thegoodfellas/blogset-br huggingface dataset:
agora - se eu nao sou bom para ele, se ele se sente Eu nao sou bom, entao isso prova que eu sou apenas um nao e bom para ninguem ". E que, uh - em qualquer lugar perto dele?Oh, bem, outras pessoas ja me disseram isso tambem.Yeah. M-hm. Eu vejo. Entao, voce se sentiria se, se voce for pelo que os outros - o que muitos outros ja disseram, entao, entao voce nao e bom. Nao e bom para ninguem.(Silencio dos 3 minutos, 40 segundos)Eu nao sei se isso vai ajudar ou nao, mas eu gostaria apenas de dizer que - eu acho que posso understandpretty bem - o que e sentir que voce e apenas nao e boa para ninguem, porque houve uma epoca em que - Eu me senti desse jeito em mim E eu sei que ela pode ser realmente dificil.(Comentario: Este e um tipo incomum de resposta para que eu faca Eu simplesmente senti que eu queria compartilhar minha experiencia com ele.- Para que ele saiba que ele nao estava sozinho).profunda empatia sempre significa "ouvir com o terceiro ouvido", em que um contato regressiva com a propria niveis mais profundos sentimentos ea capacidade de imaginar o que um se sentiria em uma situacao semelhante sao importanteselementos.Rogers descreve como ele desenvolveu gradualmente mais confianca em seu proprio nivel mais intuitiva:Confio os sentimentos, as palavras, os impulsos, fantasias, que surgem em mim. Dessa forma, eu estou usando mais thanmy auto-consciente, com base em algumas das capacidades do meu organismo todo.Por exemplo, "De repente, tive a fantasia de que voce e uma princesa, e que voces gostariam que fossemos seus assuntos."Ou, "Eu sinto que voce e o juiz, bem como o acusado, e que voce esta dizendo para si mesmo com severidade:" Voce e culpado em todos os aspectos. "Ou a intuicao pode ser um pouco mais complexa. Enquanto um executivo responsavel esta falando, eu de repente, pode ter a fantasia do menino que ele esta carregando dentro de si mesmo - o menino que ele era timido, insuficiente, com medo - uma crianca, ele se esforca para negar, de quem se envergonha . E eu estou desejando que ele iria amar e cuidar deste jovem. Entao eu posso voz essa fantasia - nao como algo verdadeiro, mas como uma fantasia em mim. Muitas vezes isso traz uma profundidade surpreendente de reacao ereflexoes profundas.Gendlin, tambem, descreve como um terapeuta pode imaginar empaticamente, com base no seu proprio fluxo de pensamentos e sentimentos, o que o cliente esta passando, ou pode tentar evocar o sentimento de sentir o que o cliente diz:O paciente fala, talvez se muito valor por ter um ouvinte simpatico e atencioso, mas nada de relevancia terapeutica e dito.Nao e apenas falar sobre a comida do hospital, os eventos da semana docomportamento dos outros, um pouco de raiva ou tristeza, nenhuma exploracao me tornar a pessoa que expressa os sentimentos e significados sentiu eu digo: "Que lugar para a 'ou' Gee, e eles nao me importo o que voce pensa ele ', ou' eu acho que nos faz
The term 'congruent' is one I have used to describe the way I would like to be. By this I mean that whatever feeling or attitude I am experiencing would bematched by my awareness of that attitude. When this is true, then I am a unified or integrated person in that moment, and hence I can be whatever I deeply am. This is a reality which I find others experience as dependable. This also means that the therapist should give priority to discussing his own feelings whenever theypersistently stand in the way of the other two basic attitudes. Initially, Rogers considered such moments of self-expression as a 'help in need', as a therapist's last resort in discarding obstacles to his involvement with the client's experiential world. Gendlin, on the other hand, emphasises more the gain, for therapist and client, resulting from daring to present oneself as 'not perfect':'Congruence' for the therapist means that he need not always appear in a good light, always understanding, wise, or strong. I find that, on occasion, I can be quite visibly stupid, have done the wrong thing, made a fool of myself. I can let these sides of me be visible when they have occurredin the interaction. The therapist's being himself and expressing himself openly frees us of manyencumbrances and artificialities, and makes it possible for the schizophrenic (or any client) to come in touch with another human being as directly as possible. The personal presence of the therapist should also be apparent from his concrete methodology, from the specific interventions and procedures used to facilitate and deepen the client's discourse. Important here is that the 'technique' should rest on an underlying attitude, that the therapist should stand behind it with his whole being , and that his work method should suit his personality. Rogers