Hope and Despair in the Therapeutic Relationship: The Paradoxical Power of Letting Go

Christian Sell describes a therapeutic process with a patient who struggled with feelings of hopelessness and despair. He reveals how unbearable he initially found the passivity of the patient to be and how tormented he felt by the sessions at that time. He suggests that helping the patient to find hope depended upon the therapist’s resistance to the patient’s despair and maintenance of a therapeutic posture intermediate between activity and passivity. It is proposed here that empathic immersion in despair, rather than resistance to it, may be an essential therapeutic factor in this circumstance. This view is consistent with Sell’s experience that “letting go” of his position was paradoxically necessary in order for him to overcome his feelings of powerlessness. Hope then seemed to emerge from the deep sense of connection in a shared experience, rather than from resistance to it. This may have been what allowed the patient to reveal vivid and terrifying childhood memories, to join with the therapist in a fluid process of creative imagination, and for the shared task of reclaiming a life to begin. Relationality, rather than resistance, is sometimes what is needed in order for the light to come in.