One Chapter Closes…A New One Begins.
Reflections on Being a Psychotherapist & Transitioning to Retirement
After 30 years as a clinical psychotherapist, I closed my private practice in 2024. I am now semi-retired and only offering some clinical supervision to a few therapists. Semi-retirement has afforded me the space to focus more on the wisdom teachings of the Buddha dharma, lead Insight retreats and Zen sesshins, pursue writing, move and dance with joy and spend more quality time with family and friends.
I’ve had some time to reflect on making the transition to retirement which has been both a challenging and joyful process. I have loved therapeutic work, offering a container for transformation and healing. I have met some extraordinary people over the years, yet ordinary in that we are all touched by suffering, the common ground of humanity itself. It is through the splinter of suffering, angst and distress that brings us in search of support, care, healing and liberation. Along with the splinter in the heart, imbedded within each of us is a natural organic healing impulse.
My private therapy practice has brought me many gifts; it has been my bread and butter, a primary source of financial income over the last 30 years. The therapeutic journey has been rich and multi-layered. It has required foundational formal academic study of psychological theory and practice that spanned two decades. I initially trained in Trauma recovery from sexual assault and domestic violence with Women’s health. My interest shifted to Jungian dream work and sand tray therapy which are both methods of depth psychotherapy that use symbolism and dreams to access the unconscious mind and facilitate psychological healing and individuation. The Buddhist practice of mindfulness and inquiry has been a deep thread that has been woven through my life for over 40 years. It was a natural fit to train in mindfulness based cognitive therapy, Hakomi Somatic Psychotherapy and Internal Family Systems work. It has been a formative part of my own psychological, emotional and spiritual development. Alongside and equally important to study and ongoing professional development, I’ve engaged in my own experiential therapy. This has been an ongoing inquiry into my own patterns of behaviour a process of unravelling and re-organisation. Engaging in the hard-work miracle of deep characterological transformation has deeply informed my work with clients. It’s been an invitation to plumb the depths of psychology that is never ending. Overall, it has been a privilege to be a psychotherapist, it has offered a window into my client’s personal lives and my own. I am deeply grateful for this intrapersonal and interpersonal journey.
Reflections on being a psychotherapist
In order to be a therapist, I think one has to have a genuine fondness for human beings – our complexity, flaws, emotional messiness, our pain, suffering and vulnerability, our conflicted longings and need to live a happy, fulfilled life. We are all to some degree troubled souls, longing for love. Understanding of our primary needs for; love, approval, connection, respect, safety, to be seen, heard and valued, underlie our human condition. Therapy is not necessarily a glamours profession, it is working with the grit at the coal face of pain and suffering and trying to offer some healing practices, therapeutic interventions to support the emotionally injured parts of a person to recover, to heal and then thrive. Good therapy is above all relational, it occurs in a safe, respected, caring, professional relational space.
The Boundless Heart Teachings
All the theories, strategies, interventions and techniques that I have learnt have been bedded down in the practice of mindfulness, inquiry, bearing witness, the compassionate humanistic values of unconditional positive regard. Apart from honing my therapeutic skills the Buddhist teachings of the boundless heart have been the philosophical and spiritual underpinnings of my therapeutic work and my life in general. The immeasurable qualities of – Love, Compassion, Joy and Equanimity are known as the 4 Brahma Viharas or the 4 Immeasurables in the Mahayana tradition. I have taught the clinical application of these qualities in the therapeutic context for AABCAP’s two-year professional training for 16 years. Each of the Brahma Viharas can be cultivated in a three-way field, as a practice for the therapist, as an agent of healing for the client, and as a way of being in the therapeutic space, the inter-relational field in which we do therapy.
In many ways these heart qualities fall in line with what the renowned existential psychiatrist Ervin Yalom calls the ‘love cure’ and what Carl Rogers an American Psychologist and founder of the humanistic psychology referred to as an unconditional positive regard. This approach stems from the belief that humans are inherently good and have an ‘actualising tendency’ to reach their full potential.
