Marian Platta writes in her (2018) article “Therapists Need Therapy Too” in Vice: “Acknowledging and accepting what haunts me has helped me become more empathetic towards my patients’ emotional suffering.” Many of us including myself were not aware the extent to which we were drawn to be a psychotherapist because of our own inner pain and unaddressed need for healing. I remember early in my career when the penny dropped for me, triggered by a client’s childhood trauma, and I realized to my surprise, oh, I have to go sit in a waiting room like the one outside my office and see someone like me. This led to many years of psychotherapy with someone much more experienced in trauma therapy than I was at that point in my career, a process that was deeply healing and which deepened my capacity to provide psychotherapy.
What strikes me is, as healing as psychotherapy can be, it can also be an introduction into a way of life where we continue to gradually cultivate making deeper sense of our feelings and motivations and engaging in life in a more fulfilling way, a humbling, lifelong and daily cultivation of a more genuine relationship with ourself, others and the world. I find cultivating meditation in a community of practice invaluable in this process, but we need to take care that our roles as mindfulness-based clinicians, teachers or trainers do not leave us isolated by over-idealization and lack of proper support.