Therapy is a performance

Five participants described a process of trying to make sense of their role in therapy.

Emma was the exception. This was a consuming process and distracted the participants from why they had gone to therapy. The participants were reluctant to trust their initial experiencing and persisted in therapy. The theme was represented in different ways by the participants.

Sophie felt under pressure to align with her therapist:

“I felt in that therapeutic relationship, I felt angry a lot of the time. I always had a sense with Beth [the therapist] that she thought she was two or three steps ahead of me and she was just waiting for me to catch up. So she would often say things like ‘and that’s because’….and I ended up feeling [pause]

that I was almost trying to sort of second guess the answer that she wanted me to come up with”. (Sophie)

In this extract, Sophie recognises that she felt angry about the therapeutic relationship, yet she remained in the therapy for two years and tried to make it work.

She silenced her reservations about the way her therapist was working and it seems that she performed, rather than engaged, in therapy. Her attempt to please her therapist or to be a ‘good client’, rather than being herself, was reinforced later in her account, when she said, “and you know I got a long long way away from myself in those sessions”.

Some participants described remaining passive in therapy. Caroline remained in therapy for a further 65 sessions after deciding it was not meeting her needs. She was aware that specific interventions made by her therapist were unhelpful:

“She would talk to me about, or at me, it felt, about, ‘well you know this is what you’ll experience and these are the sort of thoughts you might think’

[pause] and I used to think, ‘no I don‘t, no that isn’t’. It’s almost like she’d read a book on childhood sexual abuse and that all victims feel this so obviously that’s what you must feel”. (Caroline)

Although Caroline is clear that her therapist was wrong in this extract, she did not tell her therapist that the intervention was incorrect. While it seems that Sophie was trying to please her therapist by fitting in with her therapist’s worldview, it appears that Caroline decided to remain silent.

This sense of remaining passive while trying to understand therapy was also shared by Alison as she recalled, “I really shouldn’t have gone back after the first one really because I didn’t feel comfortable from the start”. Alison tried to make sense of her experience by referring to popular discourses about therapy when she said, “I hadn’t had therapy before so I thought, ‘oh maybe this is part of it or something’. I don’t

know. I mean you hear about people going through turmoil in therapy. I thought

‘maybe this is it’”. Rather than listening to her doubts, Alison searched for a way to legitimise what was happening in her therapy. Similarly, John struggled to understand what was happening when he said, “actually for the first couple of sessions I kept it to myself. So once I came out I thought, ‘what was all that about?’

And I didn’t really want to share it with anyone else”. For John, therapy was a performance outside the room too, and this was an unsettling experience for him. He felt ashamed to tell anyone that he was still going to a therapy that was not working, and had to pretend to his wife that it was going well because it was expensive.

Some accounts referred to the ‘routine’ of therapy. In the following extract, Alison describes therapy as a routine she performed:

“I’d just go into that room [pause] which was bizarre because it had a bolt on the door and that wasn’t very good either. So, that just gave you a bad [laughs] from the start...I’d just go in there, she’d interrogate me and rape me and then chuck me out and I’d give her money for it and it was horrible”.

(Alison)

Caroline also referred to performing a routine and referred to the “saga of the cup of tea” and feeling forced to participate in the therapist’s rituals. She felt obliged to drink the tea given to her by her therapist even though she did not want it. She even had to spend time exploring why she did not always drink the tea and whether it was the right colour, rather than working on her problems. She recalled, “It feels more like you’re going along each week and just processing the last week rather than actually really doing anything in depth, and there were an awful lot of issues really that needed to be worked through”.

The therapy routine was experienced differently by Olivia (therapy 1) because she was waiting for the therapist to help her. She recalled, “I can remember just looking at this person thinking, ‘are you going to say anything?’”. She referred to feeling

‘frozen’ and not knowing how to make use of therapy. She was unable to engage in therapy because she had no idea how to. Her inner experiencing was preoccupied with the therapist’s performance rather than the reasons why she had gone to therapy.

Unlike the other participants, Olivia saw it as the therapist’s role to explain and facilitate the process.

In their talk about subsequent therapies, some of the participants felt that this was when “the real work started” (Alison), suggesting that the previous therapy was superficial. John felt that his therapist was not interested in him and “I was just there really to give her someone to talk to for an hour and to pay for the privilege”.

He felt that therapy was simply a “chat”. His therapist used the sessions to talk about herself, and this silenced him. He recalled, “she hardly knows me, part of it was, is she dismissing what I might have to bring?”. Caroline also felt her therapy lacked depth:

“I’d had the feeling for quite some time really that this wasn’t really, if I’m honest I think it was probably a good 30 to 35 weeks of therapy, probably even more, that didn’t feel that it was therapy, just felt like a bit of a chat really”. (Caroline)