This may sound like a platitude but I keep learning from the people I work with to such an extent that I felt some sort of acknowledgment was timely. Whoever they are, whatever psychic place they come from, and for whatever reason they have ended up in my company, there is something unique about each of them that makes me feel different about myself.
I am not talking about interpersonal dynamics that have been described in various ways depending on the paradigm that one adopts as a therapist and that helps explain and understand the content of one's own internal life. I am talking about the genuine and real effects of two human beings coming together in a privileged and unique way. I think this is something that may remain difficult to acknowledge provided that too often the therapist keeps seeing herself or himself as distinct and separate from their clients and their problems. They create a barrier that may be protective but that also denies the way in which we are transformed and healed through human relationships and through our encounter with an other. Therapy is in my mind a dialogical process through which certainties are being openly and honestly reassessed. There is no doubt for me that this happens for the client and the therapist in very similar and powerful ways. Failure to recognise this would be dismissive of the way we as human beings constantly influence and enrich one another. It is a recognition of the way we become ourselves through our encounters with others.
The people I work with have pushed me, challenged me, astonished me, inspired me in ways whereby I was able to reconsider aspects of my own self. This is an incredible gift especially in a world that keeps privileging the interest of the self as opposed to the self in relation to others.
Thinking about it, I have realised that the people I work with are behind the creating of this blog. My voice remains mine and I am not writing this for them or to do justice to any of them, but my voice is polyphonic by carrying the music of their own voice.
I am not talking about interpersonal dynamics that have been described in various ways depending on the paradigm that one adopts as a therapist and that helps explain and understand the content of one's own internal life. I am talking about the genuine and real effects of two human beings coming together in a privileged and unique way. I think this is something that may remain difficult to acknowledge provided that too often the therapist keeps seeing herself or himself as distinct and separate from their clients and their problems. They create a barrier that may be protective but that also denies the way in which we are transformed and healed through human relationships and through our encounter with an other. Therapy is in my mind a dialogical process through which certainties are being openly and honestly reassessed. There is no doubt for me that this happens for the client and the therapist in very similar and powerful ways. Failure to recognise this would be dismissive of the way we as human beings constantly influence and enrich one another. It is a recognition of the way we become ourselves through our encounters with others.
The people I work with have pushed me, challenged me, astonished me, inspired me in ways whereby I was able to reconsider aspects of my own self. This is an incredible gift especially in a world that keeps privileging the interest of the self as opposed to the self in relation to others.
Thinking about it, I have realised that the people I work with are behind the creating of this blog. My voice remains mine and I am not writing this for them or to do justice to any of them, but my voice is polyphonic by carrying the music of their own voice.