Each year we open submissions for our Annual Wise Therapy Spotlight, where we ask a question of particular importance to our wider therapist community. We are always moved by the depth and generosity of our community voices.
This year, we asked our community, What Is the Soul of Therapy? Read more about our inspiration for this, our 5th edition, in the letter from the editors and Academy of Therapy Wisdom founders, Brian and Ian.
Continue here to read the submission by Serene Sarah George. We hope you enjoy it as much as we all did.
My wandering search for the soul of therapy
An experiential essay through a brown baby therapist’s eyes
I took birth as a baby therapist into a post-pandemic world. A couple of genocides and wars followed with no sign yet of much light at the end of the tunnel. Just as I was supposed to learn to breathe as a therapist, I was suffocated.
It was beyond appalling to read about the obstruction of supervision for Arab therapists in a solidarity statement put together by some mental health professionals. The very same structures we have created to protect and support one another were being used to oppress and other. The microcosm of the violence in the larger world repeating in all its nastiness within the ‘care’ empire. In a parallel in my home country India, I was taken aback by the neglect of our professional community towards isolated voices from therapists belonging to the Muslim community trying to name the obvious. An eerie silence. We do not talk about difficult things anymore, I guess? But wait, isn’t that the very essence of our job? How do we do this authentically for those we share therapy spaces with, when we cannot even dare to care for our colleagues? A care empire that cannot dare to care.
In our obsession to hold the moral high ground, maybe we have stopped trying. At a time when nothing feels good enough, I often wonder, how is by-standing a good enough response? Neutrality and complacency, witnessing and by-standing, containment and violation – everything seems to have blurred- rather, they have always been blurred and now the blur has become an uncomfortable, spotlighted blur. But we still won’t talk to each other. Operating from our neatly curated Instagram and LinkedIn Accounts, operating from our Google’s HIPAA-safe workspace and our sterilized, posh clinics with no sign of dirt, maybe we have forgotten we have responsibility as a fraternity too.
Maybe we never knew how to hold space for defiance and disobedience
I often wonder if this amount of psychic reality just when I am learning to breathe will take away my romanticism and faith as a budding therapist. How am I supposed to create a sacred space within a largely contaminated environment where all of us are part of a filthy game we cannot seem to opt out of? We seem to understand holding the science and the art together in therapy, but not romance and faith. We seem to understand the mind and the body at work, but not the heart and soul. The mind is not just the brain we say, but apparently the heart is just the cardiac system. Well, what about the soul then?
I would like to think that the soul of therapy is not dead yet, but it seems to be on life-support, desperately seeking oxygen from within and without.
Psychotherapy, a field that has been in existence in its current form from around 100 years probably cannot produce ‘experts’, especially when we are trying to study human beings and their psyche within contexts that are constantly evolving. On the other hand, I also draw parallels to music when I try to make sense of psychotherapy. The seven notes got discovered, and then we keep innovating and improvising. Therefore, one can argue that the timeline and nascency of the field does not matter. I don’t know- I am no expert nor do I have ambitions to be one.
Having said that, when I think about people I want to learn from – expertise, I think, is a more palatable term for me. Expertise to learn from, to observe, to wonder and be curious about. But, if this expertise gets mistaken for infallibility- I shut down, I run. That is not an expertise I would want to learn from. Is there a point we get to in our expertise that we can afford to stop listening? Is there a point to which we can get to in your knowing that you can afford to give up our not-knowing? Is there a point we get to in playing experts on life that we can forget being human?
Maybe we are quite nearing that point in our community collectively that a few of us, scattered across the world, are feeling called to search for a losing soul. Something is moving and swaying. Something emergent and evolving or something that’s making a retreat? My ’soul’ tells me probably both! Maybe a wandering soul that was exorcised on the couch is pre-empting to make a comeback, reincarnate and then fly out of the window.
Housekeeping needs come from a need for survival and hope, rather than self-absorbed gate-keeping. Housekeeping demands that we keep cleaning up too, alone and together- taking turns to preserve our collective capacity over self-preservation. For the soul needs sanctity to stay within, housekeeping needs to clean up the altar.
I’m writing this piece from my being as a therapist who also allows her patient-hood to breathe easy or at the least take a sigh in and outside the clinic. As someone who has more questions than answers, I will attempt sharing further, some directions I have gone for strolls in my soul-searching so far.
Spoken language- One of my cherished parts of therapeutic work is the process of finding the rhythm in the shared language with each person I co-create therapy space with. When I read academic papers or even LinkedIn articles, I often find myself having to work past the way things are said, to listen to what is being said. The way things are said, are indeed an integral part of what is being said, and
I wonder if our ‘expertise’ allows us the humility to take a good look at how we are speaking to our patients.
