A Little About Psychotherapy And My Fancy Suit

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Psychotherapist - Healer or Entrepreneur? In Gestalt I learn to use “and” instead of the conjunction “or”. Because “or” is already about internal separation. It turns out in Gestalt psychotherapist - this is a healer and an entrepreneur in one person. An entrepreneurial healer, if you will.

For a novice psychotherapist, this is a very urgent question. Entrepreneurship in this context is not necessarily related to money. Anyone who started his practice once or is now in this process can talk about his thirst for clients. I'm talking about a case in which the motivation is to gain experience, become professionally, and identify oneself as a psychotherapist. "Income is not so important, give clients!" In this place, one way or another, the topic of entrepreneurship arises. I need to sell myself as a specialist: to colleagues who can recommend me to potential clients, friends on social networks, who, upon hearing that someone needs a psychologist, will remember me first of all, to completely strangers through advertising, announcements, publications.

And this is a very delicate moment. Since I am just beginning to identify myself with the profession of a therapist, and my motivator inside pushes me to shout loudly: "Look what an oh … th therapist I am!" And he adds next: “Well, think for yourself, because they will not go to an inexperienced person who is not sure of a positive result. But you have to start somehow. " Listening to the motivator, I try on this costume and go out to people …

I am writing about this, and from somewhere in the depths of my memory an image rises. I'm probably about 9 years old. Mom brought a fashionable suit from a business trip. In Nikolaev, where I was born and raised, at that time you cannot find such people with fire during the day. As I remember now: a checkered jacket with a zipper, with leather inserts, beige trousers with arrows. “Look, he says that I brought you! From Leningrad itself! I'll have the most fashionable one. I look at this suit and understand that the suit is probably good. (Or maybe I understand, because my mother said so - I don't remember now). But I feel that this is not my suit at all. And I also understand that I will have to wear it. A chill runs down my back. I involuntarily begin to think about my friends, with whom all the garages climbed up and down, all day from morning to evening through the weeds along the river, landfills, shell casings, training mines, football, potatoes in a fire, knee-deep in dust, hands and cheeks in soot …

How will I appear to them in this form? And now this day comes. I don’t remember for what reason, but I have to dress up. I put on a suit - even my hands hardly obey. My back is wet, my head is thinking: “How long is it to go across the street? Just five minutes. Maybe I won't meet anyone. " I gather my will into a fist and smart, together with my smart mother I leave the entrance. I walk as if I'm not breathing, I try not to look around, and nevertheless I scan the surroundings with my peripheral vision. There they are: Vanka, and Ruslan, and Dima came to see grandmother, and even this pretty girl from the next house. In a word, Yaroslav, he hit the jackpot. Such a shame fell on me. I walk, as if I do not touch the ground, my eyes are on the floor. This suit sits on me like a mannequin. As if not really on me, but on something else that is between me and this suit. That somewhere in the depths - I, then this incomprehensible substance, and then a costume dear to my mother … In general, I passed this corridor of shame, and even went somewhere to visit, and did not die of shame. And even my friends did not cease to be friends with me, although they called me for some time in the courtyard "mannequin". As if my friends understood that I was me, and that day they saw someone else in a beautiful suit.

What am I doing this for? 28 years have passed since then, and I am writing about this and my cheeks are red-red, and my face is hot. It seems that since then I often wear that fashionable suit “on the way out”. After all, my mother said that you have to be beautiful in order to please everyone: “no one else has such a son!”.

I would like to say: “Go … go to the costume. I'm not an ooh … th therapist. Psychotherapy is not about beautiful and fashionable, it is about feet in dust, through weeds, landfills, potatoes in a fire and hands in soot, only together with a client. To be honest, so far I know very little about what kind of a therapist I am. After all, I am the most beginner. And I had clients - one, two and missed. And I also know that I am not an entrepreneur. (For some reason, this role disgusts me a little). But I really want to work. And I really believe that psychotherapy is really my vocation.