Counseling is not surgery that substitutes words for sharp knives. Healing in the psychologist’s office must take care not to cut. Its goal is to strengthen and enlarge wisdom, courage, and tender hearts.
The pace of the therapist’s early evaluation should not open the delicate memories and emotions too soon. First, the sufferer needs sensitive preparation to reveal the trauma, especially to himself.
The unfolding of his life story takes many pages and days to pass before the climax. Some sheets must be reviewed until every page can be understood, absorbed, and purified of guilt. Tempos vary. In most cases, unresolved trauma is a matter of inches of progress and weeks when progress lives on life support, the therapist’s support, and hope.
With skill and patience, questioning a brave patient will gradually unveil what is required. The secrets are like a set of nesting dolls, one inside the next inside the next inside the next. Too rapid a revelation, and the client often takes flight.
The degree of change is not easily counted, measured, weighed, and secured. Sometimes, those who sprint from therapy’s starting line slow down, run out of breath, and fall back. Sometimes, like the story of the tortoise and the hare, slow and steady wins the race
Ecclesiastes: 9:11, from the Hebrew Bible, offers this commentary:
I have seen something else under the sun:
The race is not to the swift
or the battle to the strong,
nor does food come to the wise
or wealth to the brilliant
or favor to the learned;
but time and chance happen to them all.
As this Old Testament verse suggests, there are no guarantees in dealing with psychological trauma. In this way, I suppose, therapy requires something a bit like the faith in an all-good, all-knowing caretaker.
Therapists are not omnipotent, but at their best, they are sensitive, wise, knowledgeable, and experienced. And yet, in the treatment of desperately damaged people, they also require your belief.
Transformation is possible. Then, if the patient’s life story is reread, flipping each page will be like turning over a new leaf.
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Both photos are the work of Laura Hedien, with her kind permission: Laura Hedien Official Website.
The first is a Wisconsin Sunflare in Ottawa State Park in 2022. The second is A Lonely but Colorful Chicago Bridge.
