Reflective Journal Entries: Difficult client doesn't think it will work

From Lucy Waterhouse, with thanks

Another client who I found very difficult to work with was a woman, B, who I have also mentioned in my workbook. She presented with pain issues and told me that she is in constant pain and that she is terribly ill. 

The first thing that worried me about this was the fact that she immediately told me that her counselor had agreed that she didn’t have to pay for the session and that she didn’t think it would work. I don’t see a problem with seeing clients for free in general if they are invested in the change, but right from the outset it was obvious that she had no investment in moving forward through this issue at all. 

That she had so much invested in being ill and disabled and that most of her relationships with friends were based on them being able to help her in some way. I didn’t have high hopes for a lasting positive outcome but still gave the best I could to her. She had no problem getting into trance and I did a basic control panel to increase motivation to change then worked with her using the script that I wrote for my advanced workbook, about the pain suit. Her responses were good throughout and I thought that maybe in spite of her conscious efforts to remain ill that her unconscious mind might benefit from learning some new coping skills, so I carried out the session as I had intended and with full investment on my part. 

When I woke her up, she was very quick to remind me again that she wasn’t paying and that she didn’t think it would work. I had carefully meta questioned her in the beginning gently inferring that her unconscious maybe had embraced the pain as it offered her so much validation and reward. I didn’t use those words, I was much more subtle, and she immediately got very defensive and her defensiveness was suggesting that I was right. She claimed afterwards that although she felt very relaxed she was still in pain and therefore it hadn’t worked. I honestly don’t know where to go with this one, whether she will be back, but I find myself feeling impatient with her just thinking and writing about the experience, I need to look at my own expectations for clients and remember that it is their expectations that we work with, and that I can work with motivation but everyone works at their own pace and unless the client is on board then no amount of cajoling and hoping on my part is going to work magic. Big learning curve here I think and we all need to have some of these to give us a balanced view on what we can help with and how the onus is sometimes with the client in certain cases.