Transcription
Hello everyone, my dears. You are back on my channel. And today we will talk with you about psychotherapy. Surely many of you, and not only about psychotherapy, but about life in general, about your life. My team asked me to share with viewers some of my realizations, discoveries, or insights from the last 30 years of practicing psychotherapy. And, of course, I don't really like this genre. There are three ways, seven types, 12 categories. Here. Well, I'll try, perhaps in a spontaneous mode, to outline what psychotherapy has taught me. These are very, very important, possible things that are on the verge of your daily life and a certain philosophy of the profession that I am engaged in. These realizations of mine are related to why people get sick, how they change, what is the nature of change, what is the nature of the path, where a person is already tired of suffering and wants to stop suffering. If you recognize yourself in this portrait, stay until the end, you will probably learn a lot about yourself. Why do people keep banging their heads against the wall, in the same place? Why does the attempt to resolve life situations not lead to any result for a long time? And so, I will try, perhaps, to tell a little about these discoveries, realizations, which, if I look back spontaneously, I remember them. So, this is insight number one. At some point, I discovered that people seem to get stuck in their problems, that besides this problem, there is almost nothing more important in their lives. And it even seems normal for a person who suffers from one problem or another. Well, for example, if you have a rather unpleasant psychosomatic illness, for example, I don't know, irritable bowel syndrome, or, for example, you just have hemorrhoids, for example, then you, of course, think only about it. And if you have obsessive-compulsive disorder or generalized anxiety disorder, of course, your life revolves around it. And if you have an autoimmune disease, you can only think about it. But there is a trap in this. The trap is that your life begins to boil down to your problem. And as long as your life is equivalent to your problem, to your illnesses, you will not change. It seems like a paradox. We come to therapy or to doctors in general to get rid of a problem, right? But in psychotherapy, everything looks fundamentally different. In fact, any symptom that appears from the perspective, at least, of Gestalt therapy, is your way of building contact with your environment. It's your way of living. If you suffer from some psychosomatic illnesses, then the body somehow speaks for you through life. That is, in essence, what is psychosomatics in the broadest sense of the word? It is the absence of a psychological language of description. And the somatic language becomes an alternative. Well, that is, you don't know Chinese, even though you live in China, but you know English. You can speak in English. That's what psychosomatics looks like. And as long as this problem in life is almost equivalent to your life, that is, it is the most important thing, you will come to therapy, you will only talk about it. Until then, you will not change. Have you noticed, perhaps, you have been trying to cope with a problem for decades, and it only becomes more stable, sometimes even worse, more deeply rooted. Symptoms are getting heavier and more unpleasant. Problems with relationships, with intimacy are becoming more obvious. Right? A vicious circle of some kind. You seem to be doing a lot for it. And have you noticed that when you come to psychotherapy, if you are a therapist, have you noticed that clients come to you and for many, many sessions, a year or two, they talk about the same thing, that something hurts them. And they have every right to, of course, but they are hostages of a concept according to which they want to get rid of it. And I noticed the following: my clients only start to change at the moment of attention when their life becomes more interesting to them than what they are sick with. In a broad sense of the word, when I say sick now, I mean not only, well, formalized nosological units, but generally those problems that are encountered in life. And at the moment when you start to be interested in your life more than your hemorrhoids, you start to change from the perspective of hemorrhoids. Do you understand? The solution is always outside. The resolution of the figure is always in the background. Such is the general position of field theory. Therefore, when you get stuck in your topic, which is your figure, you become more competent in terms of the structure of your suffering, but you do not get rid of it. Therefore, the sooner you become interested in your life, the better for you. The therapist's task is to help the client see that their life is bigger than obsessive-compulsive disorder. And only then will they start to change. Only then will new messages about your life start to come into contact, which will now transform all of this. There are three videos on this channel. They are called "Creative Evenings: Daring to Be Alive". These are creative evenings that I held 12 or 13 years ago. But the metaphor itself, which will be in the first meeting, is relevant. I held it in the Minsk Concert Hall, where people came and asked a practicing psychotherapist various questions about their lives. And on the first day of this, well, creative evening, an interesting story happened when