Mistakes

"People do not grow in sterile containers with perfect analysts; they grow in messy human relationships with analysts who try their best to do right by their patients  but whose best must frequently consist of reparative efforts vis-á-vis the difficulties they have created."How do we recover from the mistakes that we make? We recover by recognizing that of course we make mistakes because we are human and it is how we learn. I have been in this work for 40 years and I still make mistakes -- different ones, but mistakes nonetheless.   When things go awry because of something I say or do, initially I need to be able to simply accept that I made a mistake, be willing to own that mistake. Optimally the relationship is solid enough that my mistake does not end it and we have the opportunity to work through it, to look at what happe ned and why and how it came to be experienced painfully. Sometimes the therapist's mistake breaks the relationship. What do we do then? Well, we have to sit with it, reflect on what happened to see what we can learn from it. Maybe got some supervision to see if looking at the situation with another pair of eyes illuminates it for us. We learn what we can from it and let the patient go. Pursuing trying to get her to hear the explanation starts to be its own problem.  A wise supervisor once told me that we fail our patients in exactly the way they need to be failed and the trick is to be able to work through that. And he was right. Years ago I had a ...
Source: Jung At Heart - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: blogs