I’m With You, Not “Helping” You: The Reality of Therapy
I’m letting you all in on a trade secret here; also some trade gossip and problems.
I’m not gonna help you. No sirree, Bob. If you want that, by all means, don’t contact me.
I don’t think you need help.
I’ll say it differently; I don’t think there’s something necessarily intrinsically wrong with your internal existence that necessitates some sage words or sweater vests or dream analysis or plug in all other therapy stereotypes; no, it’s not that.
I think what you need is someone to be with you. And I mean, with with you. Let me now explain what the heck I mean.
Therapists egregiously and notoriously struggle with boundaries. Go figure, the one telling you hey, do this and don’t do that? They don’t do that and they do the very thing they tell you not to. I’ll quickly give a rundown of why this is.
For one, we are empathetic folks. We don’t like that you’re in pain; we loathe it, in fact. So when we hear the sorrow of stories untold, wounds unexamined, we take that to heart and bodies. Quite literally.
Second and connected, we are in pain. To be fair, ALL humans are in pain to some degree. But more often than not, as therapists we experienced something painful in our lives that was likely remedied and/or healed through a healthy relationship with a mentor, coach, pastor, heck even a therapist, and we want to spread the wealth. We are so thoughtful like that.
Third, and back to the blog title, we think we are helping you. We think that you need help from us because we are good at helping. That we cause others to grow, change, evolve, strengthen.
The arrogance.
I don’t do shit; let me say it again, bluntly; I do literally no shit at all.
I just hold your story, maybe say some EMDR prompts hopefully unrobotically, and often cause you cringe through three or four too many bad dad jokes.
You change. I’ll say it again, in case you missed it; you grow. So sorry, I just have to say the same thing a different way.
You heal. You strengthen. You rebuild.
All you needed from me to do these things that, again, YOU are doing, is that you do them with me. I am with you.
Judge my “with”-ing skills please, not my helping skills.
The core to good counseling is empathy and listening ie legitimatizing your feelings and accurately reiterating your story. Otherwise, I’m just a bloke you see for one hour out of 168 in the week.
Odds are your wife helps, husband helps, parents help, etc. (often simultaneously, don’t help too) with your life. But that’s not my gig. Nope.
Frankly, when I’m outside of the 168, minus treatment planning, continuing education, or other logistics of the craft, I am not thinking about you. Negative.
But when we meet for our hour? For that 50ish minutes of jokes, awkwardness, heaviness, tears of joy, tears of laughter, tech issues, philosophical wonderings, spiritual/existential dread, or your damn mother/damn father?
I’m in. All the way. 100%. With you, never helping you. That’s the reality of therapy.