Being a client is also hard work. When you are a therapist, your basic task is to be with the other and not interfere with his processes unfolding. Behind you you already have a moderately “adult” group of colleagues from whom you can receive treatment, support, and receive hypotheses, feedback, and ideas. There is a therapist with whom various things have already been done to create a safe and nurturing environment. There is a supervisor - a great, knowledgeable mother or a good friend and adviser, a doctor of personal practice, or simply an outsider’s view that brings you back to reality. These people are always invisibly present in the background as memories, suggesting in the most difficult moments of the session that there will be time for your worries and doubts. place. Even if you are a newborn therapist and are just learning to babble about what is important and listen with your heart, you have someone to ask for arms: the community has withstood it and not so much as the anxiety and confusion of one little person. Among other things, the therapist can always rely on his own client experience, in which he has already gone quite far on his stronger legs. Life experience - heterogeneous, well structured and learned, can be useful if the other finds a way to digest and integrate what is suitable into themselves. When you are a therapist, you are protected and defenseless at the same time, but both in moderation. You already know how to catch the rhythm of the dance of relationships, approaching and moving away to the beat, you already know how to handle your freedom, frankness and suffering. When you are a client who finds yourself opposite someone interested in you for the first time, you are like a lost kitten. Lost in life with its confusion and chaos, just as lost in the office - with its uncertain rules, possibilities and limitations. You have a wide field of experience behind you. Somewhere, well plowed with conversations and fertilized with loving care, somewhere scorched by misfortunes, carefully covered under a layer of protection - it’s not customary to go there, it’s too unsafe. And this man opposite is watching and waiting for something... What to do with him? What can you actually get from it? You would like to get an idea of ​​what is going on before going into something serious, to note your point of presence in the universe, in your own life, in your body... but where is it in such anxiety! And it seems that the therapist is waiting for you to you will lead him somewhere, but all you have is an abstract, unrecognized, time-stretched “bad” and a handful of the same vague expectations and hopes. It’s good if all this is not covered with a sarcophagus of shame and prohibitions. It is not known what is scarier: going into your scorched field yourself or letting a stranger into it. When you are an “experienced” and fairly conscious client, you already know what you will be working on during the session. Or you won’t - and the choice, like everywhere else in life, depends on you. You can simply ask to listen, to stay close and not lead anywhere, to provide special support, to give feedback, to help research, to put together an experiment. You can ask personal questions, confess warm feelings and hug, cry on someone else’s lap, you can argue, be offended, clarify relationships, fly into a rage, disagree, leave therapy and return again... But, no matter what kind of client you are, Every time you choose the familiar instead of the new, you endure many difficult feelings, but you regain the right to consciously remain where you are and as you are. The right not to rush somewhere from the idea that something is wrong with you, that something urgently needs to be changed, and you find support in this choice. And every time you choose something new instead of the usual way, whether with passion or with anxiety, you expand your own horizon and gain a qualitatively new experience next to a stable, stable other. You are assembling your unique route brick by brick. And no matter what you choose, it won’t be easy. Authorship of life - a gift and a burden of responsibility - does not come easy. Being a client is generally hard work. (Spoiler: but it's worth it.)