KEYS AND KEYHOLES

11 Apr KEYS AND KEYHOLES

Its’s been a long time since I’ve published something. I often happen to ask myself whether my thoughts are worth sharing. I should define what is interesting and what’s not, but I will put aside my thoughts, and I will get on with it.

During the last three years I’ve had the honor of working with M. . M. is a 50 years old man, expat, who comes to my practice with a not yet open existential crisis, rather on the verge of.

We slowly build our relationship and the therapeuthical alliance, which evolves using non conventional methods: music.

M. is a composer and he’s part of a band, but, in my eyes, he’s the real core of it, he writes and composes songs. Why is he choosing to stay on the background?

Therapy unroll while M. looks for his path, and his comfortability.

I must admit that for me it has been a very slow process, but inesorable. M. really helped me appreciate slowness.

During our sessions, which are continously florish of new songs that stems from things that we explore together and then spring to life (I am very honored and proud), we realized that therapy is the quest for people’s keyholes.

people are like keys and the process is about founding the right keyhole for that very key. Looking at keys with a superficial attention, all keys look the same. But only one open a specific keyhole.

Writing songs “together” we succeeded in accessing M.’s deepest core and strive toward his wholeness. In order to make space for music, and to embrace his nature, M. had to leave behind, in time, complacency and compliance to others’ bidding.

He enabled himself to do that by looking at his specific indentations as unique key, realizing therefore that he doesn’t need anybody else’s keys. Not only, but also choosing to give up trying to open up doors that didn’t correspond to him and aknowledging that certain keyholes won’t never open (compulsion to repeat).

Where does the door open to? It opens on that individual’s specific path, that has nothing to do with beautiful/ugly, right/wrong , but just with that person. Open the door means giving ourselves the possibility to run across a different route from the one one ran until this moment.

It comes to mind that also in the movie “Matrix” a very important charachter is the keymaker, who consent Neo to access the Source. I like to think that we all are looking for our Source, and that as a therapist I can be the Keymaker, and facilitate and accompany during the quest.

My point being that during therapy, the therapist has to adapt to who is sitting in front of him/her, and that this doesn’t mean being false, it means to try and find the best way to access efficiently to help that individual pursue his/her goals. Every individual has his ones. This is why in psychology techniques aren’t enough by themselves but they need to be implemented with humanity and compassion. With M. it was music, With others it could be to speak their mother tongue (for instance with a second generation immigrant in the US, whose mother tongue was Spanish, talking in Spanish would make emerge aspects different than those that emerged in english, mainly emotions related). this means being the Keymaker to me.

It also means to provide an inspiration, a different option. to allow the patient to experience different possibilities in the safety of the therapy room, that are not viable in the real world.

Learn to be ourselves with whatever means necessary.