As many of you know, I recently had major surgery at the end of February (all went well) and two weeks later I received a break-up message from a friend in my close inner-sanctum (or so I thought), via text. I won’t go into detail now, but needless to say it was brutal and painful, and got me thinking about and researching lots of things which I’ll write about in more detail soon – look out for upcoming articles on:
- Friend vs Frenemy (and how to educate our young girls at school)
- The Friendship Graveyard (not what you think)
- How To Identify a Toxic Friend In A Group
- Managing People With NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder)
- Understanding Your Attachment Style And How It Influences Friendships
One thing it did for me was change my use of social media. I haven’t been keen on it for a while generally speaking and haven’t had the scrolling habit for years, but I did like posting Facebook stories about my kids and what they’d been up to. It was the Covid lockdown that first started my dislike for it, and more so business wise since attending a day-long AI workshop last year, where it became apparent that much of the content is generated (or at least influenced) by AI, and then gobbled up by AI, and then fed back to us again (by AI). It got me thinking – what was the point? I’ve never managed to crack the code for increasing my followership via socials for my line of work anyway, which relies on client confidentiality, plus authenticity-while-not-over-sharing on my part. I’ve become quite disillusioned by the whole thing. It feels like a party where noone’s high any more, but everyone’s still hanging out there because they don’t want to go home (as Liz Gilbert once said).
Following the text-message break-up brutality post-surgery, and the last thing I needed was to be seeing “best friends forever” photos of said friend with another friend, who had been in the same friendship group before it got blown up unnecessarily. So, I decided to go on a mission to find another platform where I can write and share authentically, in a way that feels safe and nourishing for me, and hopefully helpful for the people who follow and work with me. Enter – Substack!
Also, while I was recovering, I finally read a book which had been on my reading list called Just About Coping; A Real-life Drama From The Psychotherapist’s Chair, written by Dr Natalie Cawley.
I think this is the kind of book that most of us in the helping profession wish we had written ourselves – I certainly do.
I won’t spoil it for you, as I think the title gives enough for you to know what it’s about, and, it’s a topic I feel is SO SO IMPORTANT in my world: the world of therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, counsellors, coaches (of any kind) and any other kind of professional qualified to help other people heal and achieve. People who are not in these professions often (not always, but often) will hold two risky assumptions about the people who are:
- We have no problems and therefore just have life “sorted”
- If we do have issues, then we can “just sort them out using our skills”
I have felt judgement from these assumptions, sometimes acutely, and have so for YEARS (I became a therapist at age 27 and am now 47). Not just from those on the outside, but from certain “friends” and colleagues, too.
The book skilfully disabuses these two myths. I don’t know if that was her aim in writing it, but it’s certainly provoked some resonant passion on my part, things I have thought, felt and believed since starting this profession fresh from university in my early 20s.
I’ve noticed that people tend to idolise those of us in the helping world. People – or clients – can admire us, role-model us, and wish they could just as easily embody the qualities that we seem to portray. We seem like we’ve found a solution to the things that they want solutions for, and this can lead to idolisation, or, as I like to call it “guruitis”. I’ve been afflicted by guruitis myself, when I first started my NLP training in 2005, and I can reassure you all that I no longer suffer with it, and certainly discourage it in my own clients.
It’s part of the job and totally awesome to role-model functional behaviours and have your clients wish to embody them, of course. But – not if it leads to another stick in which they use to beat themselves over the head with (“why can you do it, but I can’t?” or “How come you do it so easily?”). It’s useful to remind our clients that we spent thousands of hours of training, professional development, and paying lots of attention to ourselves to even begin to authentically embody and model some of those desirable qualities. It’s true of course also, that when your client sees you, they’re seeing you in your professional role, where you’re at your best, having spent some time getting into a good state so you have access to your inner-resources in which to help them. They aren’t seeing you when you’re at the end of your tether on a Friday evening, when your kids are refusing to eat the dinner you spent an hour preparing for them, without an ounce of energy left in which to coax or negotiate.
Look – let’s be clear. We, in this profession, have a RESPONSIBILITY to be working towards being as FUNCTIONAL and as WHOLE as possible, to be using our own skills as much as we can, to be authentically and honestly role-modelling wholesome and healthy behaviours – be it food choices or boundary setting or time-management or whatever. We have a responsibility, if we are holding the space for others to do their inner-work and heal, to be working on OURSELVES, continuously, to try always to be a few steps ahead of our clients and anything that might arise in the therapy room. We need to be grounded enough and clear enough to not be getting triggered every 5 minutes by what’s presented to us. And, if we DO get triggered, we are responsible for addressing this with our own professional consultative-support person. We have to do our best to be as clean and as clear as possible, to be able to do our work effectively and achieve the best possible outcomes for our clients. I believe personally, that if you’re an addiction counsellor, then it would be harmful for your clients if you yourself were not healed from your own addiction. A life coach shouldn’t be sleeping on a park bench either, right? I, personally, wouldn’t hire an overweight nutritionist or personal trainer, for example. I want to know that they’ve had the experience of achieving the results I want to achieve myself. I think these things are ethically, morally and professionally fair to expect (I know this is a bit of a straw-man argument – but you get the point I’m making).
