Confessions of a Therapist

"All you do is sit around and listen all day...how hard can it be?"

I heard that a lot from people as I was working to become a therapist and well into my time being a therapist. This was especially true from people very disconnected to mental health. People who had never experienced therapy at all before. 

The comment always struck a deep chord within me, making me second guess my own intense reactions to seeing clients. The nightmares, the long nights of insomnia, the endless search for new materials and trainings, and the wiping of tears in the 10 minutes I had between sessions. 

It's hard to explain the knot of feelings being a therapist brings. The joy and the pain, the celebrations and the endless fear that you aren't enough to help someone. 

And so I began to write. I'd write down what it was like to see clients, to work with them as they processed their own traumas and vulnerabilities. I'd write poems and short stories to process what my experience was like on the other side of the room. In the therapists chair. 

These Confessions of a Therapist are those writings. They aren't pretty. They aren't the beautiful stories of huge breakthroughs or the highlight reels of all the amazing work I accomplished in every session (because that didn't happen). They're the real struggles of sitting with someone "listening" to the worst stories imaginable. The horror of what we humans do to each other. And the way I have tried to process my own experiences in relation to what I hear. 

All personal details of clients have been excluded or removed in these writings, as they were written to help me continue in this field. 

Warning: Reading these (as they are released) may be triggering, so please exercise caution and take care of yourself.