Son of Bad Supervisor

Years ago, mistakenly feeling superior, I completed the coursework to be a counselor supervisor. Slogging through that literature was living in the hell of pure boredom: chapter after chapter, PowerPoint and workshop of the most emasculated, packing-peanut jargon and oversight boilerplate possible on earth, short of farce. The aim of the material, for the most part, was to have me inflict many layers of diapers on the counselor trainee. Don’t be sexual with the client. Be genuine. Self-reflect. Be ethical. Learn the theories. Identify misconceptions. Know the client’s world view. Explore supervisee’s feelings. Explore boundary issues. Be multiculturally competent. Be evaluated periodically and as needed.

The end result of my knowledge, the supervised intern, would be a gingerly hatched egg with no compass, a map with nothing on it, an extremely light suitcase, and a fear of jail (really, just malpractice and doom).

I have never wanted to do it again. But I do enjoy challenging and distressing students.

What do you think it means to be a therapist? How have you dealt with your own psychology? How far have you gone in it? What do you think psycho-emotional problems are?

Here, if he or she has drunk from the communal well and says “cognitive errors,” I will probably reply . . . .

Jesus, no. Do you believe the client is too stupid to think right? He “thinks,” if you want to give him that compliment, because he feels. He feels because that’s how we receive the stimuli of the world. A child isn’t sick because she thinks it. Let’s look at what feeling is, and what it does to us. Let’s look at the kinds of mental slippage that we call “thinking,” and how it often has little to do with the world.

That would start the ball rolling. We’d then sit at a pub, have some drinks or a water, and slalom in the mess of human misery.

Therapists are the fortunate few. People “feel” helped by all sorts of lights and voodoo, even when they’re not. Especially when they’re not: Real help is painful and fearful, and may not feel useful. While lite help – pushing reframing and sanguine thoughts, encouragement, humor, some tears, general psychoeducation – sugars the client’s mind, directs him away from his deep sharky ocean.

Student counselors are, admittedly, the best at this. They are enthusiastic, empathic, mostly ignorant, attractive, happy to be titled therapists or psychotherapists or counselors.

I have never liked using those terms. They’re a little embarrassing, as it can never not seem pompous. “I – I know the human psyche. And then I’ll know yours!”*

If I had the chance, I’d influence the intern to question herself uncomfortably by sending her feeling eyes into her past, by lightly landing on the billions of microscopic emotional satellite dishes – residing in the gut and chest and throat – that comprise the body’s awareness of its history. If we know the dumbstruck facts of our nature, we’ll be comfortable with and allowing and inviting the client to know theirs. Psychotherapy is not primarily a skill or an art you learn. It is the gradual undoing of self-assumptions, of one’s comfortable persona, where investigation brings somber sobriety and knowledge and catharsis, which equals clarity, which equals more-lucid empathy for the other. It’s a kind of de-evolution of the self, yet we become more.

Interns sometimes don’t like that supervision includes moments of their own therapy. Maybe that’s what separates the young men from the boys, the young women from the girls.

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* Inspired by one of Johannes Brahms’ witticisms: “During a rehearsal of a quartet of his, the violist asked if he liked their tempos. ‘Yes,’ said Brahms. ‘Especially yours.’” http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2006/10/classic_putdowns.html.