December 13th 2018
Barcelona in a cloudy morning.
Gratitude and Helplessness.

I wanted to share with you a reflection I made due to a case I had this week. This reflection is about gratitude and helplessness. She is 25 years old, with university studies, and works in the social field. She is cheerful, with a fine sense of humor, and a great emotional pain with herself, mainly, from the relationship she has had and keeps having with her mother, a relationship marked by humiliation.

She told me she’s tired of the disruptive thoughts she has towards herself and others around her (especially her mother), of her low self-esteem, of not

being able to enjoy her life and of being worried about her relationship with others… Well, she has a case where the love she feels for herself and others is quite hurt. On the outside, she gives the impression of living a fulfilling life, but on the inside she is emotionally consumed.

I’ve been working with her for a year now. We have localized, as far as we could (the world of psyche is extremely mysterious) the coordinates of her mental and emotional map, localizing her weaknesses and strengths, biographical as well as systematic and corporal. In that sense, she is one of the patients I have worked the most with. However, and after a long year, we both have the feeling that we have progressed very little.

I told her openly that sometimes I find myself not knowing what else to do for her, that everything is mapped, with intervention strategies done and executed, but there are no changes. She sees this too, although she does see some changes. The first of them is to be more aware of her situation. Before the therapy, she knew there was something wrong with her, but she didn’t know where. Now she has more clarity and that has helped her, even though she’s still stuck.

The meeting this week was one of evaluations (I make quarterly evaluations with all of my patients to analyse changes, relapses and halts). Out of the blue, I thought I could tell her that her healing process lies in being grateful of everything she has lived and is living.

She looked at me in the eyes, and said: “Being grateful for everything my mother has done for me, for all her humiliation and abuse? Being grateful for the shitty state of mind I’m in?” I told her “yes.”

She laughed and said, “but that is like making a Copernicus-style turn to everything we’ve worked so far.”

“Yes, I think we talked about it before, but I feel it more clearly now. You are upset with the life you have to live and as long as you don’t make amends with your heritage and your present you won’t find peace. Making friends with reality is one of the most therapeutic things there are, even though that friendship is a bit sour. I think surrender is right now the way to go.”

We stayed quiet for a while and after that the conversation carried out in a more calm and less anxious way than at the beginning of the meeting (she arrived as always complaining about herself, about her mother, about her ex-partners…).

We will see what the outcome of this is, but be that as it may, this opened a new horizon, and this at last my work; trying to open new horizons and perspectives that are useful for their development.

This experience has reminded me of something I read back then (from Peter Bourquin) and it said that feeling helplessness during therapeutic sessions is very healthy because it reminds us therapists that we are not the solution to our patients’ problems, rather that the

solution is within them and us, and that in the best case, we can trigger the solutions that lie within them.

We have to trust the path.
The sun shines above,
even if the clouds don’t let you see it.