It's fine to be weak and vulnerable. I believe this. It's normal. We all go there. Going there makes you human and real. So I'm going to practice what I preach.
Hi. My name is Heather. It's been 2 weeks since my last blog entry. I meant to do it for 30 days straight, and I got 7 in a row done before I lost my motivation and stopped. I'm embarrassed about that, but I'm also happy and proud of myself for doing 7 in a row like that. Usually it can be months between my blog entries. Am I ever going to be a daily blogger? Hell no! But I can push myself for bits of time and do more than I thought possible.
Even therapists have our struggles. A good counselor education program will include a requirement that budding therapists have their own counselor and do their own work. Working in this field brings up your own issues in a way that most people never get to know. They don't see the times where we are internally aghast at ourselves for counseling clients about the same issues we ourselves were working on in the very recent past. They don't feel the click of synchronicity that happens when a client shows up and needs exactly the advice you picked up in your recent continuing education reading. They don't feel the tremor of wonder and anxiety that can come from the awareness that we are being used by Something larger and greater than ourselves for the healing of another. A client comes in and tells you their vulnerability story about something that happened to them when they were younger that they never told anyone about before, and the thing is, you have been in spookily similar shoes in your own past, and now that experience is coming back to you while you're sitting there in session with them.
Over the course of 2 weeks, I lost more than half my clients. All for legitimate reasons, which I can fully be supportive of. A couple of those involved being financially hard up. That kind of thing is everywhere. People are sacrificing expenses that equal self-care all the time for the sake of meeting daily living expenses. It's a matter of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. When food and housing and transportation aren't possible, emotional healthcare and relationship building and self-actualization are just not within reach. Their suffering becomes my suffering, however, when they stop therapy and thus I can't make my ends meet. It's a weird world, and a weird place to be put in emotionally. But in the end, we pick ourselves back up, show up yet again, keep doing our work, and keep trying. And we find a deeper empathy for those we share the world with.
