Therapy Tidbits
Here are some ideas, concepts and tools that showed up today in session.
Being a therapist is wild because I spend so man hours of my day thinking about the issues of health and wellness and growth and psychology and relationships—but I do so in a state of complete connection with another person and their life. When I sit with a client, I am almost completely immersed in their context, which in a strange way means I am dissociated from my own life. When I see a client again the next week, their context and story repopulates in my mind, and I once again energetically join completely in their journey, leaving my own journey behind (for the most part—sometimes I bring personal stuff in if it feels relevant to the person’s story/context) until the session is over and I “re-enter” my own life, so to speak.
Because of this, it’s almost like I don’t have possession over most of what I’m thinking, saying, or experiencing over the course of a work day. If someone asks “how was your day?” I’ll have a general feeling of how things have flowed, but there isn’t a lot of content that comes to mind usually. I’ve found that unless I consciously reflect, I often don’t even remember most of the discussions I’ve had all day—even discussion about topics that really enliven me, or in which I’ve had powerful insights about life, psychology, or relationships.
Recently I’ve started writing down the things I remember (topically) from my day of work, and it is interesting to see the little nuggets that emerge. I’ve been doing that for my own benefit (and occasionally they have led to viral Twitter threads and such—this one about pets and grief came from taking the time to do this at the end of my work day, for example).
Today, I realized this might be a nice thing to share in this space! So, I hope you enjoy these tidbits that showed up in session today:
1. There really is a strange dichotomy for people who have ADHD and autism where there is a huge drive for routine and sameness on one hand, and then an equally demanding drive for novelty, spontaneity and change on the other hand. (This is a major theme of my own life AS THIS 30 DAY PRACTICE CLEARLY SHOWS US, lol)
2. Sometimes self harm (like cutting) is more than just the compulsion. Sometimes self harm is literally artistic expression. If art is an expression of emotions on some medium like a canvas or computer screen, the body, for some, becomes an actual canvas upon which cutting or harm becomes the artistic expression of the emotions (or lack of emotions) being experienced. I had never thought about it that way before, but it makes complete sense.
3. Having kids, working for money, and trying to advance forward in any way is really, really hard in our current economy. The current set-up is actually meant to be entrapment for both men and women, but it is especially cruel to women who are expected to care-take instead of advancing their careers. (Once again, women’s unpaid labor is the literal backbone upon which our entire society is built.)
4. Secrets really do make us sick. We cannot—ever, for any reason—expect ourselves to fully heal while we still guard secrets—of any kind.
5. Privilege is dismantled from bottom to top. That’s why it is so incredibly important for people who are power-adjacent (like queer white folks, or queer men, or white women who date or are married to white men) to do the work of becoming anti-racist and intersectional feminists, and generally aware of the systemic interplay of power systems. Because those of us in this group are just one or two steps away from maximum power (aka white, straight, cis, hetero-patriarchy) we will both have the least incentive to jeopardize that proximity to power by agitating, but also the maximum impact on harmful systems when we finally do.
6. It can be hard to trust our gut when fear, something it is less useful to trust, is also felt in our gut. Being able to tell the difference between fear-based gut discomfort and intuition-based gut activation is something we learn to do over time as we practice mindfulness and meditation, and as we approach decisions from a stance of curiosity and hypothesis testing. Remember, we can always alter course if we end up moving forward based on the wrong type of signaling—as long as we avoid dissociating and instead listen to the messages our bodies are giving us.
7. As two people in a couple grow and heal, it can feel discomfitting when one partner’s growth makes them realize that they were immobilized and not advocating sufficiently in the past. It can feel like a punch to the gut to the other partner when they learn that although there were signals all along the path that things were okay, their partner’s healing has helped them see that, actually, there were many things that weren’t okay. (Not sure if that one made sense to anybody, but I gave it a solid try, lol)
All right, those are all the tidbits I can think of from today.
Feel free to leave any questions about any of that in the comments (I will be sure to leave them on this time!) Also, if there was a topic you’d like me to write in more detail about, I’d love to know.
Much love to all,
Joshua