Summary: If you volunteer to go to the clinic, you will get the most out of it. Not your doctor or your partner should have made the decision, but you. With this you create the best conditions for yourself. Because working against your own will usually doesn’t do much good.
The biggest challenge in choosing a clinic is probably getting over the stigma. The “loony bin”, the “insane asylum”, all these clichés do not necessarily contribute to making such a decision easy.
However, I can reassure you: modern psychosomatic clinics are not bad places at all, but facilities that specialize in acknowledging your problems and issues, your challenges and destinies, and specifically helping you to move forward in your healing process.
A voluntary step can happen more easily if you are clear about your topic, as already described. Because then there is an intrinsic motivation to work towards a concrete goal.
Ein freiwilliger Schritt fällt leichter, wenn man sich, wie bereits beschrieben, über sein Thema im Klaren ist. Denn dann gibt es eine intrinsische Motivation, auf ein konkretes Ziel hinzuarbeiten. This also has to do with openness, because otherwise it would be more difficult for you to get involved with the offers. You will need longer to arrive, to accept the therapy, to understand what is offered, to get in touch with the patient community, in short: to be able to accept the therapy.
Courage
Especially if it is your first hospital stay, it also takes courage to face it. And if you have never had any experience with psychotherapy in general, it is even more difficult. Ultimately, it comes down to being in touch with your feelings, and that is usually difficult for patients in clinics. However, this is not because the clinics make it difficult for the patients, but because there are people in these very clinics who have experienced particular stresses.
The emotions involved usually hurt – but we humans, I have observed, prefer to avoid them as long as we can before confronting these unpleasant feelings. It takes courage to do that. Therefore, voluntariness and courage are two sides of the same coin here. This is not to be confused with selflessness, that is, in such a way that you would, as it were, passively subject yourself to treatment, according to the motto: “Here I am! Do with me what you will.”
This contradicts the principle of one’s own work and that the therapist can only give assistance, hints, impulses. In the psychotherapeutic context there is no treatment that works like an operation, where the patient only has to “surrender” and the actual genesis is carried out by an expert.
Being able to engage
So it’s quite likely that your voluntariness and openness, or your courage, will be less than optimal when you go to the clinic. After all, something completely new awaits you and it is obvious that it will not be a walk in the park. So why would you go there “with joy”?
But now you know the initial situation and that a positive attitude would be better and you can work towards opening up to the process in the clinic.
Because without voluntariness it takes weeks until you really get into psychotherapeutic work. Then the stay can be half over. So your first task would be to adjust to the challenge of arriving.
If this doesn’t happen, the clinic may send you home again because the therapists notice that you are not making any progress. But don’t worry, this really only happens if you really don’t want to be there anymore. And in these cases, the people concerned have often left at their own request, because even from a purely formal point of view, the stay is first and foremost one thing: voluntary.
This article is part of the in-depth coverage of the overview article “Inpatient therapy – why, how and where”.
