, and her own mother did not really need this girl. Very carefully, I suggested to my colleague that she take this girl, her own granddaughter, into her upbringing. In response, I received indignation that, they say, “I’m talking nonsense.” I wasn’t offended and, of course, I didn’t blame my colleague for “not wanting to change,” I just remained silent. However, later the woman did just that and took her granddaughter with her. The girl began to go to our school with her grandmother - and her grandmother came to life. This was the only thing that helped her cope with grief and despair (and also helped the girl whose upbringing her own mother was not interested in). SO, UNDERSTAND. To understand and HELP is the task of a practicing psychologist, psychotherapist. And if understanding a person is the work of the soul, then helping is already the task of the mind. Moreover, it is not easy to find ways of such help, but to come up with ways for a person to ACCEPT the proposed path, so as not to expose his RESISTANCE as a dull shield. Find those formulations that will “suit” this particular person and fit into his spiritual “universe”. And if it doesn’t work out, look for new methods, new formulations and arguments - those that will eventually “come in” and begin to work for the benefit of a person. One client told me that he was offended by the psychologist for proving to him that he is touchy (!) - and he was so offended that he didn’t go to him anymore. Although the psychologist’s words were fair, it is possible, however, that in order to bring the work to a positive result, he should have simply changed the wording, and not stood his ground. I also remember a case when a very weak-willed person tried his best to prove to me at a reception that he was... strong . Was there any need to argue? It is not always necessary to crack a psychological defense like a box with a crowbar. I then simply asked the man why it was so important for him to feel strong - and with a trembling voice he admitted that everyone around him accused him of weakness. Of course, we spent a long time working on his character, but do you think I should have foamed at the mouth to prove that he was weak? It was bad enough for him already. In conclusion, I will give one more example. A woman contacted me about the aggressive behavior of her seventh grade son. When I started talking about working against aggression, she suddenly declared that her child did not have any aggression: that very RESISTANCE, the so-called PSYCHOLOGICAL DEFENSE from thoughts and feelings unpleasant to a person, was turned on. If I started arguing, reminding her that she herself filed a complaint about her son’s aggression, it would turn out to be a long and unproductive argument, and her resistance could develop into irritation and resentment towards the psychologist. Therefore, I tried to find other words and started talking about the fact that the boy was “audibly pushy in his selfishness.” The client’s face brightened, and she said that she accepted this formulation and was ready to work on it. The work, by the way, went ahead and ended successfully. I write again: understanding, support and help - that’s why people come to a psychologist. They are already in pain. Is it worth increasing their pain? What if we intensify the pain so much that the person simply doesn’t come to us anymore - and remains with even more pain?! I am convinced that each time we should deeply and sensitively think about how exactly the client is able to understand us, which recommendations he is able to implement and which he cannot. That is, every time EMPATHY and: +79687465967