In the last couple of months I’ve started working with a few new clients after other clients have successfully got to where they wanted to be.
The first stages of therapy always feel a little messy to me, and I’m pretty sure that my clients feel the same. There’s no clear ‘three-step-process’ or rulebook explaining how to help someone through stuff they’re struggling with. I deal with what emerges in the session and work on whatever the client brings me.
As our sessions together progress and we start to get to know each other a little better, they begin to trust me more and that leads to a new level of communication – sharing deeper parts of the problem they’ve been struggling with, talking about stuff they’ve never talked to anyone about before, divulging memories or thoughts or feelings they’ve had that they’re concerned about.
As these new layers of the problem emerge, it can often feel a bit overwhelming – for both the client and the therapist.
Where on earth do we begin?
I was having a conversation about this with a fifteen year old girl I’m currently working with and I used the analogy of doing a jigsaw puzzle to help illustrate what I was trying to explain. She really liked it so I thought I’d share it with all of you in case it might help you or someone you know.
The client comes to their very first session with a box of jigsaw pieces. They’ve often been carefully carrying this box around for years, protecting it fiercely, and the pieces are all jumbled and muddled together. They take off the lid and nervously offer it to me. I take a look inside and quietly assess what I see. Sometimes it’s a 24-piece puzzle. Sometimes it’s a 5000-piece puzzle. Sometimes there are pieces missing.
The first thing we do is to start turning over all the pieces together so we can see the different parts of the puzzle. This might take one session or it could take many, depending on how many pieces there are. Once all the pieces are turned over, we can see a bit more clearly what we’re dealing with.
The next stage is to find the corners and the edges. What are the boundaries of the puzzle? What’s it’s structure? How big is it?
The third stage is to start joining some of the pieces together. Sometimes we might get lucky, and immediately find two bits that fit together. Sometimes we have to search through every piece before we find two that connect exactly. Again, this might take one session or several. Sometimes we think we’ve made the right connections and it turns out that there was a part that didn’t quite fit right, so we have to separate them and start over again. All of this is ok. We just keep going, piece by piece by piece until the bigger picture begins to take shape.
From time to time it’s useful to take a step back from scrutinising the detail of each individual piece that we’re working with and look at the whole. Are we getting there? Is there another area of the puzzle we could be working on that might make more of a difference? Does what we’ve done match with what the picture on the box (what the client is working towards as their end goal of who they want to be) is supposed to look like?
Eventually we get to a point where it doesn’t need two of us working on it so closely any more. That’s where I take a step back and let the client continue piecing it together on their own. I might occasionally point out a piece that I spot that might fit somewhere, but on the whole I let them get on with it because they’ve got the momentum. Sometimes they’ll check in with me to make sure they’re still on the right track. They almost always are.
Then comes the moment where it’s time to put the final piece in place.
I always let the client take that honour.
Phone: +44 (0) 7794 595783
Email: chloe@openmindhypnotherapy.co.uk