As I began to read and learn more as a practitioner, I caught myself speaking differently – the language of condescension- spoken and unspoken, creeping into the spaces I hold. Some of it the real experts (my patients) called out in their own beautifully messy ways. If I could infuse something into the language in and around therapy today, I would add in a concoction with a tablespoon each of uncomplicated warmth and kindness. I will filter out and remove some of the air quotes and extraordinary fascination for the ‘subject’. If we cannot have curiosity without condescension in the verbal – in our research and training, how do we expect the learning to translate into practise? Too much to ask, I wonder?
The unspoken language- As therapists, we nurture our skill and capacity for attunement with great care- something that very naturally comes to most of our patients. I’m a deeply attuned patient too. I draw from my therapist’s sighs, held back tears, even the flutter in their stomach. However, for all we speak to wear not-knowing as a therapeutic attitude, we also seem to know a lot- well, ‘seem’ to know! How do we then embody, breathe and carry our not-knowing while we share spaces with uncorrupted, highly attuned souls? How do we honour this privilege of radical accompaniment to a fellow human being, when we cannot get off the proverbial high-chair in our minds? How do we hold the knowing in the not-knowing, and the not knowing in the knowing together – when we are making leaps in scientific research and attempting to continue to create art within a therapeutic space?
The shift from chasing to seeking- The goal oriented, hustling, productivity pioneering chase has found its way into therapy spaces too. Almost everyone feels like an imposter in this mental health industrial complex. The good enough baseline has been making paradigm shifts, competing with an upward sloping revenue curve in a losing fight. In our efforts to stay afloat, we are ‘borrowing’ from ancient wisdom and trying to ‘own’ and ‘sell’ it. The chase to seek transformation will need to happen from within the therapists. One may ask- is it fair for us to take all of this burden on? Surely not- but we can role model and start somewhere too- by putting an extra thought into what material goes into the cardigans we wear and where are our therapy chairs sourced from, or by searching for the political complexities in when to see our patients with our naked eye and when to wear a tinted lens to protect from them from our very same eyes.
Beyond the binaries- We pathologize binaries in most of our modalities. However, it is quite paradoxical how many binaries we have developed as ways of our professional functioning. Often in the criticism post this realization, we repeat the problem, often in its extreme opposite. One such criticism I have found is the dismissal of individual work as perpetuating narcissistic ways of being. While I see merit in that, I also imagine if we were to think beyond hyper-individualistic ways of practise, isn’t individual work a group process too? There is my village- my peers and supervisors and all my extended support systems holding me and the same divine thread also connecting my patients, and through them, their villages. I have seen bodies and minds of people in my practise affecting one another and, in those moments, I can only surrender in gratitude. When we imagine our boundaries as walls and borders in our professional life, how do we think between the lines? In our concreteness or loose sand-ness, can we play with our clayish-ness?
Dreaming together- When I speak to my peer therapist friends, I realize how we can see possibilities in the impossible. There is probably something in the ‘becoming’ of a therapist during a time when world is breaking apart that makes us want to hold each other in a way that feels different from templates we have available. Maybe it is only my bubble- but I experience us as a generation of therapists who are attempting to grow up together. Maybe seeing our seniors who are recovering therapists, we remind ourselves we should not have to recover. And maybe that is why, we dare to dream together. My prayer is – may more of us attempt to dream together and may these imaginary bubbles slow burst into wider spaces extending its healing potential to above and beyond.
As my search continues, I will end by parting with a piece of my pain to my larger professional fraternity in a hope to connect and help us soul-search ‘together’. If we were to imagine no soul is free till every soul is, after all collective liberation and moksha (salvation) maybe one and the same thing?
To my co-therapists,
I feel the superior air of radical kindness and compassion advocacy.
I hear the resilience and motivation brigade that refuses to “mollycoddle”.
As we move past the abuse of isolating privacy, to the show we’ve made of vulnerability
In a time where ‘fence-sitting’ is shamed and polarization demands one to take a side
In a flood of perspectives, leaving little space for free-flowing continuum that thought is
In the piling up of affirmative and anti-practices, where does my not-knowing stand?
My wisdom tooth asks me but how do we counter noise with voice?
I have no answer; I respect the hard work it takes to shout in a largely frozen world.
I shout too at times, and let my voice rest for a while!
Can you not judge me? I already feel guilty- for shouting, and for resting too.
Let me grieve the collective noise pollution (if I’m allowed to?)
Let me grieve the cults we are reducing into (without being cancelled?)
And let me wonder when we promise therapy to be a space for being,
In the discomfort of sitting with multiple truths, why would we make peace with a lie?
The views expressed in this essay are not necessarily the opinions of Academy of Therapy Wisdom, its presenters or its staff. This is part of a series featuring the unedited voices of our community in conversation. All content is used with permission and is copyright 2024 by Academy of Therapy Wisdom. Only the author may reproduce their content.
To read more articles or download a free copy of the final publication visit Wise Therapy Spotlight.
