Dikes of the Netherlands

I know, that’s a strange title, but you’ll soon understand. Patients often want to know how psychotherapy works. One of the metaphors that I use to explain this was first taught to me by my most respected mentor.

The Dutch have had a most interesting approach to acquiring more land. They have actually reclaimed land from the sea. They started this at a basic level approximately 2000 years ago. What they do is they build a dike out in the sea along the shore and then pump out the water between the dike and the existing land. After this is done, they may continue the process…reclaiming more and more land.

People engage in automatic patterns, often for reasons unknown to them.  Psychotherapy is about making these patterns known, and gaining ground. It is about revealing, understanding, and overriding these old patterns in successive fashion much like the Dutch reclaim land from the sea.

Now the Dutch were not without many different problems over the years with this system. Sometimes the dikes broke or were flooded over. But each time this happened, they learned something new about how to build the dikes in the best possible way to resist dangerous storms, erosion, and other types of stresses. They have become very sophisticated in dealing with these stresses.

And just as a person implements new patterns of thinking, coping, and being, they will sometimes find, that while the changes are in a positive direction, they discover circumstances that send them back into their old patterns. That is a time to learn, and rebuild the patterns in a new way, with increased understanding, so that they new patterns can be maintained through all kinds of stress.