Are Therapists Human?
Is a therapist a whole human? As I moved through my education to become a mental health counselor, we were often warned about self disclosure. As mental health counselors in the West, we are working with a lineage that has deep roots in the idealization of the therapist as a kind of “white wall”. Implicit and explicit in a lot of our training was this push to make ourselves disappear so we could hold space for others. For many of us, this came at a cost to our own mental health.
There is a difference between arriving at such deep peace and acceptance within yourself, embracing all parts of who you are so fully that you can meet and hold space for another person from a place of profound wholeness, becoming a safe space where all parts of them can breathe, heal, and be integrated without projecting yourself into their process; and being taught to fragment yourself so that others aren’t “made” uncomfortable by any part of you. It is the latter that is dehumanizing, and I would even assert, an insidious systemic virus within the mental health field. Rather than educational programs that are focused on facilitating healing for therapists in training, we have programs that are focused on training therapists to consume information and get good at performing “healed.” This is a profound disservice to the field as a whole and to the communities that we are serving.
Before I entered the counseling field, I was a full, messy, imperfect human. I was an artist. And while I could appreciate that I was on a journey of healing and growth, there was a sense of wholeness (messy as it was) that came from embracing my full humanity, even the not-so-pleasant sides, through art. Slowly but surely, however, the education and training I received as I was initiated into the field chipped away at that wholeness and asked me to zip it up. I began to understand that being “professional” meant showing up in the counseling room as a blank space for others and presenting myself in a way that was neutral and non-triggering. A pleasant smile and business-casual clothes began to replace my previously edgy, boundary-pushing artistic wardrobe and radical self-expression. I was there to help others feel comfortable, even if that meant erasing parts of myself.
What wasn’t outright said, but clearly implied and taught was- in order for others to be comfortable, we need your self-expression muted and palatable. Yet here we were, positioned to help people “heal,” supporting them in embracing their full humanity, empowering them to take up space and use their most authentic voice, while we, the therapists, were being taught to fragment from our own wholeness. Since I started speaking up about this, I’ve had other therapists reach out to me and thank me. They’ve shared things the likes of, “that whole process gave me OCD”. We were being indoctrinated with shame and being taught to silence our full humanity while encouraged to help others get free from shame and embrace their full humanity.
The whole thing is absolutely backwards.
Much of the medical and mental health training in this country (U.S) is making our healers & doctors sick (both mentally and physically) while preparing them to heal others. How does this make any sense? How could a person that has learned to make themselves small and taught to hide in shame the less “palatable” parts of themselves so that they can conform to a system, ever empower others to truly get free and heal from oppressive forces? (Maybe they weren’t really meant to but that’s a whole other conversation and maybe a topic for a future post.)
I have slowly been chipping away at this oppression in my own therapeutic practice. And over the last couple of years I started allowing the Artist to re-merge with my healer identity. The artist embraces the full range of human experience- grief, rage, sadness, destruction, creation, sensuality, the erotic, love, joy, peace, kindness. She teaches us to love our full humanity and come home to ourselves by allowing herself to be a radically free human.
No more of this narrative that therapists are here to help You by disappearing themselves. Until the advent of Western Medicalized Patriarchal systems of power this was never the case.
The original healers, the shamans, the medicine people of original cultures were the artists, the system disruptors. They shook up the suffocating patterns in the world around them so something more pure and ALIVE could surface.
After almost a decade in the mental health field in the West, and as a therapist who has worked with other therapists, nurses, and medical professionals as their therapist, this oppression of our healers and doctors is one of the distortions I am most interested in deconstructing. I can only hope that by doing so, I might help contribute to a medicine that is more alive and truly healing, making its way through the currently broken and commercialized mental health and medical systems in the United States.