noticed 'with horror' in some of his pupils how reflecting feelings had deteriorated into aping, into a 'wooden technique',no longer carried by an inner attitude which emanates from an attempt to understand and check thisunderstanding (. Rogers' view on the therapist's contribution thus increasingly evolved towards a metatheory, in which a number of basic attitudes are emphasised and in which concrete recipes and formulas of intervention have faded into the background. Gendlin writes about this evolution:Gone are formulas - even that most characteristic of client-centred modes of responding, which was called 'reflection of feeling'. As the term 'empathy' implies, we strive as always to understand and sense the client's feeling from his own inward frame of reference, but now we have a widerscope of different behaviours with which therapists respond to clients. In fact, I believe that it was in part the undesirable tendency toward formulas and stereotyped ways of responding which perhaps led Rogers to formulate this condition of 'congruence' as essential.Because of the prime importance of the therapist's authenticity - but also perhaps because he was no great believer in the power of technique per se - Rogers thus emphasises respect for each therapist's personal style. He does not want to put him in a methodological strait-jacket which would
sometimes prevent us from letting the client'sexperience emerge fully, as it is. Life issues with which we have not dealt yet, personal needs which play along during therapy, personal vulnerabilities and blind spots, all may cause us to feel threatened and unable to follow with serenity certain experiences of our client . To empathise with the experiential world of another person with values vastly different from our own, to let feelings of powerlessness and hopelessness emerge, to empathise with intense happiness, to deal without undue defensiveness with a client's intense negative or positive feelings towards us, all this is not easy. Because of our own experience of threat and defensiveness, there is a danger of us being so busy maintaining our own equilibrium that we break the deepening of the client's self-exploratory process either by keeping too much distance or by losing ourselves in the other. Rogers puts it as follows:Can I be strong enough as a person to be separate from the other? Can I be a sturdy respecter of my own feelings, my own needs, as well as his? Can I own and, if need be, express my own feelings as something belonging to me and separate from his feelings? Am I strong enough in my own separateness that I will not be downcast by his depression, frightened by his fear, nor engulfed by his dependency? Is my inner self hardy enough to realise that I am not destroyed by his anger,taken over by his need for dependence, nor enslaved by his love, but that I exist separate from him with feelings and rights of my own? When I can freely feel this strength of being a separate person, then I find that I can let myself go much more deeply in understanding and accepting him because I am not fearful of losing myself. All this means that we, as therapists, need strong ego boundaries. An important part of being a therapist is to have the capacity to be steady as a rock : we sometimes have to pull the chestnuts outof the fire, deal with stormy emotions without being engulfed, deal constructively with hate and love without resorting to acting-out, deal with the client's praise and criticism of our own person; and we have to be ableto tolerate ambivalence. To share empathically the other's world also implies putting our own world inparentheses, for the time being, and 'risking' personal change through contact with someone who is different from ourselves. Venturing in such an 'egoless state' is easiest when we feel ourselves to be a sufficiently separate person with a well-defined personal structure and nucleus. Finally, we wish to point to a last aspect which demands a certain strength from the therapist: the fact that the client's discourse can be confronting to the therapist in so far as it addresses dormant issues in himself.Rombauts relates this being confronted with oneself to the kinship which exists between client andtherapist, in the sense that both 'share a human existence'. He writes:Because of this kinship, it is not only me who holds up
