Post One - Dear Therapist…

Starting out on your own can be scary. Slow times feel as if they’ll last forever. And waiting for new clients is like watching paint dry. In fact, a better hobby would be watching paint dry. 

You can’t force a client to walk through your door. And if you did, it’d be under less-than-ideal pretenses. Imagine, for a moment, that you had even three new individuals show up at your doorstep in one week. Three new sets of intake paperwork. Three new sets of names. Three new stories and histories to keep straight. Not impossible by any means, yet not really ideal either. 

Time is your friend in most aspects of therapy. Rapport is build through slow and consistent trust. And so having a mirror put up in front of you to reflect on this process with your clients is clarifying. The quick and eager burn is far more dangerous than the slow one. 

Momentarily, such feelings of insecurity may leave you doubtful and dejected. Go see your therapist about it… I say this in jest, but truly, these feelings are direction points toward the healing work that is done in all quiet spaces.

You may have the wound of abandonment. The voice that tells you that you aren’t good enough unless someone shows up for you right in front of you, telling you that it’s going to be okay. Can you offer yourself this solace?

You may have the wound of harm. The entity that tells you that you are in danger alone. Beckoning with steely knives and threats to cause pain unless that other is just around the corner. Can you remember that you are safe, here, now?

This journey of healing work is not for the faint of heart. I had an old mentor tell me often that “we did not get into this business for no good reason!” Meaning to say that each of us has “stuff” that we bring to the therapy table. Not all meals are delectable here. But all of them are out to be ingested.

You get to decide which piece of therapy pie to eat today. Is it the painful one? The comforting one? The patient one?