Inside the Therapy Room: Watching Change Unfold with Dr. Mary Jo Peebles

You know, in healthy development, A good enough relationship provides the conditions under which natural growth can take place.

You know, we know this with children, right? Parents and children.

We provide, as Winnicott said, good enough parenting.

And that is the reflections back, we're not perfect, the listening, the attunement, to a far less exquisite environment.

degree than we do in psychotherapy, but we provide certain conditions.

And under those conditions, you know, there's a push and an extra push towards growth.

And we are always changing.

So growth in that sense means that we are learning how to adapt to the external world and to other people in healthy ways that are going to make life smoother for us.

They're going to help us be able to work and to love, which is what Freud said.

Now, if we move to psychotherapy, remember that psychotherapy is a place where people come in and they've encountered difficulties

working or difficulties loving.

And in my mind, Eric, our role as psychotherapists is to bring our body of knowledge to understanding What has gotten in the way of that normal, healthy growth and development? So if they weren't bringing difficulties to us, I mean, a very humanistic approach to psychotherapy is, and this is kind of Carl Rogers' approach, right, is that we listen, we reflect, and the natural growth processes take over.

And that was Carl Rogers' approach.

That's a humanistic approach.

That's the school of psychotherapy, which is true under certain conditions with certain patients.

Now, you might remember I have a background in working in hospital settings with severely disturbed folks, you know, with schizophrenia, with bipolar, with complex developmental trauma who had to be hospitalized.

And I have, in addition to that, 25 years of outpatient private practice.

So I have a range.

So I understand that different people require different kinds of knowledge-based interventions.

Okay.

So back to the question about is relationship enough.

You know, there was fascinating research done in the 50s about this very thing, where it was found, you know, what Carl Rogers identified empathy, warmth, and genuineness as being the key to psychotherapy.

If you provide that, you've got it.

And there were fascinating experiments done where we took barbers and, you know, hairstylists and professors and neighbors and sat them down, and you got the same ratings.

and empathy, warmth, and genuineness, and feeling good afterwards, as you did with a therapist.