I called a certain number of people onto the stage and described how discovering oneself beyond one's problem helps to change life. Watch it, it won't be superfluous. I won't talk much about it here because I won't have time to finish this video. The second insight is as follows. It sounds paradoxical. People don't change because they can't notice that they have already changed. That is, in essence, psychotherapy is not a process of change, but a process of discovery. It sounds strange for now. You know, paradoxically. If our problem is that life is constantly changing, and we pretend that it is not changing. Such is the nature of severe family crises, of one's own personal psychological development, of all the illnesses you encounter. You pretend that life is not changing. Well, because at the root of everything lies the fear of being alive. At the root of all your illnesses lies the fear of being alive. That is why, in fact, one of my books is called "Living People Don't Get Sick". Its slogan is "Dare to Be Alive". The title of the book is "Dare to Be Alive". The main thesis is: living people don't get sick. A living person is someone who, well, is capable, has the luxury, the courage, to look their life, if one can put it that way, in the eyes, and experience it with an open heart to the fullest. And if this is so, if this happens, then you, well, start to notice everything that happens in your life. But at the conceptual level, you have a conspiracy. You don't notice that you have already changed, friends. You have already changed. Everything you need for change is in this second. And you have already changed. You have always been healthy, but you just fell asleep, and it seems to you that you are sick. I can describe dozens of situations in therapy when clients, just by looking back at their lives, I say: "Let's monitor why it is so useful, for example, if you decide to leave therapy, for example, to stay with your therapist for another two or three sessions to look at the entire path that you have gone through together. You will be surprised by what you will discover there." When clients look back, they, paradoxically, notice that they have changed a lot. And even if they complain about how slowly we are developing, after they look back, their lives begin to, well, change radically. Paradox. But it works exactly like that. People don't change because they can't notice and relate to the fact of already existing changes. And essentially, psychotherapy, let this be the third insight, psychotherapy is not a process of change, but a process of discovery, not a process of addition, but a process of purification. It is a process of returning to oneself. Why is another of my books called "Welcome Home"? That is, in essence, psychotherapy is a journey home. Your task is not to find some new, good place to live. Your task is to return home. Just to return home. And essentially, psychotherapy, through experience, boils down to giving oneself the opportunity to be what is. Not what should be, but what is. And when we bring this back into our lives, we begin to change very quickly, very deeply, sometimes by leaps and bounds. Insight number four. It is as follows. People get sick because they are not the center of their lives. Sometimes this is clearly evident. Here, on this channel, there is probably a separate long video on this topic: "How to become the center of your life for 25, 30 minutes? Watch it, please." Here I write it briefly. Our lives are either literally controlled by other people, or controlled by disguised other people. We think these are our ideas, but in fact, they are ideas of other people who have suggested something to us throughout our history. This applies to introjects that our parents, grandparents, grandparents have shoved into us. This also applies to the influence of people in our lives today, charismatic people who have, well, a certain degree of influence on us. And we start to think that these are our ideas. This is how propaganda works, this is how psychological warfare works, this is how any manipulation of people over each other works. The main problem is that we give too much power to other people. partly, as in the first case, we notice this when someone is sitting on our neck, on our head, and we want to throw them off or don't want to throw them off, but during therapy we only notice that it's not very comfortable for us when someone is sitting on our neck. And we didn't invite this someone at all. But with veiled ideas, when we firmly believe that these are my needs, my beliefs, my values, and we will defend them to the point of fighting or murder, well, of course, this shift in the center of life is not so noticeable. And the task is to gain some freedom, to become free, to become the center of one's own life. And at this moment, the strongest changes begin to happen. What do I really want? Not what other people want from me, not other people incorporated into me, but what do I want? And the answer to this question is often not in: "And I want this." You see, you get it out of here. The answer to the question of where the center of life truly manifests is in life itself. Not within your consciousness regarding life, but within life itself, when at some point you find yourself making a particular choice. And this is how the center of your life manifests. Do you understand? Yes. Not thinking: "Oh, for many years I didn't know that I, it turns