Radical Acceptance: A Vital Skill for Therapists in Training
You can’t rush, or control, the process of change. Perhaps that is one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned this year. Change is like a current. It unfolds on its own, at its own pace and with its own force, because it results from many factors, both seen and unseen. As a therapist, you can’t control it. Therapy is only one factor in client’s lives, taking up only 45 minutes of the 168 hours of their week. In other words, you and therapy are only 0.006% of a client’s life. So you can’t control change, and you can’t rush change. Before accepting this simple fact about change, I first had to struggle, for months, with several aspects of the process of change. The hardest part has been watching some clients stay stagnant, week after week. Or watching them take one step forward one week, two steps back the next. This, at times, has felt like torture to me, because I never lost sight of these clients’ true potential. Why couldn’t they see what I saw, use it as fuel, hurry toward ...