Member login

THE AIMS OF THERAPY

MAY 2012

by Hans TenDam

People seek therapy because they want to change something. Which means they are not perfectly happy with their life as it is. Why are people unhappy? Because they suffer from something, at least from imperfection.

What happens with people who are perfect? First, not very much. Second, they make other people envious. Third, they drive the Gods crazy.

So the Gods send all kinds of unhappiness our way. Their first option is to strike us with blindness. If that doesn’t work, they play the dirtiest trick in the book: they grant us our wishes. Happiness may be a warm gun, but guns cool pretty quickly. And when the smoke has risen, we may see we have hit the wrong people. Life stinks.

Therapy may hehanstendam_400lp. Not completely, not painless, not free and easy, but it helps. Regression therapy usually faster and deeper than other therapies, but we still operate under the law of imperfection. I remember only few perfect sessions with perfect results. Our therapy doesn’t stink, but it has still the smell of imperfection.

Therapists who want to be perfect, encounter all the time clients who have some resistance. Clients who seek perfect therapy encounter all the time therapists with some incompetence. Imagine what can happen when client resistance meets therapist incompetence! The mind boggles.

So if we cannot bring our clients to perfection, to what do we bring them? I would say:

  1. a somewhat higher level of vitality
  2. a somewhat higher level of clarity
  3. a somewhat higher level of calm
  4. a somewhat higher level of courage and decisiveness
  5. a somewhat higher level of harmony and alignment
  6. a somewhat higher level of good-will
  7. a somewhat higher level of inner freedom

We de-tire them, de-confuse them, de-worry them, de-doubt them, de-friction them, de-grudge them, de-prison them. Everything up to a point. I summarize all that with a term that I can’t mention here in this civilized periodical, but that I can define in a roundabout way as: re-virginizing.

At the level of one session, our aims are usually more limited, like getting rid of a fear, of a depression, of a psychosomatic complaint. The aim of therapy is to restore health. The aim of psychotherapy is to restore psychological health, or mental and emotional health. And as many consider us nuts, we do that usually with some stealth. I feel a limerick coming. Probably with something about lack of wealth.

But we can use our methodology not only for therapy, not only to resolve problems, but also for personal development, unleashing talents and qualities and growing mentally and emotionally. Beyond solving problems and beyond improvement, there is a third level: transformation. Real change, a shift, a change in awareness, a different identity.

Why am I sure we can help with that too? Because rather often, our work slips naturally from therapy into personal development and from personal development into transpersonal development, transformation, life-changes.

Many people want to go there directly, ignoring and bypassing their problems, their pain, their imperfections. In my experience there are no short-cuts. It is even worse: we may first have to face imperfections and dark spaces we even didn’t know we had. Jung called hat shadow work. The worst thing about all this – the most disgusting, rotten thing – is that sometimes (very rarely!) some of us therapists (very few!) have to work at our own shadow side. Sometimes it even seems that the therapy and the clients embody our shadow side.

The real aim of your doing therapy is to pay off karma. Helping people is the dark side of once happily having ignored and abused them. You have to be brave and plod on.

You may meet in EARTh fellow-sufferers. ‘If you ignore my shadow I will ignore yours.’ That sort of thing is called an Annual Convention. See you there!

Verified publication:

Sjoerd Bruijnen

Information: