Confessions of a Therapist’s Client

[with apologies to Zev Ballen for adapting his title]

I really liked Rav Ballen’s article Confessions of a Psychotherapist.  Not only did I like it, I agreed with it. I had been thinking of writing something on psychotherapy myself and when I read the article initially decided that he’d said everything that needed to be said – I wasn’t sure that there was anything I could add. I’d also read a couple of other wonderful articles on a similar theme and wondered if yet another essay would be overkill.

But then I changed my mind because this is such a hot topic – even I know a significant number of people who have tried therapeutic and drug interventions with varying degrees of success and failure.

I thought back to my own situation several years’ ago. Out of the blue, I felt very overwhelmed by a few things that happened all at once, and an alarm bell went off because it wasn’t just your normal “it’ll pass” situation. I felt like someone had shaken me up like bottle of fizzy drink and that I’d explode any minute – it was quite a frightening experience.  And then I started to experience anxiety, which was to rumble on for about 18 months on and off.

Fortunately, I was able to see a highly regarded, frum therapist from the outset, which I thought would be ideal from a religious perspective; in fact, it was very helpful, even just being able to talk to someone at length made a huge difference and, at least for one specific issue, it rather solved the situation because I was given a practical application to deal with it. However, the anxiety didn’t go although we were able to find a cause quite early on: my father had had a life threatening illness, had nearly died a couple of months prior, and the therapist told me that this was a reaction to the situation.  This made a lot of sense to me.  So there we had it.  Problem solved.

Well not quite. Now I knew the origin of the anxiety but still had this persistent unease, this pervasive feeling of not being in control, of not being able to live in the present, of just plain fear.  And we didn’t seem to be getting anywhere with it.  During this time I also made another unrelated observation: I started to understand the dynamics of the therapeutic relationship and I became intrigued on the one hand, and yet disappointed on the other. Intrigued because I started to notice patterns of interchange starting to emerge in the way a therapist speaks to a client [and I’m sorry, it’s just not normal]: you speak, they reflect it back; I’m telling you, it can be very irritating.  It was so irritating, at one stage, I actually had to ask the therapist to talk to me normally.

In fairness though, it’s a very clever intervention designed to help the client hear and clarify what they are saying and feeling and, in fact, can be extremely effective. Therapists also tend not to answer your questions; they leave you to answer it.  So you can end up talking to yourself, which is probably a cheaper option. I’m sorry, I’m being facetious. My therapist was a wonderful person, who does amazing work in his community with at-risk young people; he’s extremely talented, highly thought of, and a deeply spiritual Jew.

So yes, I was intrigued, so intrigued that initially I got quite interested in therapy as a possible career and even started a bit of training in the area [another essay in itself]. But why was I disappointed?  Well, I became aware on some level that I wanted to talk about the connection between what I was feeling and my relationship with Hashem. I had been expecting my therapist, as first and foremost a Torah Jew, to relate to me as such.  But he didn’t. In fact, he couldn’t because his training didn’t allow it. I didn’t feel able to bring up the subject because I knew how the “system” worked.  As the client, I could have brought the subject up; as a therapist, though, he would have been restricted in his response.  And he would have had to refer me to another rabbi for spiritual counseling – how ridiculous.  And so my neshamah suffered doubly and, in my view unnecessarily, just because of some code of conduct, which is non-Jewish and secular. My neshamah wanted to hear about emunah and bitachon; it wanted to connect but was left on the ground floor with the staircase blocked and the lift not working!

So what was the outcome to all of this?  After some time, I just got fed up with my anxiety and decided to live with it; I decided that it wasn’t a terrible disease, just very uncomfortable and something I’d prefer not to have, but that’s all.  I was able to accept the situation and accommodate it.  After 3 weeks, it left.  It never came back.  Now in hindsight, with a deeper understanding of emunah, I know why. What had I subconsciously done? The answer was bitul: self-nullification.  By taking ownership of the anxiety, I had unwittingly nullified my will to Hashem’s Will. And so He nullified His Will to mine – and took my anxiety away.