What a difference a week makes

It's 7pm on a beautiful Tennessee evening- and I'm taking it all in. Had my usual graduate student/bachelor meal of quesadillas and carrots, and am rewarding myself for actually being mostly productive this evening with a cold beer (Yuengling- weird name- never seen it before coming down South-but quite good at the end of a long day).

It's been a weird, wild, and wonderful week in Lake Woebegone (as Garrison would say). I'm very happy to say that I feel much less like the inexperienced big wave surfer of last week. I'm feeling much more like I'm a beginning dancer in a very established dance company, and I'm finally getting some of the basic steps. Still mostly feeling like a painfully obvious beginner, but showing some signs of progress. Except for one hilarious incident involving me sending an email to an incorrect address (and forgetting a particular evaluation sheet today), I've managed to minimize my usual forgetfulness and general spaciness.

Today I conducted my first semi-real pseudo counseling session. In preparation for the voluntary Pscyh 110 students that I and the other 6 first-years will be seeing as clients in about two weeks, this week we were all asked to conduct a mini-session (although it was a full 50 minutes) with a third-year student. I worked with a very considerate gal named Marci who did a great job making a pseudo session real. She had some very good, concrete feedback for me as a beginning therapist. She said that because I am naturally warm and good at making someone feel welcome, I don't need to try so hard at letting the client know that they are safe. She also said that she could tell I wanted to make her feel better about things, and that while it's easy as a beginner to want to do this, it's not our job. In fact, it may be just the opposite. That is, therapy is a place where people have the opportunity to experience fully, and without judgment, whatever they are experiencing. I really liked that.

It's so true for me. I really like making people laugh and helping them to laugh at the darkness and grossness of life. But the reality is that if those dark and gross feelings aren't fully experienced, they fester. The hard truth is that as a therapist one has to continually do their best to get better at allowing whatever comes up for a client to be experienced directly for themselves in themselves. It's like how parents shelter their kids from the certain hard parts of life- sadness, grief, conflict, and death to name a few. To truly be helpful, sometimes the best thing to do is simply be there. That's hard.

But after our interaction today, I felt both affirmed and ready to continue with getting better at this challenging line of work. She made my whole day when responding to an email of mine with a comment about that she'd forgotten to tell me that she thought I was a real natural and definitely in the right line of work. Nice to have confirmation that I'm on the right path. It's a long way to go...


...but I'm heading in the right direction.