Being a therapist

Answering readers questions: What's the best thing about being a therapist? What's the worst thing about being a therapist?

What I love about being a therapist is the unexpected ways people heal. I like being in a state of humility. I like how one type of intervention will work 100% with one person and not at all with another. They might restore the fight response, tell a long-buried secret, or rework a traumatic incident, and a cascade of changes occur. They will become less hypervigilant, their panic attacks disappear. They are able to open up to friends more, able to sleep, take on less at work, feel joy. Another person, we will do the exact same type of thing and they will shrug their shoulders and nothing really changes, and I have to get in a deeper state of wonder about their structure. What makes them who they are? What needs untangling?

Growing up, one of the ways I coped with feeling lonely and unseen was escaping or connecting by creating stories. When I was little, I would create stories about the ants and their ant families. When I got older, I would sit in cafes and try and find the language to write about how people looked and moved and talked to each other, under the guise of becoming a writer. 

Because of my own disorganized attachment and moving around a lot, I was never able to make friendships that stuck. When I was 18, I read a pamphlet about the revolutionary imperative of friendship that declared friendships shouldn't be about pleasantly passing the time, but should instead utilize the platonic intimacy to constantly push each other to greater self-awareness, greater understandings of what are your defenses, how is egoism or passivity thwarting you, where do you feel unseen, what are your greatest fears, your greatest hopes. 

I fully believed the pamphlet. It gave me the policial certainty that it was great to trap new people I would meet into a manic attachment of deep inquiry, and then when it got too deep, I would find a reason to self-righteously walk away. 

One thing I like about being a therapist is the simple fact that I finally became healed enough to be a therapist and I’m not a disaster of a tornado tearing through my worlds any more. When I first started thinking about being a therapist I told my sister “I want to be a therapist, but I’d never be able to because I would just stay up all night every night worrying about my clients.” I was afraid if someone told me about being raped, I would go out and kill their rapist. I thought I would become a physical therapist instead. I love that through my own therapeutic growth, I no longer fear myself and my reactions. I love that I can hold all kinds of stories and traumas without them destroying or consuming me.

I love that the need for myself to differentiate between other people’s trauma and my own is so important, that I have to structure my life to make it possible. I have learned that I need to walk home after work to get that separation. I can care about and love the people I work with, but I don’t need to bring them all the way home. 

The hardest thing is when people move away and I can’t work with them anymore. The hardest thing is saying goodbye.