Some Concepts about Practice
If you want to help someone who is behaving or thinking irrationally you need to be prepared to develop a set of skills to help you to explore their internal world, without invading it with your own anxieties or concerns.
Here are some everyday words that describe these skills.
Empathy: making yourself available to observe and experience as fully as you can the feelings of the other person or group of people, moment by moment. Everyone knows about the experience of being with someone, and finding oneself filled up with their feelings - you leave that encounter in a very different emotional state from the one you brought to it. You need to think of this as a necessary tool towards understanding.
Intuition: taking notice of your own ‘hunches’ , ‘instincts’, ’funny feelings’ and emotional responses to a situation, moment by moment. We often disregard these, and think of them as irrational - but they are valuable messages from our own internal worlds - coded signals sent to our conscious minds from our unconscious minds.
Self-awareness: examining what feelings you may yourself be bringing to the situation. This is important, in order to disentangle what you yourself may be feeling from what the other person is bringing to the situation - which may not be what you think it is.
Self-restraint: avoiding any imposition of your own emotional agenda. Again, this is harder to do than it sounds. We instinctively try to find ways of relating to other people by identifying areas of similarity - so we can easily find ourselves comparing notes with other people, agreeing with them, or offering our own views on something. But if you do this you risk limiting the space for the other person to express their own unique and different point of view.
Discretion: avoiding any premature or impulsive response. This one can be difficult, too. You may find yourself full of intense feelings - good or bad - as a result of an encounter or a conversation with another person. But you’ll need to stop and think carefully before you act on these feelings. They may have a meaning you don’t yet understand. This takes us to one of the most important areas of psychoanalytic theory - and you can find out more about it by looking at our explanation of transference, counter-transference, projection and projective identification.
Reflection: thinking about everything you’ve observed about yourself, others, and the situation as a whole, and gathering clues about what may be going on at an unconscious level. If you want to do this well, you’ll need help. It’s like learning to play a musical instrument: you’ll only get so far without learning from other people.
Understanding: using these clues to form your own hypothesis about what may be going on at an unconscious level that may explain any discomfort or discrepancies. And again - you’ll need the help of an expert to get your mind around this.
Compassion: finding a more thoughtful sympathy for the hidden feelings that are around, as well as for those that may be more directly expressed. This will include a recognition that it is impossible by definition for any of us to acknowledge our unconscious feelings. That’s what ‘unconscious’ means!
Wisdom: formulating a careful response, based on your hypothesis of what may be going on, and your sympathy for how any possible intervention may be received. And it’s worth remembering that no-one gets to be wise without learning how to learn from other people.
You may already have many of these skills, but good clinicians work hard to improve them throughout their working lives.