Why the therapeutic bond is key when caring for patients

Therapists have the daily privilege of sitting down with our clients and building relationships with a variety of people who might not be as accessible in other professions or realms of human experience.

This fact, at least for me, is a gift that enriches our professional and even personal experience and allows us to delve into our deep knowledge of the human being, desire to know that I believe is inherent in any professional dedicated to psychotherapy.

Through our intervention we connect with the souls who come to our office and accompany their suffering in the best way we know how.

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The patient's suffering

Without exception, all the people we are lucky enough to accompany arrive at our centers with, in most cases, a greater or lesser amount of suffering in the form of a state of emotional dysregulation.

Today, we already know that a hyper-activation of the emotional state or a hypo-activation of the same are not abstract phenomena, but are physiological processes that can be well measured in our

nervous system.

The variation in our state of emotional activation will depend fundamentally on two variables; on the one hand, our temperament, and on the other, all the experiences that make up our life story.

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What are we people?

The temperament will come to us given, will shape the hand of cards of that deck with which we come to play on our journey through life and will determine us as more emotional - perceptive or more analytical - structured beings.

The former treasure the imprint of experiencing emotions, as I usually convey to my patients, in high definition. Both the regulated states and the most disturbing ones will be a joy for them and a challenge in emotional management.

The latter have the challenge of reconnecting with their body and feeling their life experience, since their imprint leads them towards the attenuation of their main source of energy, which are their emotions.

We also know that the first group has in its nervous system a predominance of the cerebral right hemisphere, natural manager of the visual, perceptive, creative; and in the latter, the left hemisphere is predominant, manager of analysis and processing more anchored in reality.

On the other hand, life experiences are going to shape our self and also place us in a level of emotional arousal, base on which we will acquire the tendency to move most of the time.

Of special importance are the experiences lived in the first years of life, and especially those lived with the link figures (mother, father or main caregivers).

From very early on, all of us are going to need to live experiences in which we feel that there is a look that gives us the necessary security to begin the path of exploration and autonomy.

Basic Security or Basic Alert

A very high percentage of people who come to therapy have not been lucky enough to have that emotional look on them and they in their life stories and that is why their inner world does not walk with enough calm and security to feel that they live with well-being.

To recover that internal security that in many vital paths has been denied from very early on, to this day, psychotherapy, hand in hand for a long time several decades of neuroscience, has developed many and varied techniques that search for aspects that have been shown to be very useful for it, such as are the presentification, the rooting, the rediscovery of one's own resources or the bodily connection, among many others.

All these techniques help to gradually regulate the emotional state and prepare the ground to work on one's own life story and the awareness and acceptance of it.

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Link and regulation

Although very useful and increasingly based on evidence, there is still no more powerful tool for this task than the bond between two human beings.

To date, we have not discovered anything that alleviates and integrates human suffering more than connecting with another human being, receiving a look and attentive listening, that does not judge us, that does not give us directions on what to do, that respects the necessary silences so that each one of us arrives at the path that we must find to find calm, which, on the other hand, is the only valid and true one, since what no one will find it for us.

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Therapist's task

Therapists must delve into the knowledge of the human mind, treasure many different tools in our work and learn enriching approaches to accompaniment of suffering, but, above all, I deeply feel that our job is to become, in our professional career, authentic masters in caressing and accompanying souls human.

For this it is good that, like Picasso when he began to paint, we know all the possible disciplines in depth, but as we sit down with our patients, let's forget about it all and just try to be souls that they meet and walk together.

Author: Arturo Lecumberri Martínez