HOW I WORK
Choosing a therapist is a lot like dating – it can feel overwhelming.
You scroll online through numerous profiles, look at photos, read through practice descriptions and philosophies that sound mostly the same.
If you’re still awake, you note credentials and abbreviations that don’t mean much to you, until you start feeling discouraged and tell yourself that it’s not that bad – and you don’t really need to see a therapist now anyway.
I cannot tell you how to fix your life.
Twenty years ago, when looking for my first therapist, I wanted someone to tell me how to fix mine.
I considered myself an aware and intelligent person; I’d read several self-help books and implemented some of its advice – but I still felt stuck.
Lonely and scared. Scared that nothing in my life would ever change or that everything would change so much that I wouldn’t know how to control it and wouldn’t be able to deal with it. Worst of all, I felt that it was all my fault.
Everyone is a work-in-progress.
After so many different experiences in individual, couples and group therapy, I am enriched with some eye-opening insights, much healing, difficult revelations, and quite a few disappointments still fresh in my mind.
Over the years, my own therapeutic style has adjusted and evolved to include not only my professional growth and academic learning, but my personal experience on the couch.
There are eight things that I’ve learned about myself in therapy and consciously implement in my practice:
No one is an expert on me except me.
Early on in therapy, I used to crave “fixes” and wanted advice; now I value curiosity and well-thought-out questions that help me figure things out for myself.
Therapeutic relationship, or emotional chemistry, is more important for progress than my therapist’s credentials.
I used to think that therapists with certain letters after their names were more effective. I now know that one’s professional resume is not as important as how they make me feel.
I want my patients to feel safe, seen and valued.
A therapy session should be all about the patient!
My first therapist used to interrupt me with lengthy anecdotes from his own life, and I never knew how to stop him. I didn’t want to seem rude or ungrateful.
After several months of working together, I felt that I knew more about his family than he knew about mine.
As a therapist, my priority and responsibility are to make my patients feel heard and understood.
I used to think that coming to an office was the best way to do therapy.
Until I started seeing patients via Zoom and became an online patient myself. I realized that our perceived barriers to connection are as real as we make them to be. Now my patients and I connect through our intimate personal spaces in the deepest possible way.
Occasionally, a seemingly innocuous comment or a question from my therapist can make me feel upset or send me down a spiraling tunnel of shame.
These things are bound to happen in a clinical relationship, and it’s of paramount importance to me that a therapist takes ownership of their role in a conflict.
I know both the value of a gentle confrontation as well as a sincere apology.
I hate the “How does it make you feel?” question from a therapist.
If I am honest, it makes me feel like I am in a bad Lifetime Original movie.
I appreciate genuine curiosity and the flexibility of mind of a therapist to treat me like an individual.
There isn’t anything that is better left unsaid in a therapeutic relationship.
Nothing is too small to bring up.
I had a therapist who was habitually late for sessions and would reschedule our appointments at the last minute. It took me months and much anxiety to finally bring it up.
Things that are left unsaid fester and grow into resentments and fears.
My patients know that it’s a sign of trust and progress when they courageously bring up a difficult subject.
I don’t feel that my sessions are very productive when I am just coming to therapy to talk about my week.
My primary goal as a therapist is to work myself out of a job.
A Little About Me
When my youngest daughter was in kindergarten, for Mother’s Day she gave me an elaborately decorated book that her teacher helped them make in class, ambitiously titled “All About My Mother.”
On the last page, under the printed heading “This is what my mom does best,” she drew a stick figure sitting on a couch, with a sad grin and tears the size of avocados, and she wrote: SHE MAKES PEOPLE CRY.
If I had a chance to amend it, I’d say: I HELP people cry. I see a tremendous value in tears. Those of sadness, happiness, elation, humor, warmth, love and a sense of connection.
I also help people laugh. I love comedy and have been taking classes, performing and teaching acting and improv for the past eight years.
Ten years ago, I conquered one of my greatest fears: I got naked on stage in front of an audience. It was both terrifying and liberating.
Since then, I’ve jumped out of a plane a few times, got through a winter trek alone in a Siberian forest, flew on a whim across the country to spend a night with a lover, got lost in a Rwandan jungle and, most recently, spent six weeks in an active war zone, working while listening to bombs going off in the next street.
However, my most challenging and rewarding experiences remain those that are not as fun to talk about at parties: speaking up in a relationship, saying “I am sorry” to my kids, re-confirming my worth in the mirror when I see another wrinkle or grey hair.
That – and not killing the fiddle leaf fig tree in my HOME office.