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Indian Summers
(Part 1 of 2)
Passing up the early morning game drive at the tiger reserve (cameras, not guns) in Ranthambore, India, I sat on the veranda of the hotel feeling like a character in the PBS series Indian Summers. Between the raucous sounds of the parakeets and the sights of the peacocks strutting on the lawn, I felt very relaxed. Then I picked up a magazine and read a short article by a guru, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. It was titled “Let Go.” In it, he said: “Change is the phenomenon of the universe and if you do not let go, you will get stuck.”
And suddenly I was back in therapist mode, thinking, isn’t that what therapy is all about—trying to help people get unstuck from patterns of behavior that are causing them pain? But letting go and accepting change are not easy things to do. It even has a name in some areas of therapy: resistance. I began to think about what therapists do to address the hard work of change. Sometimes it’s a matter of helping someone just stay in the moment and feel comfortable with strong emotions, something they have been avoiding for most, if not all, of their lives. Sometimes it takes the form of “normalizing” the feelings—“it’s not surprising you felt this way….” A number of situations came to mind in my own practice where the hardest part was helping a patient simply accept how hard it is to change behavior.
But it was my vacation and I decided to allow myself simply to enjoy the sights, sounds, and tastes of this magical place. I’d think about helping patients do the hard work of change when I got home.
Leslie Durr, PhD, RN, PMHCNS-BC is an advanced practice psychiatric-mental health nurse with a private psychotherapy practice in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The views expressed on this blog are solely those of the blog post author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Psych Congress Network or other Psych Congress Network authors.
