The thing one hears when you are a therapist. Your client's thoughts and feelings come out fast and furious, the pain, the suffering, the family crisis, and the marital dysfunction. I hear about the nightmare boss, their troubled children, and their aging parents. You name it and I have heard it. I sit, I listen, I take it in, I nod, I process, and I hold it. I hold their pain, I hold their suffering, I try to make sense of their world and help them put the pieces together. I reflect, I reword, I educate, I support, I challenge their lack of self-love, and I hold them (emotionally of course).
The abuse they endured, the cancer that they suffer with, the dying that faces them. The loss and grief of love lost, the effects of verbal abuse, the stress of caregiver burnout, the fear of impending dementia. The list goes on and on. And what of the therapist—not just me but the many out there day in and day out listening, taking in and absorbing the pain, absorbing the horror of their experiences.
What about the horror of our own experiences? I have always said no one gets into the helping profession accidently, as a matter of fact I think the best therapists have had or have plenty of pain and suffering. Plenty of the loss and grief, plenty of dysfunction, and claiming it all is what makes us great therapists. We claim that we have pain and suffering and we hold it, that we normalize what we are going through and that we have self-love and compassion through it all.
We are all climbing some mountain some are taller and more complicated than others. The climb might be slow or fast, we may slip down, we may even fall many feet, but we continue the journey. As a therapist I climb a mountain everyday and my clients need to know that we all have a mountain to climb. We have work to do and growth to happen. Obviously they don’t need to know the details of our climb as the work is about them, not us.
So what are we to do with all the stuff we hold? What shall we do with all of the pain and suffering in our lives, mine, theirs, yours? We can scream and holler, we can be unhappy and cry like a baby—and then we act with more love and more compassion. We can act as if we were holding an infant crying out of loneliness, hunger or pain. We hold, we acknowledge, we let it be and then we act. We act with love, we act with passion, and we act with commitment.