out, want the recognition of other people. Let me ask and say: 'Do you consider me talented?' Yes, you are talented. Oh, great, thank you very much. Or I never thought that my boundaries were being violated, but now I've noticed it. Move over, please, and wow, it became good. No, this is all a concept. To truly become the center of your life means to surrender completely to the flow of life and to be aware of yourself as a person making choices in a particular situation. And when you make this choice, your task is to note, by surrendering to your life, to this flow, in this choice, it is you. You must be here. And if this is so, then the centers of your life fall into place. I assure you, all your problems will start to pass, somatic, psychosomatic, psychological, social. All relationship troubles, the rakes you step on, will start to disappear. Why? Because in reality, all your problems, all your illnesses were the result of you stupidly betraying yourself, and now you have returned yourself to yourself. Congratulations. I think this is the best thing that can happen in your life. Insight number five. In psychotherapy, we are somehow strongly inclined to overestimate the significance of intervention. Entire books are written on how to work with certain clients. How to help certain people. You read all sorts of pedagogical books on how to raise children. We learn, I don't know, how to communicate correctly with other people to influence them, so that we have many friends, starting with Dale Carnegie, who, they say, died alone and unhappy. And ending with all sorts of modern books on manipulating the consciousness of one's neighbors. I love psychotherapy very much and consider it the best profession in the world because it teaches humility. Because in reality, the interventions that I make in therapy are just a prop, just stage decorations. I want to be heard correctly. I am not devaluing interventions, but what I teach my students is probably one of the most important insights from all my years of studying psychotherapy. Psychotherapy has taught me a lot. That it is not the interventions themselves that heal, but the place from which they originate. It is not the content of the intervention that is important, but the source of this intervention. Your intervention is made from presence, from love, or from the idea of improving the client's life. The same intervention, quoted, made from love and presence and from anxiety and fuss or the desire to change something with the client, will produce a fundamentally different effect. So, only the first heals. It doesn't matter what intervention you make, but where it comes from is important. If it comes from the heart, the best intervention will be born there. There is also a consequence for everyday life. Many people ask: "Igor, how to correctly tell another person that I am dissatisfied with something? So as not to offend them, for example, how is that? And to ride the Christmas tree and not get pricked, right? Approximately so. This is the most absurd idea. Just as it is absurd to discuss in supervision what interventions to make in the next session. Because when you get there, there will be no life. When you come with a ready-made intervention, you will have to ignore the real fabric of life. Surrender to what is happening. Whether you are a therapist or just a happy husband who wants to be happy, or a wife. Give yourself the opportunity to simply be present in this contact, from presence. The best interventions will be born, the best phrase, and the best declarations of love, and the best words to your child. How to raise children correctly. Just love them. Children are not meant to be raised, they are meant to be loved. If you love them, all pedagogy is already embedded there. I teach my students, I teach them psychotherapy, simply love. If you don't have love for people, don't get into this profession. Your career may be bright, but short. You won't survive in it. And when you are in harmony with your heart, then within the therapy process, well, of course, if you are a trained person, you know some concepts in the field, for example, of Gestalt therapy or psychoanalysis, then, of course, all this does not exclude your training, your own therapy, of course, but everything else, the source of the intervention is your openness to what is happening now. If your intervention comes from presence, then it will come from love. This doesn't mean you'll be coddling another person. I can be a very sharp therapist. And a teacher can be very sharp. I am not the most accommodating person. I can be sharp, confrontational, sometimes quite tough. But all this happens uncompromisingly from me out of love, because anything else is not interesting to me. Anything else would be a betrayal of myself. I do this not for other people. I do this for myself, for my nature. Because if my nature is presence, love, why should I settle for any nonsense? In this sense, I take care of myself, like a person with a child on a plane during cabin depressurization puts on a mask first on themselves. So, I only care about one thing: to be alive, present, and able to love the people who come to me. And clients are still my, my children, my beloved wife, my parents, my brothers, my students, my colleagues, my partners, you understand? So, all therapy is done not by the content of the intervention, but by the place from which it originates. Insight number six or seven. We