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The Life Cycle of a Therapist, Page 2
The Women's Project In Family Therapy was formed and, after graduation, I began post-master's studies at the Ackerman Institute in New York (a well-known family therapy center) where some of those women worked. I went to 'sex camp,' a ten-day desensitization program in Nova Scotia designed to cure therapists of any hang-ups they might have about sex so they didn't visit their reservations upon their clients.
We beginning therapists were all like crusaders, believing deeply in these new techniques, ideas and theories that supplanted the psychiatrist-based traditional therapy of the past which, after all, was patriarchal, mimicking the traditional marriage in which men had the power. After all, hadn't Gilligan told us that all psychological research theories were based on studies involving only men? Women, it seemed, made difficult research subjects as their long and thoughtful answers were difficult to quantify.
I started women's groups at the Center where I now worked full-time, getting home late and exhausted but tremendously exhilarated by the work I was doing. However, like my husband's, my life was now filled with asymmetrical relationships in which I was the helper to all those helpees. In my private life, I struggled not to carry this relating style over but it was hard. I saw pathology everywhere, in my friend's marriages and in my own.
I was learning to apply this newly gained information to my life with my husband and children and my own family of origin. I began to see us as co-creators of our various dysfunctions, along with the culture and the power imbalances that my generation was brought up with and continued in. My husband and I went into marital therapy with the hope of addressing the conflicts that continued to increase in our relationship. Since our therapist did not practice what he preached, (in fact did not even preach very well being narcissistic, alcoholic and generally incompetent) we did not get the help we so greatly needed.
Recently a friend who is a PhD candidate in counseling said that for every good therapist there are ten bad ones. I tend to agree. I was finding this out as I worked in the field longer and met colleagues who seemed to need therapy as much as my clients did but didn't realize it.
Being a therapist can have the dangerous potential of insulating you from looking at yourself, I now believe. It is too easy to think that we who have the 'keys' are the healthy ones, and many of us have needed to trust in that so we could continue to do our work. It was too scary for many of us to think that we needed help in seeing our own issues, too, and that maybe, just maybe, that would make us better at helping others with their struggles.
End, Part One
Sharon Charde, a family and marital therapist for the last twenty two years, has led writing workshops and weekend retreats for women in Lakeville and Block Island, Rhode Island, since l992. She is now teaching a weekly creative writing workshop for incarcerated young women at Touchstone, a residential treatment facility in Litchfield, Ct. She also facilitates a monthly workshop sponsored by the Empowering Young Women Project for local teenagers and the Touchstone girls. Her writings have appeared in Homestead Review, Proposing on the Brooklyn Bridge, an anthology of poems about marriage, and will apper in Finalist, The Comstock Review poetry contest, and change The Maryland Review to
She has studied with Natalie Goldberg and Sharon Olds, and her work has been published in Calyx, A Journal of Art and Literature for Women. Sharon has received an Honorable Mention in the Michael Egan Memorial Poetry Contest, Maryland Poetry Review. She is grandmother and mother to two sons and has lived in Lakeville for over thirty years with her husband John.
You can email Sharon with comments and questions.
