The unknown
These topics or letters are a product of whatever the current themes and patterns I’m encountering in my practice of psychotherapy and collaboration with clients.
My first supervisor as a fledgling therapist was a woman named Cynthia. She supervised my work with clients at an internship in a Denver, CO school. Here, I worked with middle school students and sometimes their families and teachers during my final year of graduate school.
A ‘great’ thing about being an intern, at least in my case, was the total experience of being a ‘fish out of water’ and the sense of exposure as a possible imposter, or someone who is supposed to be able to be helpful and do a depth of work with human beings, while the reality is that the real work of becoming a proficient therapist was only at its beginning stages. How is one really supposed to put so much information gleaned from several years of graduate school into practice? While the learning in a graduate program can be rich and is important, it shares the parallel of being a client in therapy in that the real benefits often occur when one is not in a therapy session, or having real world experiences once graduate school is in the rear view mirror.
While there were many learnings and important failures that helped me practice differently in future work, it was Cynthias’s remarks at our final supervisory meetings that have stuck with me and were cause for realizations that the practice of therapy is also a practice of openness to not-knowing, and, on an ongoing basis. Her statements included, “your first seven jobs as a therapist will either burn you out or simply be burn-out jobs! In addition, it will take you at least 10 years to know who you are as therapist and to practice in a way that is truly your own.”
These statements came out of her own hard won progression as a therapist, who cared for her clients as well as her own process and growth as a professional. I came to embrace these pieces of her mentorship as both investments in one’s genuine interest in personal realization but also having something of value to offer clients, versus parroting or regurgitating empty procedures or interventions that were taught or shown but hadn’t been digested or deeply reflected on at a personal level.
Cynthia’s teachings have helped ground the wisdom of the psychologist Carl Jung for me, who suggested that a clinician ought to know the craft of therapy backwards and forwards but also to be fearless in ‘traveling’ to interior places that a client needs to go and to abandon what a therapist know’s in order to embrace the creative and alive relationship that can exist between client and therapist.
In the end, when clients enter therapy I know at times very little about ‘where’ we may go together in the work beyond the basic structure and boundaries that will create safety for our time together. I see this as a real alignment with the clients I get to work with, as they enter therapy often with trepidation and uncertainty of what will come about in the work, or concerns that it may even be a negative experience. I too do not know what will come of the work, but I do feel certainty that we can learn to form a connection that will allow for positive risks and something new to come from a shared courage to willingly go into unknown places.
The notion of the unknown has many metaphors, but in the practice of psychotherapy it is the concept of the ‘fertil void’ that is most potent. This is the idea that it is space and openess that are most valuable in allowing new ways of being to come into our awareness. Like a window that allows light to come in a room or the lack of doing anything in mediation that allows for a letting go, it is not knowing that can allow a greater since of understanding to emerge. This is a simple matter, that of course is not easy to do, thus it is a practice.
