Book: The gift of psychotherapy

If you make a mistake, admit it. Any attempt to evade will eventually hit you. The patient will still feel that you are acting in bad faith, and therapy will suffer from this. Moreover, openly acknowledging a mistake is a good example for patients and another confirmation that they are significant to you.

“Like an acorn becomes a big oak…” What an amazingly liberating and inspiring image! He forever changed my approach to psychotherapy, offering a new vision: my task is to remove the obstacles blocking the path of patients. I don't have to do all the work myself; I am not obligated to inspire the patient with a desire to develop, to invest in him curiosity, will, striving for life, caring, loyalty, or any of the myriad characteristics that make us human. No, my task is to identify and remove obstacles. Everything else, I thought, would follow automatically, spurred on by the drive and forces of self-actualization within the patient.

One of the main forms of denial of death is our belief in personal uniqueness, in that we are not subject to inescapable biological rules and that life does not deal with us as brutally as the rest.