Said to be the best therapist Paul is middle-aged, in a career crisis, feeling a little overwhelmed in a recent series of treatments, one patient claims to be in love with him; one patient pushes him into a corner, he Attacked this patient and nearly beat him; another patient tried to commit suicide in front of him after taking sleeping pills in his bathroom; he also said to a couples therapy patient, "You should abort the child." The patient attacked He is a murderer. In short, all the cases were not smooth, but what disturbed him most was his suspicion of his wife.
Overwhelmed, Paul finds Gina, the supervisor who broke up many years ago. Paul and Gina have a somewhat ambiguous relationship, part supervisor, part therapist, discussing both the case and Paul's personal life, and doing couples therapy for him and his wife a few times.
Because of past grievances, this relationship has been filled with gunpowder from the start. Excellent therapist Paul was a difficult patient at Gina's. He constantly puts himself in the therapist's position, fighting with Gina for control, while also using the therapist's status to avoid looking at himself. When Gina and Paul discussed his feelings, Paul often said, "If it was one of my patients, I would say balabala to him." Trust Gina to listen to him and understand him. He is like an adolescent child, constantly provocative, bent on proving himself before his father; sometimes he is like a child who avoids his responsibility, when he tells Laura to consider referring her, Laura can't accept it, he takes the responsibility When it was pushed to Gina, it was Gina's bad idea.
Paul had put himself in a position from the start where he couldn't benefit from the conversation, and it's no wonder Gina asked, "Why me? After all that, why are you coming to me?" Paul admitted that he came Just to prove himself, he felt that he escaped from here like a wounded child, and today he should be able to compete with Gina. A bad dynamic pairing.
If the power struggle in the previous part bore me, the couples therapy part made me sad. I don't know the cause and effect. Paul's family life is extremely empty, and he puts all his energy on the patient, as if the patient is the whole of his life. After so many years of marriage, Paul and Kate find that they never really see each other, which is a terrible and sad thing. When Paul met Kate, he took care of her as a patient, listened to her, cared for her, took her seriously, and tried to understand everything she said. Kate feels extremely important. When Paul married Kate home, it was as if the treatment had ended successfully, and Paul had a new patient and stopped focusing on Kate. Kate, on the other hand, is accustomed to giving up on herself to meet the needs of others, working hard to be a wife and a mother in this relationship, but forgetting to be herself. Once two people see the state of their lives, if it were me, I don't know how to face this empty reality: we've never really been face-to-face with each other, we've always brushed past each other.
Suddenly I felt that being a therapist was a terrible profession. An artificial intimacy is felt in a counseling relationship that is both intimate and safe for the therapist because it is completely under the therapist’s control. And when he came back to his life after so many deep emotional roller coasters, he felt exhausted and had no energy or desire to manage real relationships in real life. Or, conversely, therapists may be drawn to the profession precisely because they cannot form meaningful relationships in real life. At least I think Paul is, to a large extent. He needs to take care of others, he needs to be in control, he needs others to need him. But it’s not just the profession of therapists. Think about it, how many people in this world turn to work in order to escape the risks of intimacy in their relationships?
In these conversations, Paul and Gina repeatedly debated whether the key factor in therapy was a refined interpretation or a warm relationship; is emotional involvement in therapy a mistake or a benefit to therapy? Paul's treatment is very involved. He will directly say to the patient: "The patient I don't love cannot be treated." Although this sentence is true, not every therapist will talk about it. Paul needs it very much. The patient needs him. Combining Paul's personal history and relationship patterns, I realized that this is not a question of technical expertise, but of the therapist's personality and personal needs. Especially the last time Gina finally expressed her feelings under Paul's repeated hostility and provocation, I understood that not getting involved does not mean that the therapist has no emotions, but that she uses her feelings more restrainedly and cautiously.
Because Paul is so dependent on this part of his life as a therapist, I can understand why Paul was so empty and lost going to see Gina after Alex's funeral. When he doubted whether he was really meaningful to others, whether he was really helpful in other people's lives, his pillars broke and his life collapsed. The emptiness and sadness that pervaded that conversation was almost unbearable, and I couldn't cry, and it was so suffocating.
Just stop writing here. At the end of season one, Paul puts himself into action to find Laura, eventually realizes that Laura isn't really in love with him, and heals Laura (at this point). But Paul's personal story is far from over, he still needs to continue to find himself.
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