Bottom line is, as therapists, we are people. Bringing our humanity to our work allows us to grow and gain wisdom from an extraordinarily blessed position. Our own life experience is blended with the fruit of our formal education and our window into the growth process of the people we are honored to work with.
I am an older therapist. I choose the word ‘older’ rather than ‘senior’ because, in this context that could be suggestive of a kind of superiority. That word choice alone tells you a lot about me as an individual.
Some background:
- My formal education was pre-DSM.
- I was trained by a ‘euro-Freudian.’ By this I mean he, like Freud, eschewed the ‘medicalization’ of psychoanalytic theory in the US.
- My formal education occurred within the context of incorporation of ethnic studies into academia.
- Ethnic studies included ‘medical anthropology’, the examination of medical theory and practice in different cultural contexts.
- I traveled to India to study ‘conceptions’ of mental illness itself and treatments derived therefrom within the context of Indian history and science.
- Yogi philosophy and Aryuvedic Medicine has blended into the soup of my thinking.
- Ever curious I rode the wave and studied Buddhist conceptions of psychology.
- As the medical juggernaut significantly shaped clinical theory and practice I gravitated towards cognitive science and systems theory.
- Lo and behold, application of systems theory was just then giving rise to the independent field of Marriage and Family Counseling.
As I see my work, I slip and slide between the macro level; the socio-economic-political context in which I find myself- through the mini-macro level of my own familial relationships- to the micro level, my own internal world.
I have a tool kit; structured psychoanalysis, humanist psychotherapy, cognitive therapies, EMDR, hypnosis, narrative therapy, brief focused therapy and, and…
As I think about it, I rather infrequently pull tools out of my toolkit. They are there but the natural process that presents itself with my clients is relational. What they see is what they get. I do my best to make myself useful.
May I be of help? Coaching for Conscious Evolution as Helpers. Therapists, Coaches, bring your whole self to your work.
Contact [email protected]