The Work Cannot Be Done for Them

One of the hardest things for us to accept is that we cannot want the work more than our clients do.

A client may say she wants her marriage to change, but whenever the conversation moves toward the position she keeps occupying inside it, she returns to everything her husband is doing wrong.

So we help her see the pattern.

She understands what we are saying, but she does not want to go there.

And because she has already said she wants to change, her hesitation can feel like another clinical obstacle we are responsible for overcoming.

So we explain it more gently, approach it through another modality, and spend another session working much harder for the client’s change than she is.

That does not make her lazy, difficult, or incapable of healing.

She may genuinely want relief while remaining unwilling to participate in the process we believe would help create it.

Both things can be true.

But once we have made the problem visible, explained the work, and given her room to decide, there comes a point where we must accept her answer.

We either find another way of working together or help her find someone whose work she is ready for.

We work with the players who want to play.

And if I believe that in the therapy room, I have to apply it to the way I work with therapists too.

Someone recently told me I had been talking about Trauma Mastery too much. There are parts of how I introduced it that I would handle differently, but I am not going to respond by hiding the room from the people who may be looking for it.

The same limit we meet with clients exists when a case comes into that room.

A clinician can bring the case she cannot move, hear what the rest of us notice, and see the moment where her understanding may have narrowed.

But nobody can do her part for her.

The room can slow the case down, question what she sees, and offer perspectives she could not reach alone. She still has to let her thinking be challenged, return to the work, and bring back what happened.

That is what makes the room useful to everyone else.

One clinician’s willingness to work becomes another clinician’s chance to see differently.

The valuable people in a room like that are not the ones who arrive with everything figured out.

They are the ones willing to bring what is unfinished and work with what becomes visible.

Players who want to play still need to know where the game is happening.

Learn more about Trauma Mastery here.

Esther