What is your therapist REALLY thinking? That’s the question one patient and her
What actually goes on between a therapist and his or her client? Mental health is never out of the news and it seems fresh ‘issues’ are given an official label every year, certainly increasing a perceived need.
Words like ‘trauma’ are carelessly over-used, while people with chronic needs slip through the many holes in a flawed system.
Counselling on the NHS is, increasingly, like a mirage in the desert; the UK Council for Psychotherapy warns that more psychotherapists are needed in the NHS workforce to meet the UK’s looming mental health crisis.
In the past few years, the need for competent and professional services dealing with mental health has grown considerably. There are more and more private therapists and counsellors, and advice columnists (like me) regularly suggesting that people dealing with tough problems find a counsellor – as if that were a magic wand.
Resistance to the idea is common – which is why Both Sides Of The Couch could be very useful. There are many books by psychotherapists about their practice, with heavily-disguised case histories, but what actually happens within the room?
Both Sides Of The Couch is a frank and fascinating account of the process leading to recovery, told by both the (private) therapist and his client. Pictured: Scene from Lady In The Dark
Is it hard to tell the truth? How does the therapist deal with feelings and possible judgements? This book is a frank and fascinating account of the process leading to recovery, told by both the (private) therapist and his client.
A duet for two voices, or sonata played by two different instruments, the text gives a double perspective on one story – during which the therapist himself is led to reflection on his own younger life.
Anna Wickins was a highly trained consultant engineer, happily married with three children, yet still haunted by a traumatic event that happened when she was a student at Bristol University 20 years ago.
When she arrived at the Devon home of psychotherapist Paddy Magrane she was in such a state she could barely speak, but fixed her eyes on his cool sneakers in mute rebellion, deciding to ‘give the therapy process six weeks’.
She dreaded having to tell him her reason for being there: ‘It was a secret I’d hidden for nearly 20 years that had become increasingly difficult to ignore.’ Watching, Magrane – himself pretty stressed-out from private events he’d had to deal with that morning – was disconcerted by his new client and unsure how to deal with her.
Reading his searingly honest account makes you wonder just how many therapists actually feel out of control, beneath their calm facades.
The first breakthrough came when Wickins handed him a short written explanation (on her phone) of why she was there. As a student of 18, she was raped, not once but twice, by a man she had considered a friend. When she told friends in the hall of residence, she was (incredibly) disbelieved and ostracised: ‘Next day, no one spoke to me.’
This remembered nightmare had afflicted her for many years, causing panic attacks and self-harm. Seeking therapy actually increased her ‘shame’.
Like many wounded people, she dreaded having to reveal the awful detail of what happened to her, but knew that she had set herself upon this path because it was essential. This was what Magrane must start to unpick.
The authors of this insightful book, Anna Wickins and Paddy Magrane, are now firm friends
When she can’t bear to talk, Wickins mutely hands Magrane what she has written down. In that way he can be made aware of aspects of her case she shrinks from describing.
Interestingly for me, as the Mail’s advice columnist, this approach underlines the usefulness of readers writing out their problems and finding that very process helpful. I hear it again and again.
The to and fro records of their actual discussions are often touching, sometimes repetitive, but always raw.
Their book, Both Sides Of The Couch is available now
As Wickins relaxes into trust of her therapist, he has his own demons to deal with. There is a subtext as Magrane sees news about sexual abuse by monks at his old boarding school, the Catholic Ampleforth.
He had no such experience, but his horror at the revelations is amplified by the realisation that people he knows are still sending their children there. At the same time he recalls the bullying he did experience, and realises that a whole institution can be ‘contaminated – poisoning the very air the students breathed’. He talks to his own therapist and finally embarks on a long journey simply to stand before the school where so much harm was done.
The idea of the healing journey is important, and he is inspired to make it by his own client, having witnessed at first hand what such a strange ‘pilgrimage’ can do. Because the culmination of Wickins’s therapy over two years is the journey she makes with Magrane, back to Bristol to look at the places where both rapes happened.
This sort of intervention seems highly unusual and Magrane must first discuss it with the control therapist that all practitioners must have, in order to allow them to decompress. Their alternating accounts of the strange and testing trip make compulsive reading. How does therapy end? When, explains Magrane, one or other side decides enough is enough.
Weeks after returning from their trip to Bristol, Wickins experiences the surprising cessation of all her panic-inducing symptoms. It’s as if a boil has been lanced.
Her therapist explains: ‘She felt all the pain and pushed through anyway. And as a result, Anna built her resilience on a bedrock of granite.’
But that’s not the end of the story. Wickins feels ‘profoundly changed by my time in therapy’ – so much so that she decides to train as a counsellor herself. This way she becomes what the great psychiatrist Carl Jung called ‘a wounded healer’.
This explains that an analyst is compelled to treat patients because the analyst himself is ‘wounded’.
Both authors of this wonderfully insightful book, who are now friends, might like to remember that, more than two centuries before Jung, in the Aeneid, the Roman poet Virgil expressed that very idea: ‘Knowing pain, I can learn to help the pain of others.’
- Both Sides Of The Couch by Anna Wickins and Paddy Magrane (Biteback £18.99)