a mirror to the client (although I find 'mirroring' a poor term), but also the client who holds up a mirror to me, showing me what I am, feel and experience. Dormant aspects of myself, which I have barely or not at all realised in my own life,can be touched upon and stirred up. As a consequence, I am constantly being confronted with myself when doing therapy, and led to question myself. Something happens, not only to the client but also to the therapist. We are companions-in-fate, in life as well as in therapy. Congruence and EmpathyAs we have seen, a lack of congruence undermines our therapeutic work. We can perhaps even better illustrate the importance of congruence from a positive angle or, at any rate, draw attention to a few aspects which we have not discussed yet, and which have a lot to do with the quality of our empathicinterventions. A high level of congruence certainly guarantees a personal flavour to the communication of empathy so it would not be experienced by the client as a stilted application of technique. Indeed, the clientfinds himself faced with a therapist who is 'rooted' in his own experience, and who is, from there, trying to understand his message. The therapist not only summarises the client's words, but puts into words 'whatstrikes him', what the client's discourse evokes in him, how it makes him feel', what he does not yetunderstand perhaps, but would like to understand, etc. Even though the therapist is in essence focused onthe client's experiential world, the understanding is always a personal one, in the sense that his interventions originate in his own experience of what the client tells him. Occasionally (in my opinion very exceptionally) this can result in the therapist briefly mentioning an experience of his own, not in order to talk about himself or draw attention to himself, but as a way of letting the client know that he has beenunderstood. This personalised form of empathy can perhaps best be illustrated by a couple of fragments from a session with 'A silent young man', where Rogers tries to share the feelings of hopelessness and rejection experienced by Jim Brown (see especially the T-interventions with an asterisk).I just want to run away and die.M-hm, m-hm, m-hm. It isn't even that you want to get away from here to something. You just want to leave here and go away and die in a corner, hm?(Silence of 30 seconds)I guess as I let that soak in I really do sense how, how deep that feeling sounds, that you - I guess the image that comes to my mind is sort of a, a wounded animal that wants to crawl away and die. It sounds as though that's kind of the way you feel that you just want to get away from here and andvanish. Perish. Not exist.(Silence of 1 minute)(almost inaudibly) All day yesterday and all morning I wished I were dead. I even prayed last night that I could die.I think I caught all of that, that - for a couple
of days now you've just wished you could be dead and you've even prayed for that - I guess that - One way this strikes me is that to live is such an awful thing to you, you just wish you could die, and not live.I ain't no good to nobody, or I ain't no good for nothin', so what's the use of living?M-hm. You feel, 'I'm not any good to another living person, so - why should I go on living?'(Silence of 21 seconds)And I guess a part of that - here I'm kind of guessing and you can set me straight, I guess a part of that is that you felt, 'I tried to be good for something as far as he was concerned. I really tried. And now - if I'm no good to him, if he feels I'm no good, then that proves I'm just no good to anybody.' Is that, uh - anywhere near it?Oh, well, other people have told me that too.Yeah. M-hm. I see. So you feel if, if you go by what others - what several others have said, then, then you are no good. No good to anybody.(Silence of 3 minutes, 40 seconds)I don't know whether this will help or not, but I would just like to say that - I think I can understandpretty well - what it's like to feel that you're just no damn good to anybody, because there was a time when - I felt that way about myself And I know it can be really rough. (Comment: This is a most unusual kind of response for me to make. I simply felt that I wanted to share my experience with him- to let him know he was not alone.) Deep empathy always means 'listening with the third ear', in which a regressive contact with one's own deeper feeling levels and the ability to imagine what one would feel in a similar situation are importantelements. Rogers describes how he gradually developed more confidence in his own deeper intuitive levels:I trust the feelings, words, impulses, fantasies, that emerge in me. In this way I am using more thanmy conscious self, drawing on some of the capacities of my whole organism. For example, 'I suddenly had the fantasy that you are a princess, and that you would love it if we were all your subjects.' Or, 'I sense that you are the judge as well as the accused, and that you are saying sternly to yourself, "You are guilty on every count."'Or the intuition may be a bit more complex. While a responsible business executive is speaking, I may suddenly have the fantasy of the small boy he is carrying around within himself - the small boy that he was, shy, inadequate, fearful - a child he endeavours to deny, of whom he is ashamed. And I am wishing that he would love and cherish this youngster. So I may voice this fantasy - not as something true, but as a fantasy in me. Often this brings a surprising depth of
