Musings on Becoming a Psychotherapist
~ Christina Rosseti"My life is like a frozen thing,
No bud nor greenness can I see:
Yet rise it shall—the sap of spring…"
The Dark Cocoon:
As a child I was able to wander about in bemused leisure for only brief respites. I was too busy trying to cope with the emotional pains of growing up within a second generation holocaust family. I experienced this familial crucible as riddled with thorny stress and sharp prickles that could sting me with little provocation like a hornet in a foul mood. I became increasingly preoccupied with trying hard to be a perfectly dutiful daughter in this strict and suppressive cocoon.
As time unraveled, essential parts of the True Core Me felt as though they were entombed in a dark, subterranean deep freeze. I was heeling in my roots to preserve and protect them in a place no one could invade, not even my own self. It would take years and years of tough psychological shoveling and foraging in the hardpan of my defenses to unearth, thaw out, and set free what had once been buried for safe keeping.
During my early adolescence, my emotional struggle to adjust to a familial environment I found largely inhospitable to healthy growth blazed on. Increasingly, I began to directly taste and smell the strong acrid flavor of emotional affliction and free floating anxiety. The vulture shadow of a dark existential depression loomed upon me. I began to feel as though the colors and meaning and magic were draining out of the sinkhole of my life. At the same time, however, I experienced a torrential hunger to make sense of my own emotional pain as well as that of the larger human condition. I longed to understand the ubiquitous and unfathomable motif of human suffering in the short tributary between birth and death. These personal and universal questions determined to spill more life into the seemingly drowned valley of my soul.
The competitive, image-obsessed, and materialistic values of our Western narcissistic culture also left me feeling empty and enlarged my sense of futility. My scholastic accomplishments at a renowned high school were not gratifying as others told me they 'should' be. The treasured icons of white, middle class, post modern America eluded me on an emotional level. I held these hollow-heavy trophies and accolades like albatrosses around my neck with a tight, forced smile and a hidden aching heart. I experienced a sensation of not belonging to my subculture of teens. I felt mostly like a foreigner in a strange and barren land in which the language seemed insipid, the sights monotonous, the customs superficial, and the relatedness skin-deep.
~ JRR Tolkien"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.”
By mid adolescence, my embodied self had seriously diminished along with my shrinking spirit and had exposed to the world, beyond the mask of my silent stoicism, my internal pandemonium of body- emotive distress. I went from having a healthy, ruddy, and athletic trunk to being a pale, gaunt, and anorexic reed. Depression was literally eating the flesh from my bones as the outer tips of my vitality and hope seemed to experience a sort of dieback. Yet something of my strong life force, the taproot of my childhood passion for the glorious aspects of being alive and meaningfully connected, pushed on deep beneath the chilled tundra of my days.
As a teenager, I also became quickly disillusioned with the glaring limitations of the psychiatric establishment that tried to pin me down like a butterfly under glass. Within the "venerable halls" of the "healing" profession, I discovered a dearth of genuine warmth and empathic concern for my emotional turmoil. My forays into therapy and my intelligent and plucky determination to know and express the complexity of myself were often met with lackluster and detached interpretations, trite and sometimes insultingly reductive advice, and an overarching climate of professional remoteness. I was left feeling further diminished and largely unseen by the scorched terrain of these medical model and relationally impoverished treatments.