I hear this sentence sometimes and it makes my blood boil…
“But you’re a therapist.”
As if to say in moments if I lose my sh*t, cool, temper, patience, focus, words… that I am somehow expected to live up to a standard of perfection not set forth for others.
I have also heard:
“Your writing is bullsh*t. Hot air.”
“Go therapize someone.”
“All talk.”
Record scratch.
Having an expectation that someone in my field never flubs is the equivalent of expecting a doctor to never get sick, and then judging them for it if they do.
Your therapists and your therapist friends and family members:
- have bad days
- lose their toolboxes
- have sleepless nights
- experience the symptoms of acute stress and PTSD
- ingest substances
- have sex
- fight
- breakup
- say things they wish they hadn’t
- have limits
- overstep, struggle to set, or don’t know what a boundary is or should be
- date people they wish they hadn’t
- judge
- fu*k up with regularity
- cry, weep, fret, yell, shutdown, struggle
- are done with your sh*t
Just. Like. You.
We are not robotic humans of standards and perfection set forth by some creed somewhere in clinical school. There isn’t a chamber of secrets where a long robed wizard comes out and magic wand taps us into perfect ease and life without struggle.
We, and our lives also fall the fu*k apart.
What we are are architects. We help you, those who ask for our help, identify where there are structural gaps in your health, your thinking, your relationships.
Some of us work in systems gaps too.
And then there are those of us who hold space for the children who find their parents dead, the mothers whose babies die, the spouses whose lovers leave this planet by their own doing. And we help them cope with a loss that will never be retrieved, just managed.
Trauma does heal. If it didn’t, I wouldn’t do what I do and say what I say. I am not designed to be a person who invests my heart into something without proof, return.
But sometimes the trauma rises up again. And when it does, those bullseyes also resurface. The tears, the losing your sh*t, the fu*k ups.
That’s okay.
Why?