reaction andprofound insights. Gendlin, too , describes how a therapist may empathically guess, on the basis of his own stream of thoughts and feelings, what the client is going through, or can try to evoke the felt sense of what the client says:The patient talks, perhaps gets much value from having a friendly caring listener, but nothing of therapeutic relevance is said. There is only talk about hospital food, the events of the week thebehaviour of others, a little anger or sadness, no exploration I become the one who expresses the feelings and felt meanings I say, 'What a spot to be in' or, 'Gee, and they don't even care what you think about it,' or 'I guess that leaves you feeling helpless, does it?' or, 'Boy, that would make me mad,' or, 'It must be sad that he doesn't care more for you than that,' or, 'I don't know, of course, but I wonder, do you wish you could get mad, I but maybe you don't dare?' or, 'I guess you could cry about that, I if you let yourself cry.' All this goes to show that congruence and empathy are not opposites. On the contrary, empathy is always implicitly carried by the therapist's congruence: we always understand the other via ourselves, through ourkinship as fellow human beings . So far we have discussed the importance of congruence mainly in the context of acceptance and empathy for the client's experiential world, disregarding the interaction here-and-now. However, empathy for what happens between client and therapist, for the kind of relationship pattern which they create in their influence on each other, is an equally important aspect of the process, and here too - maybe especially here - the therapist's congruence is crucial. Indeed, here it functions as an 'interactional barometer' for what happens in the relationship. We will discuss this aspect later, under the heading 'Transparency'.Implications for Training and Professional PracticePersonal maturity, together with the basic clinical aptitudes related to it, can thus be considered as the therapist's main instrument in client-centred therapy. In this respect, we share the view of psycho-analysts.It should thus not come as a surprise that, in our training, special attention is paid to the personal development of the therapists to-be. We are, of course, not talking here about 'direct training in congruence,but about the slower and indirect ways of personal therapy and personalised supervision, in which the person of the therapist is as much focused on as the client's process. As far as personal 'didactic' therapy goes, I myself am strongly in favour of participation in intensive long-term group therapy. Indeed, therapeutic experience in a group offers, more than individual therapy, the possibility of observing one's own interpersonal functioning, something which is crucial for therapeutic work . Individual therapy may then remain highly desirable, along with group therapy, but it may not be essential for every trainee.The willingness to work on one's own personality development should not be limited to the training period, but should be viewed as a life task'. Therefore, regular peer-review, either within one's own
team or outsideit, seems highly desirable. A sufficiently safe atmosphere is however a must, in order to allow the taking of personal risks and the acceptance of a vulnerable position. In a broader sense, we, as therapists, should take special care of ourselves, and watch out for signs of overburdening, loneliness, alienation, and ofgetting stuck in personal problems. When our need is too big, we may not have enough energy left to turn towards our client with serenity. What could we then do to avoid such impasses? 'Caring' for one's own personal relationships, re-entering therapy before it is too late, cutting one's workload and making time to bewith oneself ... may, besides supervision, already achieve a great deal. Exceptionally, changing an appointment with a client may be indicated. Besides this, it may help a great deal to 'prepare' oneself before an interview. Rombauts writes about this:It seems important that I stop all my other activities, even if only a few minutes before, in immediate preparation for the contact with a client. I try as much as possible to step out of my own world, and let my worries and concerns fade into the background. I also concentrate mentally on my client, for example by recalling our last session, but also more generally by letting him