Gratitude, a Seed.

As a trainee, it’s natural to feel a spectrum of emotions. Happiness when your clients walk in and tell you something they had been working on finally worked. Frustration when it doesn’t go so well and yet you see just how much distress they are in. (And perhaps some sadness there too.) Fear when some of your more difficult clients react in anger or in unexpected ways. (Which if you’re mindful of, you can let it go so it doesn't distract you from your work with changing the patient's patterns … but that’s a topic for a future entry.)

All of these emotions are usually the ones I feel during or after sessions, on the days of my externship. But on the days in between, I’ve noticed the stable presence of a different kind of emotion having taken hold: gratitude.

When the emotional vicissitudes of sessions subside, what I sense there at the core is an immense well of gratitude. I am grateful to be doing this work. It is humbling to have the opportunity to sit in a room with people who share their greatest fears, most shameful moments, most difficult emotions, with you. And it is humbling to get the time of your supervisors, who have developed years and years of expertise, so you can learn to help those people better. And after your sessions are over, you get to sit in a room with these supervisors and ask all the burning questions you had during your sessions. “What do I say here?!! What did I do?! Why didn’t I do that?! Oh, that went well? Great, I’ll keep doing that! What else is there? What am I missing?”

Of course, my supervision hours don’t always go this smoothly. On some supervision sessions, I get anxious or I’m tired and I can’t ask all the questions I really want to ask because for one reason or another I can’t formulate the problems exactly as they appeared in session. Sometimes I even know something was problematic but I don’t know what, and so I can’t ask questions about it well. Those times are frustrating for me. And I recognize them as growing pains. Trainee pains. But even so, even on those weeks, when I’ve had days like that and I see the gap between what I would have liked to ask and what I did ask, or what I would have liked to say in therapy sessions and what I did say or didn’t say … in between those externship days, the feeling of gratitude is ever-present again.

Because I get to show up, week by week, and keep trying. “The only way is through,” I am reminded now. Gratitude because I get to choose to enter the growing pains and stay with them, so I can reach another place where I am better able to help people more effectively one day.

Perhaps another aspect of gratitude is that in a world filled with pain and suffering – distress that often takes place only in private and so often goes unnoticed – I am in the privileged position of noticing it myself and doing something to heal it. Of course, it’s not a perfect system … most of the clients I see are the ones who have the resources to even afford to enter such a process of noticing, acknowledging, and healing pain. One of my clients consistently struggles with her own privilege, and all I can do is agree and praise her for being able to see what many other people don’t or don’t want to see, and acknowledge how difficult it can be to see that and have to continue living in a system where you can’t change that – not immediately at least.

It’s not a perfect system, but neither in this world. And I think something about that … something about the process of growing in a space and in a world of imperfections … something is humbling about that too. That too fuels gratitude.

This feeling reminds me of pictures of a small flower growing through a crack on a sidewalk. Which reminds me of some of my clients – slowly healing from significant past trauma, or if they’re not there yet, at least trying, struggling against an imperfect system, struggling to make sense of how they got here, to this point. It also reminds me of the valiant trainee, who day in and day out, despite so many things going against him/her (inexperience, the unpredictability of what clients bring in, the unpredictability of what the trainee will bring in in terms of mood or courage or confidence or clarity and the ability to find the right words, in session or in supervision, and of course, the courage it takes to do role plays and recordings), he/she continues to show up, despite the many moments of awkwardness or doubt or uncertainty that pile up, continues to read, to reflect, to ask questions, to tolerate the growing pains, in order to one day be that flower, slowly budding from the concrete … and on some days, perhaps those days in between externship days, that trainee is able to see, some of the roots of the flower already forming, the buds taking shape.

And in those mindful moments: gratitude.

The essence of therapy, perhaps. The seed of the courage to continue.