I think of therapy as a path of insight and ‘self-actualisation’. A path of inquiry into our whole mind body process, a path of radical acceptance with the healing medicine of mindfulness, insight, love, compassion and forgiveness. These qualities need to be embodied and role-modelled by a therapist. Sometimes we are the first person who has treated our client with respect and care. It helps to be intently curious and respectful of the inner workings of the mind. Offering a mindfulness-based therapy helps to gain insight into our family and cultural patterns that bind us and keep us stuck. Healing often comes through the crucible of learning to self-administer lovingkindness right into the wound. With mindfulness and kindness, we can attend to the hurt, the frozen fear and alienation and come to know ourselves anew.
There are implications and benefits in being a compassionate empathetically attuned therapist. Compassion offers safety to the abused, a willingness to attend to the emotional pain, it offers unconditional positive regard for the rejected, the lonely, the unloved parts that never feel good enough. The emotional wounds are held and unearthed with mindfulness and healed in the light of compassionate attention. In embodying and responding with compassion to a being’s suffering, we begin to internalise this kindness and positive regard. Our defensive barriers soften and we forge a new relationship with ourselves based on self-compassion. Self-compassion is also important for ourselves as therapists; the work is hard and emotionally draining at times.
Having a practice of equanimity, maintaining a strong back, open heart, creates balance and enhances our capacity to hold a non-judgemental space for; craziness, confusion, distorted perceptions, distress, cognitive and emotional dysregulation and not be phased by the client’s anxious states or be dragged into the black dog of depression. Equanimity steadies us to not fall into the pit of rescuing, pity, enmeshment with our client’s suffering, or on the other hand aloofness. We hold the space to welcome the many parts of our client, so they feel heard and understood. After all we are not so many degrees of separation. The practice of equanimity the steady presence of mind has helped me to sit in the middle of the tension of the opposites, the courage to help my clients face their own cross.
Every client has given me a gift by entrusting me with their story. It is an honour to listen to clients’ stories, the waves of emotions, the outpouring of grief and loss. Each person’s unique story has been a window into a part that feels broken, some rupture of significant relationship or loss of meaning yet this is the crack where the light gets in. The task of accompanying and tracking their process is important. It is a journey into the depths, yet having one eye open to know the way out of the swamp of despair in order to live with greater clarity and lightness of being. We grow strong in the broken places; the scars are the proud bearers and signs of the repair work.
I’ve grown in dimensions and ways that I could never have if it were not for my clients opening their heart and mind to me. It is their trust in me, that has made me the therapist I have become. It has been a never-ending learning and journey of inquiry. It has stretched my heart; I am grateful for this. On reflection, even the clients that have challenged me most have been times of growth, a confrontation with my limitations, edges and failings. When I have been caught up in reactivity, when I have done the other a disservice due to my lack of skill, or misunderstanding or where I have let them down, I hope I am forgiven. I hope they grow and recover regardless of my inadequacies. I trust the healing impulse that is alive within each of us and you will grow into the light of your own nature, in your own time and way.
Therapy is a heart-opening, deep listening business. We come here to learn and lean a bit more into the light, to stand steady in the midst of uncertainty, to learn to love ourselves fully warts and all, to open to the wonder of being present, without the shackles that bind us. To love oneself and others fully is a great task that has been entrusted to us. As Rainer Maria Rilke’s said in his work Letters to a Young Poet, “For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation”. Equally and vitally important is not to lose sight of the capacity to see past all the woundedness and know we/they are already free from the very beginning. Our true nature is our inherent nature. As we peel away the crusted layers and barriers our radiant true nature is revealed.
The inspiring fuel that has kept me going is seeing clients recover from deep childhood wounds, mend relationships, resolve differences, show up more and be their best selves. To form an alliance together, to hold up a mirror for them to see themselves more fully as a worthwhile person, a whole being under a vast sky. It is an honour to walk part of the way together, where I become part of their life and they become part of mine, particularly in long-term therapeutic relationships, there is a woven braided tapestry of the “I, thou” relationship.