be present, as it were, with everything he evokes in me in terms of memories and feelings. To use Gendlin's terms, I turn towards the 'felt sense' for the client, which lives in me.In this way, I try to increase my receptivity towards the client, and remove as much as possible any lack of openness I may feel. However, should I not have succeeded, the first few moments of the session are often enough to create more openness, not only towards my client but also towards myself. There exists thus an interaction: the state of fundamental openness in my personal world is the soil on which the contact with the client grows; but also, this contact, this therapeutic involvement, highly enhances the quality of the openness in my personal world. All this leaves us perhaps with the impression that the therapist should be a 'superman'. But this is not what Rogers and others had in mind. It is indeed so that someone who wants to become a therapist has to be prepared to go through life paying sufficient attention to his own inner life and his way of relating to others.He also has to be, generally speaking, quite sturdy. This however does not mean that he could not have problems which may at times be quite acute. The important point here is not to avoid these problems, to dare scrutinise them, to remain open to critical feedback, to learn to see how one's difficulties interfere with one's therapeutic work, and to do what is needed to remedy the situation. It is furthermore important to get to know and accept with leniency our own limits: we do not have to be able to work well with all types of clients. We may try to change our limits, but
this is so dramatic that I almost feel he disappears. This is in specific contrast to ourtype of therapy in which both persons are present in a rather specific sense and the therapeutic process involves the overt interaction of the two individuals and the use of the experience of each of them for the patient's growth. This 'willingness to be known' which had gradually found its way into their individual therapy praxis, emerged even more forcefully (perhaps at times too forcefully) in the 'encountermovement' of the sixties and seventies Group dynamics, with its emphasis on 'feedback in the here-and-now', was certainly not foreign to this. All these influences have made client- centred therapy into a more interactional one, with the therapist not only functioning as an alter ego, but also as an independent pole of interaction, who expresses, at times, to the client his own feeling about the situation. On account of this transparency, the process becomes more a dialogue an I-Thou encounter.In such an authentic mutual encounter, there may be moments in which the therapist almost relinquishes his professional role and encounters the client in a very personal and profoundly human way. According to Yalom, such 'critical incidents' often become turning-points in therapy. He believes that they are seldommentioned in the psychiatric literature out of shame, or out of fear of censorship; they are also seldomdiscussed with trainees because they do not fit the 'doctrine' or because one is afraid of exaggerations.Here are a couple of Yalom's many examples A therapist met with a patient who during the course of therapy developed signs suggesting cancer.While she was awaiting the results of medical laboratory tests (which subsequently proved negative) he held her in his arms like a child while she sobbed and in her terror experienced a brief psychotic state.For several sessions a patient had been abusing a therapist by attacking him personally and byquestioning his professional skills. Finally the therapist exploded: 'I began pounding the desk withmy fist and shouted, Dammit - look, why don't you just quit the verbal diarrhoea and let's get down tothe business of trying to understand yourself, and stop beating on me? Whatever faults I have, and Ido have a lot of them, have nothing to do with your problems. I'm a human being too, and today hasbeen a bad day.'Transference and TransparencyWorking through of the transference is not thought of as a nuclear process, as the 'pure gold', in client-centred therapy. The therapeutic relationship is not structured in such a way as to maximise regression. We rather follow an orthopedagogic model, in which growth is stimulated right from the start, and the real relationship aspects are emphasised. John Shlien even goes as far as to say that transference is 'a fiction, invented and maintained by therapists, in order to protect themselves from the consequences of their own behaviour' . But, with the reviewers of his paper and with such authors as Pfeiffer and Van Balen , we have to say - in my opinion - 'Yes, John, there is a transference.' Or as Gendlin has