From the other side

Having held space for clients in therapy for a few years now, I knew exactly what I was going through, but far deeper was the pain that I didn't want to express, experience or even understand. 

After a personal experience of pain, I realised how much I had internalised an incorrect idea of what it means to be a therapist. 

My experience of personal loss forced me to sit with my own emotions, identify it, reach out to my people and decide to talk about it in therapy for myself. 

And while I started doing that I felt a huge fear of being seen as the one in pain. An important question that came up was- Do therapists go through unbearable pain too? 

The honest answer is yes. The more honest answer is that I didn't want that answer to be true. Because if it was, I was afraid of what it would mean to me and to the room I was holding for others.

There is a specific role I play in these spaces, to be the helper, to hold space, to be the sorted one. The role I had built was also partly how I understood myself. Losing that certainty wasn't just professionally uncomfortable. It was personally disorienting. I was sitting with a question I had no answer to - Who I am when I was the one who needed to be held. 

I can now say with certainty that whatever I went through has only made me access and accept myself more wholly. What helped personally in the beginning was numbness, a quick way to survive it, followed by slowly allowing myself to open up, share my emotions and work through them.

I struggled to do that, because I was still strongly holding onto that incorrect and unrealistic perception of how a therapist should be. I was unknowingly holding onto the idea that I must not let my feelings flow, to safeguard my profession, to continue being the one who can hold it all in. 

I was just letting it pass through me without letting myself think about it. 

I was offering clients a room to be human in, while I was refusing to be human myself. 

Lesson learnt, we all go through hard times and we all deserve to be held in spaces that feel safe. And I could only think of my best friend from high school to open up and share everything. She became the vessel for me that I had been for multiple others. I felt heard and understood. I took a break from sessions to fully sit with myself and slowly process the pain in personal therapy.  

That's how I discovered the true value of vulnerability, not as a concept but as a practice. Avoidance had only made it worse. What genuinely helped was choosing eventually to let myself be afraid, uncertain and in progress, as the people I was sitting with. Brown (2012) reminds us that vulnerability isn't a choice we get to make, because life will always bring uncertainty, risks, and moments that leave us emotionally exposed. The only real choice we have is how we choose to face it. 

And thus the most therapeutic thing I did was to allow myself to be a human first. Maybe that is where it begins for all of us. 

References

Chai, K. (2021). An Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis of Psychotherapists' Experiences of Vulnerability.

Disclaimer: This blog post is meant for awareness/entertainment purposes only. It is not medical advice and one must refrain from self-diagnosing. It is in no way a substitute for therapy with a mental health professional and it is not meant to be clinical. To consult with a psychotherapist on our team, you can contact us on fettle.counselling@gmail.com.