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Training at The Minster Centre Your Own Therapy People often ask the question – "Why should I have to be in therapy?" They think to themselves that they are not in need of therapy, so why should they have to pay a lot of money for something unnecessary? There are several connected answers to this. |
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Firstly if you are going to be a therapist (let us use that one word to mean counsellor or psychotherapist), it is important to understand from the inside what it is like to be a client; otherwise you are unlikely to be able to treat clients with understanding.
Secondly, if as a therapist you are helping someone else to be more of a whole person, you need to have some direct experience of what it means to be a whole person yourself. One of the things that happens in therapy is that people heal their splits and resolve their internal conflicts. If you as a therapist have never experienced this – (and if you say you have no internal conflicts don't even bother to think you are ready for courses like these) – then you are not going to have sufficient empathy to be with the client in the way that is required.
Thirdly, when you are working with clients they can press your buttons. In response to them you may feel angry, fearful, impatient, mistrustful, frustrated, defensive or mystified. To the extent that you have been through therapy yourself you are going to have fewer buttons to be pressed, and so will be less reactive and more able to reflect on your experience.
Fourthly, the breakthroughs in your own therapy can give you courage to work with your clients until they have breakthroughs of their own. Unless you have had your own gains in your own therapy, you are less likely to believe that your clients can genuinely change. A lot of therapy is about hope. And the experiences that gave you hope can enable you to work toward experiences with your clients in which they can experience genuine and well-founded hope.
But still, the cautious person may say, this all does seem to assume that I must have problems of some kind. Suppose I don't? Well, don't come on a course like this. A person with no humility or with limited insight is not likely to be much use to others. It is the wounded healer who is most approachable and most reachable.
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