On the latest Got Therapy?, Dr. Dan Rose opened with a line from Wilfred Bion: the goal "is not to end suffering But to get better at it." I pushed back. I said I was fine with just the happiness part. By the end of the hour, I'd come around — and I think our profession needs to come around with me.
Here is the position: therapists should stop treating a client's unhappiness as a problem to be argued away, and start treating their own capacity to bear it as a core clinical skill.
We all know the move. A client says it's terrible. Something in us wants to say, oh, no, it's not that bad. And then we're in a tug of war, trying to prove to the client that happiness is real and within reach. It feels like help. Often it isn't.
Dan named the reason with uncomfortable precision: "oftentimes our interventions as therapists are more for us and not for the patients." It "can be often important for me to make my patient happy because their unhappiness is making me unhappy."
That is the honest root of a great deal of premature reassurance, cheerful reframing, and homework assigned to relieve the therapist's discomfort. Dan's conclusion follows: "So first and foremost, a therapist has to get better at suffering."
This isn't a call for gloom. Dan's whole case rests on the idea that emotions "are not a bug. They're a feature." Fear, anger, sadness, and disgust carry information, and "the mere idea of happiness can actually generate suffering" when it becomes the only acceptable state. A client who says "I want to be happy," he noted, often says it "in a place of despair." Racing past the despair to the happiness skips the part that matters.
Nor is it a call to romanticize pain. Dan was blunt that we can't tell someone "the cancer is making them a better person." Some suffering "seems relatively pointless." Our job isn't to find the silver lining for the client. It's to stay in the room long enough for them to find words for what they feel — and maybe, eventually, the "dangerous thought" Dan described: hope.
Training programs teach intervention. They rarely teach endurance. Supervision should ask, routinely: whose distress was that intervention meant to relieve? Graduate programs should treat the clinician's tolerance for a client's suffering as a competency, not a personality trait.
Pain, as Dan put it, "is natural, but suffering requires work." Some of that work belongs to us.
Got Therapy? is hosted by Michael Baltimore Ph.D. and Dan Rose Psy.D.