Your therapist thinks about you.

Many people think being a therapist is easy, but it is not. To me it’s easy sometimes because I do this because I LOVE it. When I start to get bored, I learn a new modality, challenge myself in a certain area, or ask for feedback from colleagues.

What’s not talked about nearly enough is how much most therapists think about their clients outside of the 50 minute session time that we have together once a week. With Ketamine clients, I typically hold them temporarily while they are doing exploration with Ketamine, open them up, and send them back to their primary therapist. Our time together is limited, yet profoundly transformative. I typically get some pretty profound gems at the end of a Ketamine session like “I don’t need anything but myself” or “I worry too much about things I cannot control.” Typically those are things that people have “known” for a while but haven’t really taken them to heart until Ketamine comes in and helps them see it from another deeper angle.

I think about my clients when I encounter a similar struggle or see something that reminds me of them. If I know your inner child loved popsicles, I will think about you when I see popsicles, for example, or I will think of you when I see another client getting into a healthy relationship after a nasty heartbreak, just as you are knee deep in yours. I think of you when I see a quote or read a book that I know you would like. When clients graduate or decide they are ready to take a break, I still think about them and wonder how they are doing. Typically they pop back up at another time in their life and I will be so excited to get to work with them again.

Sure, I get paid by my clients, and there is an aspect of money in exchange for service involved, but there is so much more time spent than the 50 minutes a week I get paid to sit with you. Training I take when I think about how these new skills and/or knowledge can help me work with you better, modalities to try with you to process painful memories, all of it.

And I love that I get to disagree with my clients. I love that they get to work things out with me. I love that they can get mad at me and we can work it out. Sometimes the safest place to argue (or it should be) is with your therapist. Maybe you received something I said in a certain way and come back wanting to process. I’m up for it. Therapy is a place to be yourself or to learn who “yourself” is. I become a sleuth, trying to ask you the questions and notice the things that bring out who you REALLY are. That’s priceless. Once you can learn who you really are, that’s when the real living begins.

I am really the luckiest lady in all the land to be able to witness people finding their true selves. That, to me, is the biggest perk of the job.