Continuing Growth Is Necessary For A Psychotherapist

Choosing to work as a psychotherapist or counselor comes with a quieter requirement that nobody spells out in the job description: you have to keep growing. The ways that growth arrives can catch you off guard.

Freudian practitioners gave us the idea of transference, which lives in the space between therapist and client. It runs in both directions. Something about a client can nudge a therapist into seeing them through a particular lens, and something about the therapist can do the same thing in reverse.

Training in a field like psychotherapy carries a trap. It can convince the practitioner that the job is to look like an expert, someone immune to the very troubles that send ordinary people into the office. Once you believe that, rationalization and denial have room to settle in.

Rationalization is the tidy story a therapist tells about why he or she couldn't possibly struggle with what the patients struggle with. Denial grows out of the same posture, and when it takes hold, the client's work stalls.

Personal growth is one defense against this. Does your sense of who you are and what life means freeze the day you reach some marker of adulthood, at 18, at 21, at 35? It doesn't. Every new experience shifts the view a little.

Can a therapist really believe they have figured out exactly how they became who they think they are, and that the figuring is now finished? Growth experiences of their own would seem to loosen that certainty.

Think about what counts as a single settled answer anywhere. Science keeps overturning its own. Consider what researchers held to be true when your parents were small, and then what you or your children have since learned that those earlier scientists never knew.

There's that old line, "Do as I say, not as I do." Worth sitting with.

The more defensive wire a therapist strings up between himself and the very thing he's asking the patient to attempt, the more hollow and indefensible he becomes in the chair.

Fresh learning and fresh growth spill over into the work with real energy. Insights that come this way let a therapist respond more openly. Speaking for myself, I catch more now in ordinary conversation than I used to, more of what gets said and what shows on a face.

A four-year-old can still teach me something. One pointed out that grandma isn't always smiling or happy when she imagines she is, and that lands hardest on the days I'm grinding at some task and forgetting to take any pleasure in it.

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