What Is the Purpose of Psychotherapy?
Image via Mitch Hodge
To tolerate life remains, after all, the first duty of all living beings. Illusion becomes valueless if it makes this harder for us.
— Sigmund Freud
Because I am a psychotherapist I am always listening. I listen to the stories people tell me; stories that double as half-truths they simultaneously tell themselves. Stories that I tell myself just as often. Listening comes with the territory, and part of what makes someone a good therapist is the ability to do so. To an outside observer it might not look like much is going on between a client and a therapist. Just two people having a conversation, but beyond initial appearances, a complicated exchange is playing out between the client and the therapist. In a therapeutic dialogue both client and therapist are constantly testing one another, and constantly testing themselves. The client wants to know if someone like myself, a professional helper is really up to the task. A fair question to ask because I don’t always know if I am, and more than that, I’m not always sure of the client’s commitment either. There is enough uncertainty and trepidation to make someone ask, what is the purpose of all this psychological probing and is there an end goal to be reached once it’s all done?
It’s certainly a fact that people test one another, in therapy and in life, to find out whether or not it is safe enough, physically and psychologically, for them to be honest about who they truly are. and few situations engender this more than the unfamiliarity of finding oneself for the first time sitting on in a therapist’s office with the expectation that you simply open your mouth and start to share your thoughts and feelings with someone you just met. In order for anyone to do this, the therapist has to quickly convince the client of their skill and capability. Without this initial convincing, there is no reason for the client to be there, and their presence will certainly be short-lived. With it, the client feels safe enough for the work to begin.
What the client gains is a place to retreat from life when they need to. A place where they can get enough distance from the world to start learning about it—if you live long enough you know that it is difficult to be curious when you are being assailed on all sides by challenges, at which point surviving life’s harsh realities becomes the main goal, the only goal, and the lens through which all other choices are filtered. I am there, one hour at a time, to pull the client out of their world, and more importantly, to pull out the parts of the client’s world that they struggle with the most. To push the client to confront the parts of life they are most confounded by.
It is only through facing the things in life that are most difficult and confusing for us that we make sense of them. A process that must be repeated numerous times throughout our lives because new challenges require new answers from us regarding how they will be met. In the end, there simply is no cure for life.
Because I am a psychotherapist I act, for some length of time, as a secular guide on the client’s journey, helping them learn how to confront their deepest anxieties and overcome their most stressful life events. Helping clients to become more skilled in the art of living is my purpose, and in carrying it out, clients themselves begin to develop their own, one that is not based on unearned confidence, but is carefully arrived at, with the proper motivation to pursue it.