Getting in Touch

Last week, I had a session with my very first ever psychotherapy client! I'm sure there was nothing particularly healing about the session, other than the simple Hawthorne effect - here was an eager psych intern listening intently and asking detailed, very personal questions about someone's life, and maybe they did or didn't benefit or feel better as a result of just being paid attention to by me. But we had a good rapport, the client was open to sharing stuff with me, and I was a lot less anxious and more grounded than I thought I'd be. After I got back to the clinic from lunch break, I mentioned to a colleague that I thought, in the minutes before seeing my first client, that I would feel out of my body, like I was floating, and I that I actually didn't feel that at all. I was also worried about how much I'd be sweating from nervousness in the session, but that too was under a reasonable amount of control. Focusing on my breathing really helped. Keeping alert and attuned to what was being said (and not said) by the client kept me centered on the task at hand. And recording my progress notes directly after the session was a useful exercise in remembering a lot of the detail that may have escaped my mind by now.

The other really cool thing that happened was that I had a phone appointment with a local psychotherapist who has some expertise in grief work and running bereavement therapy groups. Graciously, she gave me about an hour on the phone to give me some insight and pointers about starting a grief group at the clinic. Talking to her really put me in touch with why I want to do this work: I want to help people hold and move through their suffering, particularly as it relates to loss and grief. Essentially, she was inviting me to play on the "existential playground" as she called it, to join a community of healers who help people navigate this life/death threshold. I feel very new and humble right now, not taking myself so very seriously or trying to sound self-important. Of all the playgrounds, this is certainly one of the scariest to choose for myself, like being a two year-old at the top of the spiral slide on the "big kid's" side of the park. But this is where I want to be.