I was able to focus on an aspect that overlooks my emotional sphere, both as a simple human being and as a person who has chosen to make psychology his profession, I refer to the ability to "know how to be".
The therapist acquires knowledge and his working tools through a very long training path, which requires a strong motivational component, and which continues at the end of university, with a further specialization of at least four years to be achieved at one of the numerous schools of Psychotherapy.
I did not speak by chance of a "strong motivational component", but I chose a concept that is well suited to my history and life, having taken the paths mentioned above, so it is my personal experience that I want to reveal to those who will read.
Before I started my specialization as a psychotherapist, I had the conviction, perhaps convenient, that in my profession everything revolved around the component of capacity and professionalism, and that study and commitment together with practice and experience were the means to achieve this, that this is by no means sufficient.
In fact, there is another component, metaphorically I imagine it as a ladder to go, without which I would not know today to be able to do my job, and it is simply what we ask of our patients, "work on oneself" .
We professionals in the industry work with what looks elusive, emotions, and how can we do it if we have not learned to touch them by hand? how can we learn this unless we start from presenting ourselves to our emotions?
There is often talk of mental health, including the psychotherapist, I add another term, that of emotional health, and the training path should make that passage from doing psychotherapy to being psychotherapists, then getting to know themselves to learn to be themselves.
The therapist who has embarked on a path of personal therapy knows what it means to "be the patient", knows in reality and not by hearsay on the texts the difficult and sometimes chaotic path that therapy involves, has the ability to welcome the patient, to to stand beside him, to ally, to be really present and to "suspend judgment".
Regardless of what the cause is that pushes a person to start psychotherapy, self-knowledge is always the beginning of a demolition, old dysfunctional structures are thrown to the ground, we reorganize ourselves, we rebuild ourselves in a more functional way to life, to your life.
The therapist who plunged into personal therapy realized that his patients would not be wrong, just as he was not, and that they are often our dysfunctional ways of thinking and experiencing emotions to cause suffering, along with many other very personal variables.
The person is not the problem, he has a problem.
The future therapist, being patient assisted by his therapist, will learn how to activate and use the resources that are present in him, but he can not access it because he is immersed in the usual consolidated automatisms, so the therapist will then help his patient also in this important aspect of our trade.
Experimenting in following this path, in my opinion, can be very useful for every professional in the sector also to abandon the illusory idea of having or having to have the ability to heal patients, in fact it is not so, our task is different and is to help them develop their self-care resources, so that they begin to build their freedom through taking responsibility, making responsible choices.
It is not the dependence on the therapist that one wants to develop, but autonomy, the evolution in oneself as a human being free to be and to choose.
The goal is that the person, even after psychotherapy, continues to grow and improve his life, with the means he has at his disposal and now knows how to use, possibly recognizing the circumstances in which it is useful to ask for help.
Returning to a more technical level, I often reflect on the pitfalls that are hidden in therapy, and on which I have shed light thanks to my being patient, one above all: "the right time", or maybe I should say the wrong one, because if it is useful to go down and dig into the depth of painful emotions, to transform them, it is even more useful to have the sensitivity to grasp in the patient the momentum for this, the right moment, and only if I know firsthand the flavor of the impact that inevitably there it will be I can offer help to cushion the blow.
In order to better manage people's processes of change, avoiding counter-productive breaks or accelera- tions, it's useful to get your hands dirty, it's worth diving in the ascent of that staircase where each step is our own evolutionary, transformational and acquiring moment of consciousness.
Awareness encompasses many things, here I underline the awareness of those personal aspects that can interfere with the work of therapist, influencing quality and judgment skills, so it is very useful to overcome unresolved issues, knots, blocks, repetitive and unsatisfactory patterns, open vicious circles and freeing trapped energies, knowing ourselves in order to understand and welcome the other, discover the other, but above all, learn to accept ourselves in the many facets, many of them we will like, others less, however if authentic it will be pleasant to welcome them and integrate those contradictory parts that form our totality.
Psychotherapy is too private a profession, difficult to control from the outside, it is therefore the therapist's responsibility to manage not only the setting but also his person, giving voice to the difficulties he encounters when confronting his own limits or moments of strong stress, listening to himself and listen for any signs of fatigue or clues that suggest slowing down, reorganizing the rhythms or identifying then knowing how to recognize the circumstances in which it is useful for oneself and for the patients to ask for help, for example through supervision, without ever losing sight of awareness that one is not and cannot be invincible.
Personally, before my personal therapy meeting, as I fortunately expected from many Psychotherapy training schools, I also believed that I could always do it alone, I also slipped into the stereotype that force is equivalent to not asking for help.
Today I can say that I am wrong and that true courage is measured by the willingness to play in the first person, and that undertaking the process by which it is presented to us is not absolutely easy, indeed it is difficult, sometimes chaotic , as long as you can grasp the meaning of what you are doing, and the perspective changes, you have the feeling of seeing and feeling more like someone has ripped your eyebrows, surprisingly begin to even talk to your body, find out every day it is the first to send you important signals that we are too used to ignoring.
Discover your own unique and unique world.
Today I know that many things can not be studied but must be lived, it is for us professionals to overcome this threshold of fear, mistrust, stigma.
The therapist who shaking hands with the patient in front of him shakes a little hand with the patient who has been, will be more naturally empathic and will have the desire to really be there in the experience of the other, as in an adventure, and how I feel. tell me often, courage does not exist without fear.
In the setting there are two armchairs, one occupied by the patient and one occupied by the therapist, in my opinion the latter must be able to sit on both.
Dr. Selene Anna Paul, Psychologist