Common advice to therapists: When you work harder than your client, therapy has stopped. I had to remind myself this week. In retirement, without clients I still have relatives. Stan [fake name] calls me when parenting overwhelms him. Each time I’m determined to listen as Aunt not therapist. The two often get mixed up.
Yesterday he called after caving in to his son’s request to miss school for the day. Again. The child felt sick. He worries about headaches, sneezing, shortness of breath and other signs that his end is near. Mom takes him for medical workups and keeps him home from school. Stan disagrees. He tells the boy to power through. Periodically the three go into a family tizzy and Stan calls me.
This time Stan started by giving me an analytical description of what was going on. Basically he was regretting his own decision. But soon his words sped up and blared. He catalogued all that is wrong with the other parent. At first I responded with Ah’s and ‘Mm’s and an empathic word or two. Then I, too, got going.
That’s when my voice changed. I was suddenly The Expert: Here’s what you must say to the child; Here’s the proper language when you speak to the child’s Mother. Oh, how Expert I was. I even gave him paragraphs to explain my rationale. Such wisdom!
Suddenly we both went silent. Hm, I thought, that’s not why he called his aunt. Shut up, therapist! Don’t do his work for him.
I broke the silence, “So, I guess we know what I’m thinking. Now, tell me what you think you should do.” He began a calm, measured reflection. It went up one path, hit a fence, came down another. Pretty soon he arrived at a pair of sentences that were chockful of sound advice to himself.
Perhaps the hardest lesson in communicating is knowing when to be silent. Stan is the expert on his own life. When he wants my input he’ll let me know. Meanwhile, I’m his audience, so he doesn’t have to go it alone.
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