Lots of people are of the opinion that those who work in psychiatry are generally there because deep down, they know something is wrong with them.
My response to that, is who doesn’t have something wrong with them? And secondly, who is to say this thing and that thing that makes me different from your every day run of the mill neurotic is necessarily wrong?
But before we delve into that, I’ve been doing a bit of thinking while this has been on hiatus, and I’ve realized that I don’t think I would know how to operate in a functional system. In school, in life, even at the library (I knoow, right?) I’m the person on a quest to either make things better, or forcibly make them the way they should be (in my eyes, but sorry, Gh comes before Gi when you are listing alphabetically).
Coming to this realization has given me a bit more insight into some of my patients. In group, we were doing a lyric analysis of T.I. and Justin Timberlake’s “Dead and Gone”, and after some group discussion, one patient, who christened herself Ms. Attitude Department, verbalized to me her upset with my sitting in my chair with my “job having gone to school, never spent a day on the streets, never walked a mile in [their] shoes, and then having the balls to sit here and talk about making changes in [their] li[ves] as if [I knew] a damned thing [I was] talking about.”
I’ve had this conversation with myself before. I’ve had this conversation with my husband before. I’ve had this conversation with mentors and supervisors and friends. The thing is, and this is what I told Ms. Attitude Department, is that none of us have ever walked in one another’s shoes. We all tread our own paths in our own shoes and sometimes our socks stink a little. I think the game for a therapist is to learn as you go. Be able to take your own experiences and learn from them and couple them with your training so that you can provide true support.
So, going back to the statement at the beginning, people who work in psychiatry having problems themselves. I think the appropriate response to that would be something along the lines of people in psychiatry find constructive uses for their problems (if applied appropriately).
Comments?
Next post: My love/hate relationship with Lyric Analysis.
Related posts: