Your Therapist Is Human, Too

A lot of people think that therapists are immune to the normal issues and pitfalls and twisted little patterns that go along with being human.

They think we know better, that we can do better, and that we can do it all easily and without struggle. They think that that's a key criteria for having this job.

The truth is, even though we spent years getting Masters degrees and completing (literally) thousands of hours of supervised field experience, and even though we learned tons of treatment modalities and communication skills and practical work-arounds for all kinds of psychological challenges, we're still human.

We still have personal flaws and blind spots and we still get tripped up in life. We struggle with exercising consistently and being courteous drivers and behaving like adults at our parents' Thanksgiving dinner table. Just like anyone.

The good news is that it's OK. Therapy is all about you, and our ability to see into your blind spots, to reflect you back to you, to place your issues in a context vis-a-vis what's "normal," and to use all the experience and expert knowledge we're steeped in... this all works. It helps. It really does.

And being human - being flawed and fallible - is also helpful. In fact, it's key. If we are the nearly blind leading the nearly blind, we wouldn't be much use if we couldn't relate to near-blindness.

And so the field of psychology continues to exist. Because believe me, if its efficacy was reliant on your therapist's perfectness, it wouldn't.

That said.

Poet David Whyte has observed that it is inexplicably calming and healing just to be in the presence of a person who is fully themselves - whole, aligned, integrated, authentic. We know it instinctively when we encounter it. We can feel it. They don't even need to say anything; just being with them helps us feel better, helps us feel more whole. David himself is like that, for me. And last week, I had the privilege of spending a half-hour with a Native American medicine man. It's unmistakable, and so satisfying.

I believe this is the experience some people are hoping (or expecting) to have when they walk in a therapist's office. Unfortunately, that level of authenticity isn't so common yet. It's certainly something to which I aspire, as many of my colleagues do. It would make the work much less work, for everyone in the room. But it isn't something available through training & experience alone. Being fully oneself is a whole different learning curve.

In the meantime, we do the work and the work gets done. But those misperceptions people have of us can be tough.

I love being a therapist, but I don't like revealing the fact in social situations. There's a sound people make, a kind of sing-song, "oh-OH-oh," that follows the admission. They seem to think I can read their minds, or see some secret inner brokenness that they themselves don't want to know about, or that I'm otherwise "onto" them. Because they feel like an impostor.

News flash: Most of us feel like an impostor in some (or even most) areas of life. It just means you're normal.

I can't read their minds or anything, so when I'm out in the world, just trying to be myself and get to know someone, or - god forbid - flirt with someone, them knowing I'm a therapist sometimes gets in the way.

So, sometimes I soften it. I'll say I'm a counselor, rather than a therapist. Or, I'll say I'm a marriage counselor. This seems least threatening, generally. But it also makes people curious.

"Oh. So, are you married?" they ask.

Then, when I say no, "Divorced?"

I am divorced, and that causes eyebrows to rise.

(Now who feels like an impostor.)

It's a quandary most therapists face, sooner or later - the client (or potential client) who thinks that we can't help them because we aren't the model of what they hope to become. We're too young, or too single, or too childless.

Or, they think we can't help because we're too different from them. We've got our acts together - we dress well and work for ourselves in this lovely office, in this lovely part of town - so how can we understand where they're coming from?

The answer is that we can, usually, and if we can't, we usually know enough to say so and ask good enough questions to meet them halfway. But it's an impossible situation. Just the act of reassuring someone that we can understand is usually further evidence that we don't understand. I'm not entirely sure why, but that's how it goes.

Our personal histories certainly inform our work. How can they not? We are well-trained, however, to detect whether they're getting in the way of seeing your issues clearly, and we're legally and ethically required to get over it, and if we can't, to refer you on to someone else.

Back to those raised eyebrows. Even though I feel a pang when someone infers that a divorcee cannot be an effective marriage counselor, I know it to be untrue.

Doubting a marriage counselor's skill or professionalism because they're divorced is like doubting a pilot's skill because his plane crashed after the co-pilot set a bomb in the fuselage and parachuted to safety.

Any experience that makes us more human makes us better therapists. Marriage, divorce, never-married... parenthood, childlessness... togetherness, loneliness, grief... there's no experience that means we can't help.

So give your therapist a break. Despite being only human, we still do a fine job.