Dual Dialogues : How Therapists Communicate In and Out of the Office

It begins at 2 am, tired of the endless Instagram scroll, going down a notes app rabbit hole. A junkyard of old passwords, New Year's resolutions, unfinished poetry and texts I never sent. In the mess, I found a carefully crafted, neatly formatted notes app apology. Instead of the cringe of second-hand embarrassment, I felt a sad smile come over my face, and here's why.?

It was, at the time, a Magnum Opus apology. Informed by how I believed I should communicate with the people around me using my newfound therapy know-how. The funny thing is when I look back at that Notes app apology version of myself - I don't find myself in there. It was an impersonation of a freshly-graduated-can’t-wait-to-be therapist. A? held-under-hostage therapist creating a wall with ChatGPT-esque text instead of being raw, emotionally vulnerable and allowing my messy feelings to emerge

My classmate was in the same boat as me, freshly off the psychology graduate boat and onto Being the Best Therapists Ever. Practicing therapy skills, practicing how we thought we'd have to show up for our clients. Forgetting that such a one-sided model couldn’t allow a real relationship to sustain.?

So there we were, saying? “I see where this is coming from” (lies, I didn’t) to “Your feelings are valid and that’s all that matters” whilst carefully brushing our every feeling under the rug. In an attempt to be better at what I do, I believed I’d have to let go pretend to let go of my real emotions. To fit into the Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting narrative of being a therapist first, a human being second.??

That was then, though, and this is now where I’m actively trying not to be defined by what I do. The therapeutic alliance, a safe relationship for clients to look up to and sometimes emulate can only go so far. What happens when it becomes an internalized way of being for the therapist? Holding space for other’s emotions, and saying the right things, bled into all my other relationships - always the giver, never the taker.?

This revelation also helped in how I show up as a therapist. Even the best therapeutic relationships can have ruptures. I don’t always have the right responses to my clients either. I’ll say the wrong word or fumble. And we’ll laugh about it together. Sometimes sit in companionable silence, grieving and hurting together too.?

In retrospect, I wonder where these expectations came from. My ideas of what a perfect therapist is? Or other people saying: “you’re a therapist you should do better, be better”. Maybe there’s no right answer, a clear divide between internal and external projections of how I should be. It feels heavy, nonetheless, to have to carry it all on my own. My thoughts would echo Anne Carson’s while I asked myself why I needed to hold onto this, and the answer rang “Where do I put it down?”

So now, when my friends tell me they fought with their partners, I don’t jump in to play the I-don't-take-sides and lets-understand-why-they did- this. I just show up like any friend would and hate on them :P (sorry to their partners). When I feel angry or upset with someone, I give myself the space to own my emotions. Sometimes I’ll burst into angry tears, lose my temper and say something hurtful. Things I’d never do as a therapist, but I do as a human being with real feelings. I won’t always be in the space to listen to a friend who’s mad at me, the way I will with a client. Now when people gossip, I let myself laugh and join in, without worrying about the correctness of it all.?

We lose the essence of communication when we look at what you should say vs what you need to say. You’re allowed to be unabashed with your feelings, loud and unapologetic, even unreasonable sometimes. If you’re always worried about the right thing to say or do, your whole life will feel like a test. There’s so much liberation in allowing yourself to make mistakes and to get things wrong. Maybe it isn’t the end of the world to get it wrong (I know, shocker). This is a reminder to throw out the manual you’ve picked up over the years and allow yourself to just be. A human, with bones, dirt stains and wrinkles in all the messiness of life.?

Oh and in case you’re wondering, we had a good laugh about it, my classmate and I. Remembering how we tried so hard to get it right, and got it so, so wrong. I told her about how I actually felt back then and so did she. This time there were no pretty words to band-aid what happened. That’s what true connection allowed us to do - to just be with all our messy emotions and not try to make them more palatable. In our early years in the field, growth meant becoming a better therapist, learning new skills and providing a safe space for our client’s emotions. Now, growth also means learning to separate the entirety of my being from my work, to speak my mind (and heart) to people who signed up for the exclusive, all-access & unfiltered parts of me. Reminding myself that ?I’m a full-time human, part-time therapist.?