The Waiting Room
In my practice, I do video-counselling for people who live in remote areas of the province, or for those who don’t have transportation to and from my office. The service that I use is like Zoom, only much more secure: it complies with PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection of Electronic Data Act), also known in Canada as Bill C-6. The app is called doxy.me and it is used by doctors in tele-medicine to meet safely with their patients and discuss their concerns. The advantage of this app is that the patient (or in my case, the client) doesn’t have to download the app to their device. A simple link sent by the professional (me) by email takes my client to a waiting room. The app alerts me that my client has arrived, and I admit them with a simple click. I subscribed to the professional version so that I could see more than one client at a time (as in the case of couples’ counselling or family counselling when the parties are not physically together).
Thinking about my waiting room has got me to thinking about waiting for things in our lives that we wish had already happened by now. The change we want to see in ourselves, the process of grief being completed, the adjustment period after a traumatic incident, the bad relationship, the tension between generations, … the list goes on.
Waiting is hard. The more we want something to happen and the longer it takes to happen, the more anxious we can become. As anxiety grows, the waiting gets harder and harder. And the cycle continues.
It is difficult to commit to the process, to understand that deeply ingrained injuries and ways of behaving take time to change. However, we can understand that it is a process, and give ourselves grace to undergo it. And in doing so, we can perhaps see change more quickly than if we hold out for the “miracle Zap” that we wish would occur. In my practice, I find that the people who experience that kind of change more quickly come to therapy with a willingness to do whatever it takes to cooperate with that change process, and who realize that it might take some time. They know that my purpose as their therapist is to walk through their pain with them as they confront hard things, to give them support, but that it is THEY who are the ones doing the work.
And truly, and especially in the case of “inner child” work, sometimes the change happens more quickly than we expect, and we need to learn new ways of relating to the world around us, ways we never learned growing up or in previous relationships. The “re-parenting” process, then, is the part that some people find more difficult, because they have no role model to follow. The relationship with the therapist, at that point, becomes one of trusting a mentor or a facilitator to their own growth. And I am thrilled to fill that role until the person develops their own confidence level.
We must remember, however, that anything that is a process (like growth, healing, and learning) takes time. And sometimes the growth, for example, seems so slow that we can barely notice it is happening…. but it is happening. That is the hope that gets us through that “waiting room” experience. It is a wonderful thing to realize that even while we are undergoing those minuscule bits of progress, we are creeping ever closer to a place of health and well-being. And it will be worth the waiting .