I stopped working as a therapist yesterday. My long-threatened (to my clients), long-promised (to myself) sabbatical arrived, one that I’d planned and announced 18 months ago.
Timing is a big thing in therapy, and we take beginnings and endings very seriously – and it is especially difficult when it is the therapist who is instigating the ending. I think I got away with it. It has been a very moving time. For all the fact that it’s a job, the most extraordinary intimacies and exchanges can happen in therapy. And that’s all I can say, really – client confidentiality is the sine qua non of the relationship, at least in my way of working. Which is, in the context of these pages, a bit of a shame. The story-teller in me has learned so much about human nature over the past six years, at its best and worst, that I’m fit to burst with it all. It is, therefore, most definitely, time for a break.
There are some gifted therapists who write about their clients, most notably and inspirationally the humane existentialist Irvin Yalom. However, the circumstances that enable him to do so with integrity, and with the full consent of his clients, seem uniquely his. It’s a matter of faith. Over the decades, he has developed a reputation as a respectful writer, one who has never betrayed the trust of his clients, and so he attracts people to his practice from far and wide, who believe it’s worth the trade-off. And he does, of course, change any identifying details in his moving accounts of growth and transformation. But he is American, and there is an exhibitionistic component to that culture which seems to permit not only the educationally worthwhile showcasing of deeply personal work, as in Dr Yalom’s books, but also the trashy counsellors and therapists who exploit it on daytime TV, seemingly without a twinge of shame or doubt.
On the opposite end of the scale, there are psychoanalysts and psychiatrists who publish clinical case studies in professional journals without the consent of those whose lives they are examining and pathologising, under some misguided patronising, patrician concept of authority. I believe people’s stories are their spiritual property, and in the same way as some peoples used to imagine that one’s soul was stolen if a photograph was taken, I think something is robbed if someone’s story is taken and retold without their consent.
For who are we without our stories? It seems to me that the work I’ve most enjoyed is in helping people to tell their own stories, to take authorship of all that they have done, and all that has happened to them. It’s a move away from victimhood towards dignity, and that’s much easier said than done. But when it happens, it’s magic, there’s no other word for it. And it’s as much to do with the client wanting to tell their story as it is the therapist wanting to hear it. We can’t wander around waving our magic wands and effecting “cures” on cue, measurable “treatment outcomes” that satisfy the more scientifically-minded. To a degree that clients really don’t appreciate at the beginning, the answer to what is hurting them is there all along. It is present in the precise moment they pick up the phone or tap in a query at their computer, when the first contact is made – the energy behind the desire to change is the transforming agent; the therapist is but a catalyst. Although, in a strict sense, the word catalyst isn’t appropriate, as the whole point of the work is to allow ourselves to be moved, disturbed, teased, manipulated, seduced, controlled, despised, fooled, inspired, bored, challenged, humiliated, aroused, enraged, embarrassed, turned on, tested, delighted, amused, disgusted, exhausted and, ultimately and hopefully, trusted by our clients. If, after all that, we are still there, still listening, still wondering, still in relationship with them: that’s the healing. A therapist has to see to it that the client’s initial spark of change is protected and gently fanned into something that burns brightly and consistently enough to stay lit on its own.
I made a pact with myself, eight years ago, that I’d allow the part of me that is interested in being a therapist full rein, until I got fully qualified and established. Then I’d give the part of me that wants to create a go in the driving seat for a while. Not that therapy is lacking in creativity – far from it – I’m talking the sort of antisocial activity that is writing professionally, the willingness to lock oneself away with one’s muses, for days, weeks at an end, until someone blinks first. It is impossible to work imaginatively and creatively with clients on a daily basis, and try and scribble a few paragraphs of fiction in between them. Or at least it is for me. Real life is stranger than fiction. But it’s also far more interesting. And the courage and humour and resilience and chutzpah and imagination and tenacity and sheer loveliness of the people I’ve got to know over the years in London are qualities that I will never forget. People are amazing.