After about 36 years of work as a psychotherapist, I slow down and reflect on my profession and mainly on my professional performance.
I'm not questioning my psychotherapists, because they did and still do their best for me.
I am very grateful to these people who welcomed me, questioned me, instigated me, informed me and helped me to expand my awareness.
Yes, I am questioning my profession, but sitting in the psychotherapist's chair.
And me?
Can I be healthy and useful in my profession?
I've seen "squills" of people and I believe that many of them didn't leave my office "better".
I also know that many left dissatisfied with my performance, expected more from me or imagined that I would do something better for their lives.
And many people I attended, I couldn't even understand their request for help.
And others, today I understand that in fact they didn't have any requests for help...
But to many people, I apologize as a psychotherapist for not having differentiated between pain (feeling) and suffering (thought). This suffering had great validity in the power game they imagined they had with life.
I can understand today that I “forced the bar” for a change to happen. And I may have harmed many people with my mistaken idea of help.
After reflecting and leaving the (dis)comfort zone in which I placed myself professionally – the place of supposed knowledge – I conclude that for many, many years I really believed in this illusion.
This was the worst of my professional sins.
Believing I should know everything.
And advancing further in my foolishness, I believed that I should do everything!
Oh! This human vanity, which got me right.
Hence, committing many professional blunders was easy.
Many times, I did my best to “solve” problems that my clients (some professionals call patients) did not yet have the desire to solve, because they were not problems, but inadequate resolutions that they created for other (worse?) they didn't want to face. Their right!
Until then, I did not understand that problems do not exist. What exists is a rigid way of seeing a given situation. So problems to be solved, first they must be solved – diluted, soluble, less dense.
I also didn't understand that in general the symptom is a lesser evil for that system, for that person. The greater evil is something else, something more shameful or perhaps more laborious, which I, as a psychotherapist, will not have the slightest idea of, if my client does not allow me access.
Here I remember Riobaldo, a character by Guimarães Rosa, in Grande Sertão:Veredas, when he says:
"…I almost do not know anything. But I suspect a lot.
The lord granting, I say: to think far, I am master dog
- the Lord releases in front of me a slight idea,
and I track this one through all the bushes. Amen!"
Very different from Riobaldo, my belief that I should know everything and suspect nothing, left me in a vain accommodation and so I “tracked” little.
Why suspect, track, sniff around, if creating some interesting hypothesis regarding the client's issue always left me in my place of power – the place of “supposed knowledge”?
I trained well, studied a lot, read all the theories and any question that came to my office, I was prepared and had a good answer.
I really didn't lack answers, but I lacked good questions, systemic and reflective.
Finally, and it's about time, I've been letting go of this vain place of "supposed knowledge" and learning that the first question I should ask a person who walks into my office is:
HOW CAN I HELP?
Or variations around this question as an example:
- Was it you who decided to ask for help or was it someone who said you should get help?
- Are you a person who asks for help?
- Who have you asked for help?
- Was this person or professional you sought out before able to help you with anything?
- Did that person owe you anything?
- If I can help you, and I don't know if I can, what would really be a valid help to you?
I want to point out that the word help comes from the Latin adjutare, which also means to help.
Perhaps this is another one of my confusions in providing help, because I often confuse helping with providing help or saving.
So, in addition to occupying the “place of supposed knowledge”, I also wanted to occupy the place of someone who helps or saves.
Maybe that way he would gain more power and recognition...
I believed that these were the best places to occupy in the “show” of life.
Here is a suggestive tip for my colleagues who are starting their careers, with so much enthusiasm to help and with the belief that they must take the place of supposed knowledge.
A healthy psychotherapist (and not a nanny) does have an important helping role. But you need to understand well the request for help that the person makes you. “Think far ahead” and check if you are dealing with a person who is actually asking for help and willing to collaborate with their own improvement.
“Track” his path well, which offices this person has been through, trying to understand if he has or is willing to develop the humility to ask, the patience to wait for things to happen, the tolerance in receiving what the other can offer, without become a debtor or collector, but grateful.
"Be wary" of people who don't trade.
It's not easy, but it will depend a lot on our level of understanding of the complexity of human interactions.
From my place as a psychotherapist, I say that every inappropriate thing done, every foolish thing committed, was worth it, because learning happened.
It's not the end, but it's a good start.
But I imagine that for many of my clients, it may not have been so worth it. In my human condition, with the sacred right to make mistakes, I apologize if I didn't favor the growth and maturation of many.
Jaqueline Cássia de Oliveira "Wisdom of little things" Written in July 2014
Updated July 2023