I recently came across a wonderful post by Jennifer Kunst, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, working with adults and couples in her private practice in Pasadena, CA. and I was deeply deeply touched by her post.
The post was titled, No Limelight Here: Good Quality Psychotherapy Is Humble Work – Success in therapy requires simple, humble, daily effort
It whispered to me from start to finish but there were a few lines which were especially moving.
She wrote: ”Day after day, month after month, in a room known for its privacy and confidentiality, a therapist quietly meets with another person … There is no applause, no real audience to speak of. There are just two people, engaged in an intimate exchange with no witnesses. The work of tending the mind, heart, and soul of another turns out to be a lot like the humble act of washing someone’s feet”.
Also, ” … I, too, have impulses to live in the limelight. I suppose that writing a blog and even a book is an expression of that impulse! But, with help from my own therapists, I have worked hard to not make a lifestyle out of it. When I am able to rein in my impulses and devote myself to the simple, private work before me, I find myself more rested, more centered, and more grounded. I discover anew each day that quiet, humble work can build a solid foundation from which real creativity and success can stem. It is the only way I know to keep at the daily discipline of being a psychotherapist”.
The post led me to revisit some of my own understandings of who a therapist might be and what a therapist might offer.
I will write further on what I believe some of the essentials of therapy are, but running throughout my own practice, there a recurring existential conundrum is not only my jousting with the limelight impulses (her struggle), but addressing the issue of ‘whom I am actually in my therapy room for’? My work is often enormously gratifying. Is this why I do it? For my feelings of gratification? Or is it for my clients? Can I even separate these needs? Surely I am entitled to have some inner reward for what is often profound and draining work?
My oasis, my resolution, emanates from my own therapy experience some 40 years ago when I was lost, desperate, alienated. I was fortunate enough to meet a wonderful therapist and human being, who held me quietly during my turbulence – a warm, accepting, soul who believed in me in such a way that I was able to slowly learn to believe in myself.
When I sit with clients, all I try to be is the kind of person whom I got to know 40 years ago. My role is just to offer my clients what was once so generously, warmly, charmingly, humorously and lovingly offered to me. And I hold him close to me in the room and in my life, despite there effluxion of 40 years.
Michael Cohn Sept 2014
