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During their working life most therapists will meet patients/clients who are disabled or who develop a life-threatening illness. Therapists are often unprepared for this encounter, which raises questions about their own mortality and the meaning of life and death. This book aims to show how therapists can work effectively with ill or disabled people, by facing their fears, by adjusting their technique, and, above all, by learning from the patient while accompanying them on their journey (p. 6).
Working psychodynamically with people who have physical illnesses or disabling conditions raises a particular set of challenges. Therapists may be confronted, through their clients, with anxieties about their own health, their own living and their own dying. Illness can change the way clients perceive themselves, their lives and their world, and therapists too may have to change their hopes, their expectations and, sometimes, their way of working. They have to face the possibility that their work may be cut short; that they will be able only to make limited inroads into troubled minds, that their work will not change the way a life is lived, but perhaps only the way a death is experienced.
Certain practical issues may also have to be confronted, including questions about hospital or home visiting and attendance at a funeral. Illness and imminent death can raise questions which are normally ignored by the healthy and the young. In this book therapists show how their work can contribute to the lives of people with physical problems. The importance of witnessing a life and its end; of listening to the almost unbearable emotional pain caused by a childhood disability; of providing a warm containment for fears of death and of dying – these are all vividly demonstrated in the work of this group of counsellors. Unfortunately, the group has now been disbanded, a victim of the recession and of cuts in the budget of the Westminster Pastoral Foundation. This book is a testament to the ex