tend to overestimate the content of therapy. I don't know why. It seems that out of fear of living, we become somewhat naive. A huge number of books in the field of psychotherapy are written on how to work with this or that disorder, behavior, impairment, and so on. But 30 years of psychotherapy, 31 years this year, has taught me the following: that the content of therapy is always secondary to the quality of the therapeutic process. If you have a live contact, a meeting of two people, two open hearts in one space of presence, it will always lead to changes. Always. And this is very important. Insight number seven or eight, derived from this, probably. That change in therapy is a very important thing, it is a byproduct of good, deep therapeutic contact. That is, you do not directly manage changes. Well, at least, I'm talking about Gestalt therapy, about experiential psychotherapy. Probably, if you are a cognitive-behavioral therapist, which would be more correctly called a psychotechnology, then it seems to me, you can directly manage it. But Gestalt therapy, like many other person-centered therapy approaches, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic therapy, group analysis, transactional analysis, existential-humanistic client-centered therapy, do not directly manage symptom relief. Nothing is better than another. In the sense that CBT is wonderful, Gestalt therapy is wonderful, psychoanalysis is wonderful. It seems to me that if a psychotherapy approach has survived for, say, 10-20 years and has followers, then it is wonderful. And there is a history, and clients change. Yes, great, let it be. Nothing unnecessary will last. I am a proponent that no external regulation, approval, discussion, acceptance, recognition of methods plays any role at all. It's just for show, for a fragile, wounded ego. For example, experiential psychotherapy does not strive to be approved by any major world association. Despite the fact that I am often offered to do so, I don't want to. It is alive, possibly only because it does not play games with any state system, does not play games with any large system based on bureaucracy and recognition. I believe that people influence each other only at the level of open hearts, beautiful, deep ideas, developed deep philosophy. And all the social dances that are arranged around them make absolutely no sense. We come to therapy because we want something that hurts us to change, right? But we need to let it go. Remember the first point? And here the most important thing is to focus on the therapeutic contact, so that you are interested in therapy, you are interested in your development, you would be interested to know who you really are. And if you are infected with this and you start to build honest, open relationships with your therapist, honest not in the sense of following some of your therapeutic contract, but you are as open as possible, you surrender to this contact, you don't try to control it, you don't try to change each other. In this contact, during therapy, of course, the therapist makes some interventions, something appears that leads to change. And you do not directly control the changes. It happens that clients come and they complain about some problem, about some symptom. A year of therapy passes, or two, a large part of a person's life has changed, but this symptom remains, but everything else has changed on a much deeper level. And this symptom no longer seems so significant to the person, but it remains. And sometimes it passes in 2 weeks. One of my students, I had a demonstration session about, probably almost 20 years ago now at a training group. She suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder for 8 years before this session. And she is still convinced that I cured her of OCD, which she had suffered from for 8 years, in one demonstration session in 30-40 minutes of work. Not a single relapse since then. Not a single one. That is, she has not encountered these symptoms again in her life. This happens. But we don't control it. I wasn't trying to get rid of her obsessive-compulsive disorder. I was trying to help her become more alive. Do you understand? That is, symptom relief is always a byproduct of good therapy. Well, at least, that's how it works, well, Gestalt therapy, psychoanalysis, existential-humanistic, or some other dynamic therapy. Eighth insight. Expectations kill life. This is a very important thing. It seems to me that most of our problems stem from expectations. Expectations are like a morality police or a thought police of your concepts. Well, the source of expectations, of course, are concepts. That is, you disagree with the fact that the world is like this, but it should be like this. And therefore, when something goes wrong, as you would like, you get a focus of tension. You want to make it so that everything is as you want it. And therefore, expectations make you not see the news. Expectations make you see only what you are ready to see. If you keep stepping on rakes, you get hit in the forehead, it always happens like this. That is, expectations lock you into a narrow corridor of problems. Therefore, the main enemy you have in your life, whether your problems are in relationships with others, with loved ones, at work, with money, with health. You are in a narrow corridor of expectations. And therefore, your task is to go beyond these expectations. It is best to go beyond expectations with