“Going to the Psychologist is talking to someone”

The urban myth: doing psychotherapy is just sitting in front of a psychologist and talking about your problems.

It is true that psychotherapy uses dialogue as a basis, but far from being just that, otherwise everyone was a psychologist, and all the training and study I have done so far would have been superfluous.

Such a myth assumes that a person is immediately available to reveal their greatest anxieties and vulnerabilities. But there are more clients who need a long time to get used to the idea of ​​revealing their intimacy to a stranger than those who begin to “unwind” their neurosis (note, the term neurosis in my practice is not derogatory: all we're a bit neurotic, and as long as it works... it's fine).

Psychotherapy has several stages, and one cannot advance to the fourth stage – regulation of responsibility – without consolidating the first – building therapeutic alliance –, or the second – increasing awareness of the self and its experiences. Psychotherapy takes as long as the client needs to develop the phase's competence.

For the client to develop these skills, the psychotherapist is not limited to listening. What “change” (theme of the next chronicle) can be promoted just by saying “hum-hum”?! Your psychologist will not tell you what to do or how you can heal from one session to the next. Your psychologist will give you work, and this will not happen in the first session, where you explain what your problem is; nor in those where the alliance is still being solidified; nor will it happen while you are still becoming aware of how you treat yourself and how you have been experiencing your life; nor when you are still developing compassion for the way you have learned to treat yourself and others.

At first it may seem that you are just talking about your experience, but you are doing it, in the service of developing the skills that each phase implies.