I've been confused

One of the things about learning and growing and pulling in all types of new tools and techniques into my personal healing and eventually my practice as a therapist is the confusion!  It comes in waves, sometimes deafening waves.

I see this practitioner being brilliant and then this one…each one totally different.

I see the value of techniques and the value of leading with techniques and offering results.  

I wonder what I offer?  

I see the value of support and empathy.

I ask myself - what is support actually?  What is helpful to a person?  

Sometimes we need to be challenged.  Sometimes we need kindness.

And who am I to say what is helpful?  

And who am I to tell you where you should get to?  

Some people want enlightenment in this lifetime.  Others want to sleep better.

So what is the goal of therapy?

These are the questions of psychodynamic and relational psychotherapy.  Always asking questions. Examining the relationship between us. Engaging in self-reflection about my actions as a therapist.  Asking what benefits the client.

Accepting that the relationship is asymmetrical and accepting also the regulatory requirements of a registered health professional while at the same time supporting the client’s agency.  Striving not to make assumptions about what they want or should want or what a “good” life looks like.

And the more work I do on stripping away my own assumptions about ‘health' and ‘good' and ‘living' the more difficult it becomes to be sure of anything with respect to my clients.  I have in the past assumed so much.

And having learned so much from my pain and my mistakes I question my place here as well.  I feel the flow of learning through my clients’ lives. I know they need to do this learning.  I know they don’t grow through magic (although I also believe in magic). I know they are growing through their experiences and it isn’t my job to prevent pain.

But here I am sitting with other humans as their psychotherapist.  Making assumptions. Abstracting away from the particular - words always do that.  I have my thoughts and feelings. I try to mirror to them what I see - the subtle ways they discount themselves.

It feels like a long climb.  

We are all indeed on a long climb.  

Sometimes when I speak, I feel I am expressing/channeling an energy that has arisen for a reason that is important.  Sometimes when I do this I see how my own discomfort with the moment has brought forth this energy.

ARGH.

And yes!!!

I’m experiencing freedom.

A part of me would like to have certainty about what is the right or wrong way to be a therapist, about how to “help” people.  Many of my clients want certainty too. So much energy we spend trying to figure out, manage, assess, control…

I am coming to recognize that certainty - the kind we try to figure out and mange - is really resistance.  Not necessarily in the psychoanalytic sense but in the spiritual sense. Resistance to the fullness of who we are.  To the light that we can be.

The possibility for us is limitless.  Those aren’t just words. Those are my attempt to describe an embodied experience.  

And so what does a therapist like me do?  What is my job?

Well, I breathe.  I am in my office (or at my computer) at the time of my appointments.  I express myself as truly as I can.  

In the places we haven’t been held we need holding.

I’m here to do that.  It looks a million different ways and I don’t have a plan but you’re here.  And I know that dramatic healing that is possible because I’ve experienced it myself.  So if what you are looking for is a sliver of what I know or 1000 times what I know I stay with you moment by moment. With what comes up in our field.  

When we have spent some time together I’ll be able to reflect a lot back to you.  And if you are working with me it is because something brings you to this space.

Something happens in my office.  That much I know. More details than that I can theorize. Individual cases I can describe.  Overarching promises I cannot make.

I’d love to be able to make promises.  But the project we embark on is not a project of results.  It is the project of holding your being. Of being human together.  

I want to close this post.  Give it the right ending. And all that is happening is my vision is getting wider and wider and there is a limitlessness to that growth that is very hard to bear and yet it doesn’t stop….