I used to have a fire burning within me, a desire to dive deeply into my professional work as a psychotherapist. I wanted to write articles, supervise trainees and interns, have my website at the top of every relevant internet search, to become trained in various modalities, to deepen my understanding of what makes people tick and what helps them to change.
Perhaps it was the pandemic or just the accretion of experience, but those professional fires are currently banked. I continue to be invested in the importance of deep connection and the healing possibilities of a caring, attentive therapeutic relationship. I am devoted to my clients. But I feel like so much of the noise around psychotherapy, the idea that specific actions can universally initiate change, the desire to replicate training programs to mainly line the pockets of other clinicians who charge big bucks for certification, the focus on diagnosis – I feel like it’s getting us wrong. It underestimates human nature, culture, how we are embedded in time, and how these forces intertwine.
Rejecting substantial bodies of psychological research can be a dangerous position for a therapist. Relying on some ineffable magic about the therapeutic relationship, perhaps putting all the spark in the therapist themselves, leads to a loss of perspective that can be harmful. I do not reject all research on effective therapeutic techniques or see therapists as shaman or gurus. What I do recognize is that what is transformative about the type of therapy I practice is hard to capture. It emanates from a collaboration between me and the client, allowing for deep listening, responding with compassion, slowing things down, reflecting, working through ruptures, and containing and processing pain and shame. It involves the creation of a third space, an overlap between the client and myself, while also allowing for our separate experiences. Psychotherapy done in this way is a deliberate, delicate, and careful process that creates space for people to bloom into and accept their full, messy selves.
That’s what I try to do, though it can get tricky when dealing with clients across the developmental spectrum from childhood to middle age. The expectations of connection and the methods to get there are different depending on life stage and, like any person, I am more “successful” with some than others. My ambition as a psychotherapist has been whittled down to a room with two people reflecting on the beauty and suffering endemic to the human experience, asking questions about how to live. How do we make our way forward in this damaged world? How do we accept ourselves and be fully present? Sometimes this process takes place in words, sometimes in the creation of art, and sometimes using games and play.
While my psychotherapeutic ambitions have shrunken to the intimacy of the therapeutic relationship, my writerly ambitions are beginning to fire up, though with a similarly small approach. I recently committed to writing every day for at least 15-20 uninterrupted minutes. Using a timer, I ignore my frequent urges to look things up. I let my fingers fly. The result has been a torrent of words as I sort through thoughts and feelings I did not know I had. This is step one of my re-entry into something resembling being a writer. Eventually I want to include more narrative, long-form based writing, but just getting the engine started is a good for now.
Unlike almost everything else I do, writing is based on my needs. Since the concept of writing for a reader can itself be constraining, leading to a performative flexing of writing chops that can result in flash and falseness (like this sentence!), I am attempting to leave the reader’s potential needs and interests out of it. My current ambition is just to write, to build a truly creative life that is not dependent on anyone else. Of course, being a writer does imply having an audience (hello wts reader!), but I don’t want that to influence what I take on. My daily writing is for me alone. I write in this blogging space for myself and others. Perhaps as I string other narratives together, something meant for public consumption will emerge more regularly.
My psychotherapy work is a private creative act. Much of my writing is a private creative act. I suppose it could lead to something, but this is not, cannot be, the main driver. I am a woman in a room by myself, creating a shared experience in the absence of an other.
(As I was cleaning up this draft, I read an email promoting a writer’s retreat. My heart sped up. The images of community came involuntarily. So maybe I am protecting my ambitious, creative self by claiming no desire for an audience. Just have allow myself to be as I am in this moment.)