presence. Ninth insight. All problems come from fighting with life. In reality, we get sick. Well, all our illnesses are, in essence, a way of embodying struggle, a struggle with life. And therefore, we will lay the fundamental principle of non-resistance at the core of experiential psychotherapy, the first one. The second most important is honesty. Honesty means doing what your heart tells you right now. If you follow these two ways, you will stop getting sick. They are slightly more complex than the well-known rules of a happy life, which are often popularized. For example, when a person is advised to do only what they want to do, and not do what they don't want to do. The problem is that in these rules, we rely, we think that we don't want to do this, or we think that this is exactly what we want to do. And that's the problem. We follow the concept like sheep. I want you to delve deeper. The principles related to not resisting life say that everything that happens in our lives happens rationally. Your freedom extends not to what to do with life events, but to how to experience them, how to let these events spin in your heart. If you do this, remaining present, you will never object to anything, but you will never become a reaction. You will never get stuck in malice, anger, hatred, fear, shame, guilt. Never get stuck. Honesty also ensures another important thing. Honesty ensures the path by which you give power to life. It follows the principle of non-resistance. That is, if every time you perform a particular action, you can say, "And this is good," borrowing from the boss from the Book of Genesis, then every time in this moment you realize that what you are doing now, what you are choosing, corresponds to your nature, if this happens and there is some resonance inside, you know, sometimes it happens that you do everything right, but there is a nasty aftertaste inside, familiar, right? Or, for example, you don't do what you don't want to do, but the aftertaste remains anyway, because you are proceeding from a concept. And it's a conceptual aftertaste. And sometimes it happens that you even sacrifice yourself, and you feel good about it. Sometimes you share your resources with other people and enjoy it and stop getting sick. Imagine that, that's the trick. That's the whole complexity. Therefore, your task is to be honest with yourself. Honesty does not mean telling the truth. Lie if you want to. If you resonate with yourself, for example, by telling a lie to another person, wanting to save them from death, for example, or not telling them about a diagnosis, or something else, or, for example, you see your close friend's husband with some girl, and you choose not to tell her about it, and you feel good inside, or you choose not to say, and there's a nasty aftertaste inside. This is a very important thing. Feel yourself on a deep level. You will stop getting sick, and your relationships will become fundamentally different, deeper, only if you are true to yourself. Now your choice corresponds to who you are in your nature. You must be here. You are you now. If yes, everything is okay. These two principles are enough. There are many. There are five to seven principles, I think, of experiential psychotherapy. I think I recorded a separate video on this topic. Watch it, it should be on this channel. But these two principles are very important. Well, that's about it. And finally, let's make it ten. Living people don't get sick. That is, if you are open to life and if you experience what is happening, you will stop getting sick. Any symptom is a refusal to experience. Trauma is a refusal to experience. Trauma is not what happened to us in life, but it is the blocking of the experience of what happened in life. What is experience? Experience is giving yourself the opportunity to respond to what is happening with your heart and everything that you have, without stopping anything. Imagine that any event that can be the basis of your future problems, any disorders, illnesses, relationships, difficult relationships with other people, is like some, I don't know, a meteorite, a large stone, a boulder, that hit a lake, a pond, a sea, and this caused a wave. If you do not resist this wave, it will pass and end. This is experience. Experience is openness to everything that happens. You are happy, you rejoice, you are sad, you grieve, you feel anger, allow it to be, be present in everything, and then you will stop getting sick. This was insight number 10. I hope this is enough. Consider this a video tutorial where, well, a therapist, well, he tried to share his realizations, discoveries. These are not all of them, of course, and not even half, and not even a tenth, probably, but this is what seemed important to me at this particular moment to tell you. If you find this video important, share it with friends, acquaintances. Come to our program, there are links here, if you want to learn to be a great therapist and gain your own experience and after some time share your insights from psychotherapy. Come to our program. We have a large, great team of therapists, a large, great team of supervisors, a large, great team of psychotherapy teachers. So, if you want to become a therapist, there is no reason not to come to our academy. I will leave the link, and see you soon. I hope we will be a support for you on this interesting, very interesting path. Thank you for your attention. See you in new videos. Bye.