*it's long* - if you skip, I won't be offended. I am putting it
here because I trust G+ to save my writings more than facebook -
and there is a chance this might help/be interesting to even one
person in my G+ side of life. This is my response to a women I
am good friends with, named Heather, who is a professional
Counselor who bared a bit of her soul as to ''How come the stuff
that works with patients doesn't work at home?'' She, like me,
bares what she can publicly for many of the same reasons I do my
own. It's public and personal at the same time, one of the most
emotionally freeing ways to write anything. To those that lasted
to this sentence, good luck to you. She always gets my yappy
side going - which doesn't take much - but I don't think I ever
said this much in one place at one time. I love you all, truly,
even if we may never meet in person. -Ken
THIS IS MY RESPONSE TO MY FRIEND.
It's true, Heather and it is so frustrating. In high school, I
knew being a middle school guidance counselor or a minister or a
scientist or a doctor was my calling. I became none of those
things (not outwardly), and went into computers and business.
You see, in my early 20s, I decided to find out *all* about each
of the professions. I interviewed two psychologists in real
life; friends of mine who were seeing therapists who agreed to
give me a few minutes of their time, when I said I was
interested in becoming a therapist. They gave it all to me
straight up, the goods, the bads, their own feelings. I listened
and asked questions and listened some more. It is a profession
one can enter at any stage of life, young adult or older. That
took the desperation off of it - the ''I *have* to do this
-now-, or else'' feeling. I also learned about the sadness and
loneliness that sometimes follows, especially in that in most
you never get to see the successes. The frustration of ''I know
so much, but I can do so little'' sometimes. I also learned how
the desire to help people you don't know is due to wanting to
help yourself and the people you DO know. It was eye-opening to
me and it was enough data, so I moved on to investigating
religions and spiritual stuff, which are other stories for other
times.
But from that and the intervening years leading up to today, I
learned, ''You can't be a prophet in your own hometown.'' That
is, the people closest to you are the ones you will least be
able to help directly, if at all. It's such a cognitive
mi-matching: ''This pattern works in the office, why won't it
work here?'' Unfortunately, it's precisely BECAUSE it's not the
office, you're not the counselor, and these aren't your
patients.
Different hats, different roles, different expectations of ''Who
Heather is'' by different people who aren't coming to you with
the anticipation of, ''This woman will help me'' or even
''There's no way this woman can help me.'' What you do at work
is a ''Black Box'' - a mystery that those close to you really
don't want to open. They like you in the roles that you play.
And really, your friends and family and neighbors ''know too
much'' about you. They've seen your mistakes. They know your
humanity.
To those you help, you are wearing a Uniform, so to speak. You
are The Healer - and even those who resist your efforts only do
so to try to maintain their own sense of self-integrity; they
fear that you will tear them down into component parts and put
them back together in a way that they are unfamiliar with.
Unfamiliar emotional or mental or inner territory is absolutely
no different than being a stranger to yourself with no recall of
who you are, stick in a foreign land, hopelessly lost, aimlessly
wandering, blind with only your hand to guide them to their new
Selves.
What is your role to each person in your life? You are in a
multi-act play, where different stories are played by the same
actor, You, and you wear different costumes and have different
accents and work with a different cast of characters, as each 18
hour a day, every day play carries on.
Who is in your cast of characters at each Act in the script?
What role do they see you in? Does it say in your script:
''HEATHER as Mom:
HEATHER as counselor:
HEATHER as wife:
HEATHER as friend:
HEATHER on Facebook:''
I know your frustration well and the major mismatch of patterns
in my own mind, when my mind says, ''If follow procedure 1 then
2 then 3, my result will be 4'' without seeing that these are
actions that require land under my feet, but I am actually
swimming in the middle of the ocean.
Right words, right actions in the right environment with the
right people.
Change any of those things, and your inner formulas don't work
as well - or won't work at all.
So you need to use different formulas, different procedures.
I could talk about this subject for hours on end - it's one of
my favorites - and it is a part of what I am eyeballs deep in
trying desperately to completely understand, to come up with;
finding or filling in this Gap in our human knowledge, or at
least in my own. I'm getting closer many times a day. When I get
the answer, you'll be the first to know.
