Could
you suggest an appropriate gift for Christmas for my therapist; I have been
in analysis for the past year.
When you make a donation to this website, you are making a gift
of thanks for the knowledge and guidance you have received in helping you to live
a more healthy and honest life. But this website, although it’s about
psychotherapy, is not actually psychotherapy. In psychotherapy you pay someone to
perform the job of interacting with you so as to help you improve the quality of
your life by altering your thoughts and behaviors.
The
relationship you have with
your psychotherapist is not like any other relationship you will ever have
with anyone else—except, perhaps, another psychotherapist. It’s
a special relationship in which you learn how
to be emotionally honest with another person while paying that person to
teach you how to overcome the obstacles that prevent you from being
honest.
So, by paying
your psychotherapist, there is nothing more you can give to him or her. In this
context, then, a gift serves only to bypass the vulnerability
of your therapeutic struggle to become emotionally honest. Consequently, a gift
can be seen technically as a form of the psychological
defense mechanism
called acting out. That is, by offering a gift, you are
“saying” that you want to avoid speaking openly and honestly about your
deepest feelings.
Now, you might
claim that you simply want the gift to be something more tangible than therapeutic
work. But, as odd as it might sound, this sort of yearning for something tangible
leads ultimately to many psychological problems. Even the greatest desire of
all—true
love—has no “reward” but itself. Love is the reward of
love—and, in this intangible reality, there is an agony. The agony derives
from our existential human lack, a lack grounded in our physical and spiritual
separation from each other, a lack that can be bridged symbolically in language
but never closed by any human effort in any tangible form. It’s
in our desperation to avoid that agony of our lack that we seek out tangible
reassurances of “connection” to others, and thus we fall headlong into
all the
perversions that
appear to bring us closer to others and yet endlessly miss the point about
real love.
Any psychotherapist who
has been well-trained, therefore, has been trained to refuse a gift of “tangible
reassurance” because it will interfere with the psychotherapeutic process. Thus, in
refusing a gift of this sort, the psychotherapist gets to the point that the client,
in offering the gift, is trying to avoid.
Consequently, the best
“gift” you can give your psychotherapist is to take the work seriously and make
meaningful changes to your life.
No
advertising—no sponsor—just the simple truth . . .
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If
this website has helped you, then