"I'll Hold Myself Then":
A plea for (almost) infinite self-awareness.
In hypnotherapy in particular, we sometimes experience very strong emotional reactions in our patients.
The patients' reactions in a state of trance and when reliving, feeling and working through their experiences are not entirely intentional. These often very destructive energies naturally also affect us as people and therapists.
Almost everything that our patients entrust to us and then becomes tangible for us in the transference, we can also recognize in one form or another in ourselves. We may have already been in similar, almost unsolvable situations in our lives, experienced pure despair and hopelessness, deepest sadness, pain, shame or unbridled anger.
Sometimes the patient's issues trigger shame and resistance in us and we have the feeling that we now have to distance ourselves from the patient, that we have to protect ourselves from what the patient is telling us instead of continuing to resonate with what has been said and felt.
But it is precisely this resonance, the ability to endure and empathize, that is usually the healing aspect of therapy.
Patients sense very precisely whether we are "really with them" - and the feeling of detachment due to our own insecurities is at least unconsciously registered and hinders the process.
It is therefore particularly important for therapists to gain as much self-awareness as possible and to come to terms with our own perversions (like Freud named it): Our regressions, fears, shame or compulsive tendencies.
Because only if we deal with ourselves in a truth-seeking way can we meet the patient with interest and with the necessary resonance. In this way we can hold and support the patient's states, which we may also be aware of ourselves and familiar with against our will.
It is a prerequisite to be able to endure our own abysses and states of shame so that we do not experience the patient's statements as threatening in and for our inner world. We can only "hold the patient emotionally" if we recognize and look at the fragile parts of ourselves.
Psychodynamic therapy or self-awareness in groups can help us to meet ourselves again and again in a safe environment. Sometimes our own inner boundaries are particularly secure when we are aware of what lies behind them.
Then we no longer need to block out of fear that others will see what we don't want to look at ourselves.
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