Good night, dear friends! At this late hour, I want to share with you some thoughts on how therapy can work. To make the material visual, I will present my thoughts in the form of a dialogue with an imaginary interlocutor. So let's call him - Interlocutor. I will call myself V.M., i.e. Vladislav Mashin. Interlocutor: How can therapy, or more precisely, the support received by the client during therapy, be useful? Here I mean a situation where the client did not receive the support and acceptance from his parents in childhood that were required for his normal development and adaptation (a fairly common situation) and now experiences shame, fear of presenting himself, self-doubt or something like that, and we are trying to give him support in therapy. In my opinion, this should not be done, since it will only make him weak, and weakness will cause anger and aggression. You just need to try to accept childhood and live in the present, “here and now.” V.M.: I don’t quite understand how this can make the client weak. Or rather, I don’t understand it at all. Where did this idea come from? And living “here and now” can be quite difficult, this is precisely what therapy is intended for, in it you can learn to “ground yourself”, be here and now, live not with regrets about the past, and not with dreams of the future. If you haven’t been able to live “here and now” since childhood, then just starting to do it now can be quite a difficult task. But we can fix everything! At meetings, a psychologist creates conditions where you can learn to live here and now for at least an hour during a meeting with him. In the future, this experience can be used in real life. I think that an analysis of how the client builds his life outside the office will also contribute to this. And the very support that was so lacking in childhood can be completely “received” in therapy. Interlocutor: But in therapy you cannot get from a psychologist all that what he failed to receive from his parents in childhood, the psychologist will not be able to completely eliminate this deficit, so to speak. V.M.: Of course, I agree with this. We may not completely overcome the consequences, but we can greatly reduce them and make the client’s life more comfortable. In therapy, you can learn to deal with your problem in a new way, to learn to be its master, and not to obey it. The client receives support, acceptance, sympathy from the therapist, at meetings with the psychologist his relationship with his parents, his attitude towards them are sorted out, something is rethought, some unexperienced emotions are experienced that are associated with parents and childhood, and so the influence of these emotions decreases on a person, the influence on him of the attitudes formed in childhood decreases. Of course, it is not uncommon for certain problems to be completely overcome. Yes, it’s possible that you won’t be able to become a new, different person during therapy, but changing a lot, becoming much more satisfied with yourself and your life is a completely feasible task. Interlocutor: Let’s say you compensated for the lack of support from your parents with your support, and then, after a certain period of time, when the client’s level of compensation decreases over time, he will again have this very deficit that we were moving away from, and with it the need for compensation will again appear. And this will happen all the time; there is no way out of this situation. Of course, this idea is erroneous; my clarification is required here. Rejection is cured by acceptance. PS In a sense, this material is a repetition of my previous publications; my previous article on this topic in the “Articles” section was lost by me.