The Life Cycle of
a Therapist
by
Sharon Charde
Part One of Two
It was the end of the
seventies and the world as I had known it was falling apart. The
womens' movement had given women permission to be angry, to expect
satisfaction and fulfillment in a marriage; the encounter movement
was encouraging not only the expression of feeling but acting
on it as well. All around me people were leaving their marriages
fueled by anger and the hope for soul mates and better sex. Few
seemed to go to church any more. Many forms of therapy and meditation,
such as TM, were becoming the new religion.
After all, people needed
help—their children were struggling with confusion as their
parents acted like them smoking pot, dressing in hippie style,
giving them cereal for dinner before they went out to dance, to
pottery classes, assertiveness training or with their new lovers.
Mothers went to work in record numbers seeking empowerment, often
finding only another form of enslavement. Men were thrown by the
new brand of assertive women and fought their desire for change,
thus upping the ante in marriages and relationships.
I was no exception
to this cultural cataclysm. In the mid seventies when my seven
year marriage to a young doctor seemed on shaky ground, I sought
help from a therapist. I drove an hour and a half to see a classic
male psychiatrist practicing psychoanalytic therapy who had been
referred by a doctor friend. He never asked to see my husband,
nor was he particularly interested in my disillusionment with
marriage and my struggles to mother two young children mostly
alone. After all, he was a doctor like my husband, he must have
had a wife and reverence was due him.
It took awhile to understand
I needed to leave this man; it took more time for me to say, I
can do this better. Family therapy was in its heyday. I was hearing
about such leaders in the field as Carl Whitaker, Milton Erikson
and Murray Bowen meeting with couples and family members to together
explore problems, listen to the children talking about their parents
and getting the parents to listen. I went to a few workshops at
the Elmcrest Psychiatric Institute when my second child was beginning
prep school and I felt that, at last, there was time for me. I
signed up for a two year graduate program in counseling at a college
an hour and a half away. The tuition was reasonable and I could
commute.
Therapy was clearly
established now as the new religion and I wanted to be one of
its high priests, not a communicant or an acolyte. I'd had enough
of that. Many other women were coming into the field at this time — it
was wide open and, after all, we were good at taking care of people.
One didn't have to be a psychiatrist now, one could be a psychologist,
social worker or counselor and put a shingle out. I doubt there
was much 'quality control' at that time; in fact I shudder to
think of the low standards my program and profession had back
then but since that time much has changed. I was impatient to
work in the field and try my hand at direct care, to 'do it better.'
Early in my program
I got a field work assignment at our local mental health center.
I would see three clients a week and get supervision from a psychologist/psychoanalyst
who wore a goatee and glasses just like his mentor, Sigmund Freud.
He had little use for family therapy but tolerated my newfound
passion for it. I went to workshops, took classes and read about
the 'family of origin' and its responsibility for just about every
adult problem a person could have. We learned to draw genograms
of three generations of this family of origin—I spent many
therapy hours doing this with clients—and make connections
through the generations. A grandfather's alcoholism showed up
in his grandson, a suicide committed in one generation was considered
an option for pain relief in another. Yes, this made sense.
In the early 80's Maggie
Scarf's book, Unfinished Business, was published, and Carol Gilligan's
In Her Own Voice, both becoming touchstones for what were now
being called gender issues in therapy. Women were reporting depression
in record numbers. It was being theorized that they had lost their
voices and selves in relationships with men due to the great power
imbalances built into traditional relationships. It was tremendously
exciting to me to have this obvious fact both recognized and verified
by credible people in the field. I felt backed up by them as I
worked with women in and out of relationships and as I struggled
with my own at home.
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