Recently, I was a finalist for an award for something I’ve been working on for years. At first, I was elated just to be chosen in any capacity. After 36 hours, I wanted to win. One week later, I got the form email telling me I lost. The highs and lows of that week made me think about how this dynamic arises in the therapeutic setting.
Most of my clients work hard in therapy. They come to every session with thoughts about themselves and their lives and divulge their feelings about the most intimate aspects of their inner world. Many of them practice skills or habits outside of the therapy room to improve their routines and patterns. All of them hit walls where, no matter how hard they work, parts of themselves or their lives seem stuck.
I know how discouraging, enraging, and upsetting this can be because I too have been through it. Not just with this award but on an emotional level as well. As someone who began their career being trained in modern psychoanalysis, I have been in therapy myself with the same therapist for my entire career. Together, we have weathered many moments when I felt like I hadn’t made progress in various aspects of my healing. In those moments, I felt like all the work I had done was for nothing, and I wanted to quit. I never did fully quit, but in some of these periods, I have taken a break from therapy for a month or two. In the breaks, I never had any "Aha!" moments, but I did get some space from dealing with that issue on a weekly basis, which is what I needed at the time. Sometimes our defenses dictate what kind of work we are capable of, and my defenses were not ready to relinquish control long enough for a breakthrough.
In our society, we learn that if we work hard, success follows. Sometimes that is true, but often people are doing all the right things yet cannot make progress in therapy or in life. There are many reasons for this: institutional oppression, burnout, structural obstacles, intergenerational trauma or stress, and unhealthy relationships that keep us tethered to our patterns, leaving little room for change and making people feel like failures.
But sometimes success can be defined in different ways. Of course, in my mind, success was winning the award. My friends, family, and even my own therapist reminded me that being a finalist is a success in and of itself. It is something that can be celebrated and used to increase my chances of winning another award of its kind down the road. It’s something to be proud of. I’ll admit that the day I found out I lost, I was not able to take in any of the encouraging things they were saying. But a few days after the news arrived, I added the accolade to my website and felt it was a new level of achievement.
When change doesn’t come quickly despite great effort, one may feel disappointed, hopeless, and self-critical. In therapy, I help people to sit with these uncomfortable emotions and explore what it means to struggle through them. We get curious about the feelings that arise when their effort doesn’t pay off, how past experiences may echo in what they feel now, and how perceived failure in the past plays into their current reaction to being unable to move into a new space within themselves.
Therapy is more than solving a problem. It is a place to experience emotions safely and build a greater capacity to endure difficult emotional experiences. What allows that to happen is the therapeutic relationship, which takes time to build but creates the conditions in which the skills being taught become emotionally possible to use.
While it may be hard for my clients as they go through the process, I see progress in less obvious, smaller shifts that precede a big behavior change. When a client understands what’s triggering them, feels less shame, or recovers more quickly from setbacks, that is success. When I see them tolerate difficult emotions longer and have more compassion for themselves, that is progress. Eventually, I do see these small changes culminate in the behavior change they were originally looking for.
I was hit harder than I thought by the disappointment of not winning. To me, that is an indicator that there is something I don’t understand about myself regarding rejection or competition, and I’m curious to find out more while also sitting with uncomfortable feelings for now. So I will talk about those feelings in therapy; I will explore what comes up with as much openness as I can, and I know progress is not measured in “feeling better” about it but instead in my being able to relate to the feelings in a new way through a deeper understanding of myself.