It has not all been healing developmental trauma, pathology and bruised relationships; it has been a delight to open the doors to wholistic positive psychology and explore the far reaches of consciousness. In depth and transpersonal psychology, it is a journey of recognising our inter-connectedness, the felt sense of our inter-being. We open to a mutual deeper mirroring of truly seeing another as none other than our true Self, the common ground of our essential nature. To sit in the space of openness, true intimacy where the self and other are forgotten, the ego project of identity is unlatched, the door of freedom opens.
The therapeutic space has been a mutual healing space where both therapist and client draw from the well of nourishment, the rich inter-personal, interpsychic connections, the unfolding conversations at the heart of what matters. Therapy has been a process of authenticity of being real, where one’s head, heart and gut can come into alignment with our values, beliefs and purpose. Our ideal self and real self are aligned. There is a degree of intimacy in the interpersonal space that is both fulfilling and often draining with so much psychic holding. While I am ready to let go, I had wondered whether I will miss the deep dives into the interpersonal well? Those intense powerful moments of connection had vicariously fulfilled me. I wondered will there be an emptiness, a loneliness, a lack of intimacy in my life when I close up shop? The good news, is that none of those concerns or fears were born out in reality. I have found that letting go opens up a fertile space of possibilities, a new chapter, it is freeing. I’m following the thread of joy, a much-needed antidote to hearing so many stories of suffering.
Transition, letting go
The subtlest part of the transition to retirement is letting go and sloughing off my therapists’ identity. I take a leaf of wisdom from Erik Erikson a German-American psychologist and psychoanalyst who was known for his theory on psychosocial development through the life span. He also referred to transition as an ‘identity crisis’. Our ego identity constantly changes due to new experiences and information we acquire in our daily interactions with others. Erickson portrays retirement for the over 65’s as ‘ego integrity versus despair’. “It is during this time that we contemplate our accomplishments and can develop integrity if we see ourselves as leading an ongoing meaningful life. Erickson described ego integrity as, the acceptance of one’s own life cycle as something that needs to develop a sense of coherence and wholeness. Successfully managing this stage will lead to the virtue of wisdom which enables a person to look back on their life with a sense of closure and completeness and also accept death without fear”.
Over the years I have built up an accumulation of knowledge that is born out of the social psychological dynamics from a state specific therapeutic environment. I have acquired wisdom from years of experience, mindfulness training, Hakomi psychotherapy, transpersonal psycho-dynamic psychotherapy that interfaces with Buddhist teachings. On one hand it is a shame to let go of all that acquired knowledge, yet there is a greater freedom in letting go my attachment and identity to being the therapist. Wisdom from a Buddhist perspective asks us to see into our psychosocial conditioning and construction of self-identity, that arises due to causes and conditions that are inter-dependent. Over-identification and attachment to one’s identity as a separate fixed entity is a false dawn. Recognising the stickiness of self-identity, I sought out supervision in order to make the transition to retirement a conscious wholesome process of letting go. It was somewhat harder than I had imagined but so vital for transition.
No matter how skilful or unskilful I have been as a therapist, the psychic holding is exhausting after years of looking into that window of emotional distress. Over exposure and expecting myself to keep responding to trauma, pain and suffering becomes a trigger for vicarious traumatisation which in turn is a lack of self-compassion and a wearing down of resilience. I have held out the bottomless bucket for the well of tears for long enough, my heart now wants to reclaim itself, to unburden itself from all those tender arching stories. It is time to stop, to give up the good work. To say to myself, “I have done enough”. “It’s enough” and feel into the satisfaction of having given enough and being enough. My heart feels tender as I speak these soothing words.
A quiet joy is calling me to a different horizon a new chapter. It is time to close the therapy door, take down my brass shingle. The healer in me now needs time and space to rest. Slowly, there is another voice that is growing quietly within me, a voice that wants to be free, a seeker of joy, the antidote to too much compassion. I hear the call to my own vastness, boundless and joyful presence, a call to my self-actualising potential. I hear the longing for a deeper well of silence, to abide in the eternal mystery of my essential nature.