"Becoming a therapist is a narcissistically-wounding process." This is what my supervisor told me last week, as I was crying in her office, so afraid that I would say the wrong thing to a client and cause them harm.
It's so hard for me to say "I don't know." Intellectually, I'm all about the ambiguities, the grey areas, the blurry. Unresolved chords--bring 'em! Tangential philosophical conversations that lead to unworkable paradoxes--rock on! The feelings these in betwixt ideas inspire, however, become more complex. The vagaries of life and death that I feel capable of playing with conceptually terrify me at a raw, emotional level. What should I do? Why can't I bring myself to do any solid work on my thesis? What holds me back? What if I don't find a paid internship next year? What if she leaves me? What happens when we die?
I don't fucking know.
Good. I said it, in spades. But then there's the self-flagellation. Why don't you know? You're incompetent and naïve; you really should know. Terrible things will happen if you don't produce the answers. Clients will suffer, my self worth will plummet, fathers will drop dead unexpectedly.
It's your fault, you know.
I don't know.
3 comments:
sometimes you just don't know, better put it's not always possible to produce an answer, I don't know much about therapy but maybe you should make the patient think about why they don't know whats wrong with them. I enjoy gray areas to....nice post
I've been contemplating randomness a lot lately, and how we humans really seem to need solid answers we can take as universal truths to be comfortable in navigating our lives. I think there are universal truths, but they're often not the ones that we want to hear, like "you'll always be with the one you love" or "there is an afterlife" or "things always get easier." I think the universal truth is actually quite a bit closer to the one you've expressed: "I don't fucking know." Not at all a bad place to start from. I think of the good therapy relationship as one of "I don't fucking know, but I'm here with you now, so let's explore that together." Or the good friendship, for that matter.
I wonder if becoming a therapist is similar in some ways to becoming a mother. The enormity of being responsible for another human being's life (or quality thereof) can be so overwhelming, but I guess you just get used to it after a while. You learn to live with that constant, nagging, "I'm not doing this right/I'm not good enough" feeling, and figure that as long as you're constantly reflecting back on your choices and trying to grow, you can forgive yourself for the inevitable mistakes that are born from the times when you just don't know... which, frankly, is a LOT of the time.
Anyway, sending you big ((((((((hugs)))))))). I know you know it's not your fault, Sweetie.
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