So much of my time, energy and focus as a therapist has gone into trying to figure out what I do, and put it into words in order for people to know whether I would be a good fit for them. This is not something I enjoy. I understand that it’s unavoidable, that business is business and that I need to eat. But everything in me is reluctant to give in to the myth that it is what we “do” that helps people, and that it is what we “do” that gives us value.
Do I have skills? Yes. Do those skills help me better understand my clients’ issues? Yes. Are those skills what helps people? No. Even for me it is hard to really grasp what I do because so much of it is outside of my control. In my years as a therapist (and a client) I have come to realize that it is not what we do but who we are that is the most important for the people that we see.
Getting closer and closer to who I am, getting braver and braver with who I am, gaining more capacity to stay present in my own body, gaining more trust in what appears obvious to me, or the words that want to come out of my mouth, that is what is deepening my reach as a therapist, not the acquiring of more skills, no matter how tempting it is to believe that.
That doesn’t mean I will stop training or learning new skills, because it is also who I am: perpetually curious and loving to learn from people who themselves have such a quality of presence that they help me just by existing. But in a world drowned in sales pitches, solution based offerings, promises to “do something” for you, I struggle to buy into that lie. What anyone does goes much deeper than this. It is a question of energetics and resonance way more than cognitive action.
This was made clear to me the first time I saw someone having a deep healing process with a practitioner who was clearly not “doing” anything. One way that I’ve been talking about it with colleagues recently (I’m leading a 2 months lab on therapeutic stance this summer), is in a very simple framework of energy geography. Many therapists/healers (myself included when I was starting out), work from an energetic stance of leaning forward, even often enveloping their clients in their energy field to attune them to a different frequency. While this stance can sometimes be useful if employed very consciously in specific instances, most of the time it is adopted unconsciously, and leads to all kinds of superfluous dynamics between therapist and client (and also to therapist burnout). Incidentally, it is what happens between mothers and children, where the children are contained in the field of the mother until their field is strong enough to withstand the world. In that case, it is normal and desirable, but not so much between two adults engaged in therapeutic relating. I was once a client of such a healer, and it took me two years and a lot of work to extricate myself from her field.
In my practice, I’ve seen again and again that an energetic stance of leaning backwards into my spine, or even further out of the room (as taught to me by my teacher, Gary Strauss), did wonders for people. It feels like doing nothing, and technically it is : I’m not interfering or trying to manipulate the other person’s process, I’m just very present in myself. This is more efficient that all the advice and solutions I can come up with (and believe me, I come up with a lot), as I’m reminded every time I catch myself trying to “help” and revert back to that positioning of energy. You might say “I don’t feel energy”, or this might sound to New Age for you, and that’s totally fine: there are many other avenues (hint: the body) to feel when you are investing personal stakes in a client’s process, or when you are just fully present with what is, both for the person and for you. The moment you’re entangled with wanting to help, that’s an added layer of complexity to navigate for the client and you.
So much if not all of it comes from the person themselves, their readiness, their willingness, their fearlessness, their openness, what they have invested in the work. We are just there to witness, mirror and relate, not to solve or help. The only way to do this in an unencumbered way is to extend our capacity for presence with ourselves. God forbid that our sense of our own worth be mingled with how “helpful” we are, as that’s a recipe for misery. The most we can do is to honor the strength of our clients by trusting them to carry their life with dignity, and to find their way through.