"I rarely hear fellow therapists complain that their lives lack meaning.
The therapist's life is a life of giving, in which we daily transcend our own personal desires and turn our gaze toward the needs and the maturation of the other. We take pleasure not only in our patients' growth, but also in the phenomenon of concentric circles — the healing effect our patients have on the people they're connected to in their own lives.
This is an extraordinary privilege. And an extraordinary satisfaction.
Speaking earlier about the hazards of the profession, I described the persistent, unending self-examination and inner work our profession demands. Yet this very demand is more privilege than burden, because it acts as an inherent safeguard against stagnation. The active therapist is constantly evolving, forever growing in self-awareness and consciousness.
How could anyone guide others through an examination of the deep structures of mind and existence without simultaneously examining themselves? Nor is it possible to ask a patient to focus their attention on the way they relate to others without examining your own corresponding patterns.
Our work gives us not only the opportunity to transcend ourselves, to grow and mature, not only the privilege of a clear-eyed view that leads us toward a true, if tragic, awareness of the human condition — it offers us even more than that.
We watch our patients abandon old, self-destructive patterns of behaviour, distance themselves from things they'd complained about for years, develop a zest for life, learn to love us, and through that, turn with love toward others too.
It is a joy to watch other people release the sources of wisdom within them. Sometimes I feel like someone guiding patients through their own house, from room to room. What a remarkable gift, to watch them open doors to rooms they had never entered before, discovering new wings of their own home where their own exiled fragments reside — wise, beautiful, creative pieces of their identity."
Irvin Yalom, THE GIFT OF THERAPY
Dimitris Drivakos