It is a challenging and unique aspect of our profession to have one’s professional identity so intimately linked with one’s personal self. Becoming a therapist is a state of mind, a sensibility, a never-ending process of developing an identity, a solution to a deeply personal problem, as well as learning a body of knowledge, a set of techniques, and establishing a career. The therapist’s identity is an amalgam of professional role, which grows around a personal amorphous core. The professional and the personal dimensions of self are variables in a complex equation describing the therapist’s identity,

The practice of psychotherapy isn’t for everybody. We have chosen a most interesting and difficult job where satisfaction, challenge and peril co-exist. We are privileged to a special intimacy. Day after day hour after hour we hear the most intimate details of a person’s life. What we hear from our patients triggers pain within ourselves as we suffer the same symptoms and difficulties in our lives.

What is the relationship between the difficult, symptomatic aspects of oneself and therapeutic behavior, between the professional  and personal dimensions of oneself? How does the cultivation of a professional identity over the span of training and practice assimilate these unhealthy aspects of self?  How do we learn to use our Self including the “unhealthy” parts when what is split off and dissociated by the individual is also devalued by the professional community?

The paradox we experience as therapists is that while we work tenaciously and compassionately to heal our patients, we tend to close ourselves off to those unhealthy wounded parts of our personalities. We have struggled with our wounds, which often was motivation for becoming therapists and have fine-tuned our ability to help others. At the same time these wounds continue to be present and provoke shame. We feel considerable pressure to present a normal, competent, professional self to our patients, colleagues, and even to ourselves.

The socialization of the self into a professional role and the ongoing expectations attending a successful practice create the conditions for splitting within the therapist’s self, where the professional holds the “preferred (idealized) version of self and the personal holds the remains, including what is messy, wounded, inadequate, and unacceptable.

What motivated you to become a therapist?  What life experiences influenced this decision and shaped your development?  I welcome your comments.

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