After the Break: Finding Our Way Back

Clients arrive this week for their first or second sessions after a long break in August, relieved that the air is cooler, the garden recovering after the recent rainfall, the plum tree from next door lending its branches generously to my side of the fence, and my formerly tiny sage plant now spreading itself widely like some kind of hungry trifid.

There is much to be eaten, tasted, space to take in, to breathe, arrive, sit down, feel themselves again into the space and into themselves. I too wait and hope that in this session together we will find a way of connecting that allows for playful creativity and new thinking.

For some people, returning to therapy after a break can feel like a gentle settling back into something familiar. For others, the return can bring unexpected feelings to the surface.

Clients may arrive ready to pick up threads from before the break or with anxiety that pours down like that longed-for rain hitting the hard, dry ground. Some bring frustration with their therapist at the cutting off of our work together during the break and some arrive with a need to measure progress and consider endings.

In psychodynamic psychotherapy, we often pay attention to these feelings and to what happens between us in the therapy room. A break in therapy can bring things into focus: feelings about separation, dependence, frustration, loss, change and returning. Sometimes what happens in the room can offer a way of beginning to understand feelings that may be difficult to recognise or put into words elsewhere.

It is wonderful work being a therapist: having the privilege of being with so many very different people, full of thoughts and ideas, capacity for change, and the opportunity for exploring and being in feeling with others.

Sometimes this can be a joyful, intimate sharing. At other times it can be a complex, conflicting, hard-to-tolerate mesh of confusing thoughts and feelings that are difficult to find, tease out and make sense of.

It is often this work which can be most rewarding for both therapist and client: the staying with, the being unafraid of confusion and of not knowing, until some kind of route through is discovered.  This is when there is the possibility of co-creating new meaning, moving to a new place of understanding, or finding a new glimpse of hope; a finding a way back to ourselves.