In the comments to an article about containment and contact, user karga shared interesting thoughts and questions about feelings in therapy, for which I am very grateful. In response, a whole text was born, which I offer for discussion. About the therapist’s acceptance of the client’s feelings, karga wrote: What does it mean to “accept the client’s feelings”? karga wrote: Does the therapist accept the client’s feelings? Or does he turn to the experience of his experiences, that is, gets his same feelings out of it? It happens in different ways: sometimes the therapist’s experience resonates with the same (similar) feelings, sometimes the feelings are different. For example, the client shames himself, experiences himself as worthless, and the therapist at this moment, on the contrary, feels sympathy and warmth for him. Or even this: the client is afraid, and the therapist is angry. The main thing in the idea of ​​acceptance, in my opinion, is this: let the feelings be. The therapist recognizes the client’s reality, his right to all his feelings: that is, he does not “fight” them, does not stop them, does not try to prematurely console, calm, or cheer up the client. If the feelings of the client and the therapist do not coincide, this does not mean that the client’s feelings “wrong”, and the receiving therapist is able to remain in this discrepancy and pay attention to it, explore it together with the client. In the Gestalt approach, acceptance of feelings serves, perhaps, two main goals: 1) to allow the feeling to mature, not to extinguish it prematurely, to allow it to unfold - to make it clear what kind of feeling this is, “what” it is about: what experience it is associated with and what need is behind it; 2) allow the client to see that he is not alone, that he is in contact, in touch with the therapist, with him There is support in the form of a therapist. Support does not mean that I, the client, necessarily coincide with the therapist in feelings and needs - sometimes I start from this support, test myself against it, like a litmus test, like using a touchstone, and I can detect them not only on the basis of similarity ( “I see myself as in a mirror”), but also on the basis of differences (“he has it like this, and I have it like that, but he doesn’t reject me for it, but gives me the right to be different”). For this to become possible, differences must be legalized, accepted. Like any model, the one described, of course, is an ideal scheme. In reality, this does not always work out, and therapists may fall into their traumas, run away from difficult places, and fail to cope with countertransference reactions. And this happens to all therapists from time to time, not just the “bad” ones. But, in general, the more experience the therapist has, including his client experience - the experience of personal therapy, the more stable the therapist is: he knows his traumas, which means he is able to see his automatisms and act not automatically, but creatively. About “healing” » therapist Not all consequences of injuries can be eliminated. After all, character—our enduring way of responding to the world—is the result of trauma we have experienced. And you can adjust it, make it more flexible. But becoming a person without character, perfectly balanced, is impossible. And the flexibility and “healing” of the therapist is sometimes expressed not in the fact that he is never afraid of the client’s feelings, but in the fact that he gets scared, but remains, does not run away from contact. karga wrote: I have a suspicion that if The therapist has no experience of meeting, for example, with a feeling of loneliness and the experience of living well, then I will not believe him that he understands me when I tell him about my loneliness. karga wrote: to the therapist, his experience of successfully passing through loneliness allows him to be a support to my client in this meeting. Here I proceed from the idea that every person knows all the feelings: we all experience pain, are afraid, sad, feel lonely, are ashamed, envy... Situations can be different, the feelings themselves can be experienced differently (be of different strengths, to be woven from different sensations), but nevertheless, everyone has all the feelings. I believe that a successful passage is not necessarily a victory over difficulty (“I was lonely - I found a couple”; or in the variant “... but now I I’m proud of this!”), and meeting her: awareness of your pain points.