Beyond Tips and Tricks

Thanks to popular media and the self-help industry, redacting therapists or counsellors' tasks to offering tips and tricks to clients. The stereotypical counsellor or therapist is a dispenser of mastered how-tos for making it through a hard episode a client might be going through. The stereotype, at most, suggests that the job of the therapist is listening to people. At the same time, they mourn as the therapist is nodding and making nonsense sounds or ask that annoying question, "how does it make you feel".

The media presents therapists as people who provide linearised tricks and tips for surviving a wound and hurt. Marginally, the self-help industry can suggest that therapy for facilitating mental health and wellbeing, but only for those who need it as a means to the end of productivity and optimal industrial function. These stereotyped ideas of what therapists do are only true in some cases. Therapists bring more into the therapeutic relationship than tips and tricks. In this article, I present four of the many elements therapists afford in counselling sessions and connections.

Fire

In a world of cold distance and indifference, a therapist brings the warmth of closeness and attention-fire. A therapist is aware of the need for intimacy and solitude in therapeutic measures in the context of any relationship. A relationship devoid of solitude is suffocating. When the relationship lacks intimacy, it is lonesome. A therapeutic relationship can be a context for parties to practise the dance between intimacy and solitude. Intimacy provides enough heat from the friction of the social demands, and solitude, on the other hand, offers a welcome cooling balm for necessary ego restoration.

When a therapeutic relationship works, the suitable warmth it offers facilitates grounding for solid growth and courageous evolution. Therapy is not lukewarm. It can be either hot or cold as the relationship demands. Unfortunately, when people think that counselling is for cooling off heated encounters in their life, they fire the therapist as soon as the fever recedes. Clients continue on their life's journeys immediately after the frozen run-ins with their lifeworld ends.

Cyclises

Most people know that life is lived in cycles and not in straight lines at an intellectual level. It is in our nature to forget when we come upon challenges. Human beings recognise our forgetful nature, and we designed rituals to remind us of the true nature of life. Routines challenge us to remember life's cyclical pattern. A counselling session is a patterned practice that holds reminders of such authenticity, especially that stress and trauma lead us to forget.

The therapy session may not provide us with tricks and tips to get over the hurts of life. It will contain our debris long enough for us to remember that 'this too will pass'. We will not forget that this is part of the cycle of life, the ups and downs. We can ride the waves in the deep and the crest when we hold on a little longer. We can believe with Julian of Norwich that "all shall be well. All manner of things shall be well" even when we might not know the full conclusion of our episode.

Poetry

Every so often, we need to step out of the drab of our daily grinds. We can escape into the surrealism of metaphors, imagery and poeticism. We cannot bear much reality, T.S Eliot observed. When the fire is raging, it might not help to through oneself into it, no matter how valuable the stuff engulfed in the fire. A victim of such a fire could benefit from basic rescues, staying out of the furnace. Therapy can help by taking time to sidestep. There are many ways of circumventing until the person is strong enough to look at the fire. The poetics of the musical and dramatic arts, narrations, creative and expressive arts seem to be a good way of doing so. Remember, the poetics are not for detached externalisation. On the contrary, they work to bolster an individual's capacity to creatively and resourcefully engage with their threat. A little retreat helps to embark on a winsome battle.

Humour

Life is absurd, and human beings in it need to acknowledge such absurdity. Sometimes we suffer in life because we take our circumstances personally and too seriously. We make assumptions about ourselves and how the world entertains us believing that it is because of us. Tom Harris (1988) supposes that we experience the world according to our scripts permutated as to whether we see ourselves and others as OK or not. Ideally, the world we inhabit must hold that I am OK and others are OK. However, the mass of us experience the world as "I am OK, and you are not OK", "I am not OK, and you are OK", and "I am not OK, and you are not OK." It is a lot of work to explore these transactional dispositions as the scripts take a lot of time to untwine. Humour breaks through the scriptural hold by reminding us that what we think is reality is only preferred grandstanding. The word humour suggests the groundedness of the earth. Humour is a way of remembering our motherlode. "Dust to dust" is the call to repentance. Perhaps the religious invitation to repent is not about sin but about returning to the earth where the body belongs. We are most embodied when we laugh and cry. That could be why humour makes us laugh and cry.

In this article, I tried to extend our popular understanding of therapy beyond tips and tricks by suggesting that therapy is a place of fire. I have noticed how people dismiss the therapist as soon as the heat begins to turn up. Therapy reminds us that life is cyclical. A therapeutic ritual is a tool of remembrance. I also suggested the function of the poetics to resource people's capacity to venture into the challenge of growth and evolution. Finally, I presented our invitation to repent, to return to the earth in our laughter and tears. Humour allows us to enter into the futility of cartesian "I think therefore I am." A therapist is more than a depository of tips and tricks. They bring real skill, artistry and critical attitude to the work of therapy. The work of therapy does not end when the symptoms are over. The work continues with fire, circling, poetry and humour.

References

Eliot, T. S. (1943). Four Quartets . 1943. San Diego: Harvest.

Harris, T. A. (1988). I'm OK-You're OK. St. Lucy's School for Blind and Visually Handicapped Children.