HOWEVER: the notion that we should have it sorted at all times and if we don’t then we should be able to just use our skills to sort ourselves out, is unrealistic – and dangerous. It’s part of the affliction of guruitis, and has never, actually, been part of our job description! It’s ultimately not helpful to our clients either, because it creates this notion of an unattainable future-state, where everything is perfect and no one ever suffers. I don’t believe in this as a notion or a goal – it’s not reality and it’s not helpful.
It’s also – most certainly – not helpful for us, either. I spoke to one of my lovely, highly skilled, qualified and highly effective colleagues recently, who’d had a week of sleep deprivation personally and was running a sleep workshop that week. They said they felt “incongruent” – AKA they had fallen prey to these unrealistic standards as a therapist and coach and were venturing into beating-self-up land.
In the book, she not only parallels her own personal issues and healing journey with that of the clients she’s working with, and how one informs the other (thank you for articulating this process so beautifully). She also tells the stories of some of her colleagues, dealing with their own demons and mental health issues, some of which, unfortunately, were unsolvable.
Being trained and skilled does not make us immune to life’s many challenges, nor does it make us bad at our jobs, sometimes quite the contrary (as she skilfully depicts in the book). I do my best work when I’m personally working on something hard/meaty/confronting. It makes me a significantly better helper – there’s more resonance and connection. In this way, the whole “practice what you preach” adage works and can not be seen as hypocritical: my practice is to keep improving myself, not to pretend perfection.
Sometimes we simply do not have access to our inner skills and resources. Sometimes our nervous systems are traumatised, overwhelmed, too delicate. Sometimes – often – we’ve had a shitty and dysfunctional past, which is what led us into this work in the first place (we’ve been helped, and we want to help others). I certainly didn’t have my life together at age 27, but still became bloody good at my job. We can’t be objective to our own subjectivity, it’s just not humanly possible. We need our own objective helping-people too; this should be part of our job, of course. And sometimes we need even more than that. Sometimes we’re vulnerable and we’re going to struggle and wobble and not know the best way to deal with an unprecedented challenge. It’s from this place, that the life we’ve spent “our skills” creating, that can successfully hold us while we work through it and upwards.
I, for one, am hoping that by being as real as Natalie, we can authentically help our clients (and others) without having to pretend that we are somehow invincible or immune or always regulated, and therefore not role-modelling that unhelpful notion of an unattainable future-state of perfection.
I – personally – am no longer buying into the pressure of my profession, I’m tired of it. I am – instead – going to be 100% honest. I’m not going to pick and choose my honesty to attain more social media followers through some kind of strategy. Whenever I have bent what I’ve wanted to actually say in order to do this just doesn’t resonate. It’s only heart-spoken words that do.
I believe authenticity, which is communicated in a skilful way, is the best tool we’ve got in our profession to really help people change their lives. My clients want to know I understand their struggles and that I’ve been there, that I’ve done the work and improved things for myself. And if I haven’t managed to improve, then I’ve accepted, which is also a very worthy achievement.
NOTE: this is not – as Brene Brown says – “letting it all hang out”. You have my solemn promise that I won’t be sharing anything about my life that would cause you any concern and that I haven’t processed myself FULLY. I will only share things that I’ve processed with my own (current) psychologist, professional consultative-support supervisor, or by myself in my own way. I will be through the other side by the time I share, with hopefully helpful insights and tools of resilience that will help you too. And if I haven’t found my way through something completely, but I’m resilient and not emotionally triggered by it, then I’ll share that honestly too.
In some therapeutic disciplines, psychotherapy or psychodynamic approaches for example, it’s expected that very little is shared about the therapist’s personal life with their clients, so that they can be a completely clear and blank slate in which to enable their client to project and transfer all and everything that they need to onto them, in order for it to be effectively reflected back and then processed. Life coaches, however, if they’re a purist coach, are not bound by the same process, and can freely share (as much as they feel is appropriate at least) because they are not doing deep therapeutic work and don’t need the blank slate. Although I’ve never trained in psychotherapy, I did start my career as a therapist, before training and establishing myself as a life coach, so I guess that means I can make my own rules up and skillfully share as much as I think is helpful for the client I have in front of me? And basically write what I want, on my own platform?
What do you think? Are you with me?
Love, Charlotte.