Psychotherapy as Co-Creative.

15000hrs

This ongoing series is my attempt to distil and share the wisdom that my clients have shared with me over the course of 20 years and 25 000 hours of psychotherapy practice.

Psychotherapy as co-creative.

My clients have taught me that psychotherapy is a co-creative process, where both therapist and client start with a blank canvas and co-jointly create forms, narratives, and music with the raw material from the client’s life.

Since all creative endeavours necessitate a frame, be it a blank canvas, blank page or block of marble on which to express what is within the artist, it is the therapist’s responsibility to bring the client back to the frame of their particular life experiences.

Creativity needs tension, needs a framework within which the creative act occurs, and bringing client’s back to the frame of their one life inherently creates tension within the client and the emerging process of the psychotherapeutic moment. So my clients have taught me to tolerate and befriend this tension inherent in the creative act of psychotherapy.

This is a qualitatively different experience than the paint by number therapy that is in vogue today within the field of psychology. Where psychotherapists guide their clients to fill in pre-defined tracings with pre-ordered colours to achieve a pre-determined outcome, which is usually symptom alleviation. These paint by numbers templates are the product of medicalized, industry-funded attempts at cutting costs and maximizing profits at the expense of a genuinely creative and original process. There are some peripheral benefits to this. However, my clients, many of whom have come to me after experimenting with paint by numbers, have expressed an inherent dissatisfaction with this approach to their psychological distress.

In their dissatisfaction, they have taught me that the human being seeks for something more than symptom alleviation. They hunger to get at the fire that is the source of the smoke of their anxiety and or depression. That placing fans and opening windows to dissipate the smoke does not address the cause of their distress. Like a car burning oil with black smoke from the exhaust, they are not content to pour heavier oil in the engine to dissimulate the problem, knowing that by doing so they are not free to travel the long distances they desire.

Once awoken to the creative possibilities that psychotherapy can offer, they become engaged in the work of dismantling the engine, piece by piece, deconstructing their lives to reconstruct the life they want.