Life's Lessons

I love being a therapist. Over the last six years that I've studied, practiced, succeeded, cried, failed, and existed at being a therapist, it has become me. It is who I am. I am a lot of things... a daughter, a wife, a sister, an aunt, a granddaughter, a student, a teacher... But perhaps more than any of those things, I am a therapist. I often do poorly at my other roles in life, but I don't often feel that I do poorly as a therapist. Even when I do, the point of therapy is sort of to be human and model appropriate behaviors, like apologies and openness within a relationship. I love the honesty that comes with therapy, even though it's sometimes difficult. And I love the lessons I learn from my clients. I teach a social skill group for near-adolescent girls (I think the age range is supposed to be 11-13 or something like it). It's been quite an adventure teaching it - social skills are one of those things you just pick up on as you get older, with some prompting from adults or peers. A lot of it, though, is just observation. So what happens if your brain doesn't pick up on those cues? You get someone like me to teach you about it. As I was talking to a co-worker about these groups we have at work, I commented on the assumption that those of us leading the groups have social skills in the first place. Sometimes I wonder about myself.

Anyway... as I met with my group this week, we were discussing empathy and whether or not people are just born with the ability to feel empathy. Me, being the honest girl I am, responded, "Well, I don't know if I can offer a professional opinion on this, but my personal opinion is that some empathy just comes with age and experience. And some of it, to a certain extent, can be taught." And one of my dear girls (quite haughtily, I might add) said, "Well, what if someone doesn't want to be taught?"

This question, for some reason, really struck me. I know I have moments, sometimes even whole stages of life, where I don't want to be taught. Sometimes the lessons I need to learn are so painful, I'd prefer to just live in denial about [insert any difficult topic here]. I think we all, at some point, have to be humbled so extensively there is no choice but to learn whatever lesson we have in store for us. And this is one of the reasons I love being a therapist - I love being a part of those hard lessons, providing a safe place for those lessons to be opened up and examined and accepted or rejected. I love going through the hard things with people. I love the way my heart opens up and feels with someone else, comforts or hurts or rejoices with someone else. And I imagine that on a microscopic level, that mirroring of feelings is what our Savior feels with us. He sits in front of us individually and goes through the hard stuff with us. Knowing that makes the bitter lessons a little bit sweeter.

My absolute favorite thing about being a therapist, I'm discovering, is that I learn from my clients. I've had clients recently that have helped me to deal with my own hard stuff, helped me to make my marriage stronger, and helped me to understand others in my life. Being a therapist makes me better at my other roles in life. And being a therapist makes life's lessons a little easier to swallow.