The Life Cycle of
a Therapist, Part Two
by Sharon
Charde
I left the mental health
center, burdened by too much work and total lack of support for
my therapy politics. A Indian psychiatrist on staff at that time
had told my women clients that they should have a marriage just
like his and they would be happy — of course, his marriage
followed the 5000 year old traditional prescription (sex and services
for financial support) that I was struggling to destroy both in
my life and those of my clients.
I went to work as a
family therapist in a school system, reasoning that perhaps, if
helped earlier, children and families might avoid some of the
suffering I saw in the adult clients I'd worked with. A staggering
caseload and deeply dysfunctional school administration made me
question this when I wasn't too tired to think clearly. Work had
become my life at this point. I socialized, when I did, with other
therapists.
Most of us had forgotten
that there were happy people out there in the world — we were
so involved with the unhappy. My husband was working in a city
an hour away and was home intermittently because he was still
on call as a pediatrician. My children were both in college; my
second son was on his junior year abroad in Italy. I
thought about my clients and their problems all the time, and
spent free hours reading articles and going to workshops to improve
my skills at helping them. Most of the students' parents refused
to come in. I had a missionary's zeal, not a good thing in a therapist.
And then my 20 year
old son died in an accident in Rome. There was the funeral, and
the trip to Rome, and then my older son's graduation from college,
and then, emptiness. I'd
always believed if you lived by the rules and tried hard to be
a good person, that you would have a life in which things worked
out. I think I believed that too, as a therapist — that you
could really change people's lives if you worked hard enough at
it, mastering the art and the skills. I found out how wrong I
was in the ensuing years. I
left the school, too angry at parents who grossly neglected their
children to be an effective therapist with them.
I didn't think I could
work any more. My husband urged me to open my own office, but
I said to him, who will come to me knowing the pain that I suffer?
Again, how wrong I was. For almost ten years I saw a steady stream
of clients, many of whom told me how comforting it was that they
knew I had suffered as they did. It amazed me. I
took up Buddhist meditation and began to learn about letting things
be, about how you can't take pain away but you can change how
you hold it, how you deal with it. I became much more human. The
power of relationship to heal became clearer to me as I met with
the scores of women who came to my office. I began to see the
therapy relationship as one of love and compassion, in which there
is a temporary dependence for the purpose of healing, and a hoped-for
outcome of equality — when the client could say to herself
and her therapist, "I can be strong and tender, like you."
But still, the "secondary
trauma" (my term) caused by being with people in pain day
after day, in addition to my own burdens, was wearing me down. My husband and
I had bought an old barn in Block Island a few years after our
son's death, and we made the four hour journey out there and back
almost every weekend to work on it, gutting the place, then shingling,
insulating, sheet rocking, and entertaining the many friends who
came to help us rebuild our lives there. Ever since reading a
book in the early 70's , An Unknown Woman, by Alice Koller about
the five winter months in Nantucket she had taken to discover
who she really was, I had dreamed of doing the same thing myself.
Slowly, fed by fatigue and burnout, the plan began to take shape
in my mind. I
would have to close my therapy practice. I would have to stop
being a therapist.
I did it. Seven months
alone, a few trips back home, a visit or two from my husband.
I stayed in touch with a few clients by phone, but I was on my
own each day, to write, meditate and walk the moors with my dog
by the ocean. It was a lonely and powerful time. I felt life with
few distractions, and without the problems of others a therapist
always has to focus on. It was destabilizing to be without very
much to do. I saw myself, and was not happy with what I saw. My
husband wanted me to accompany him on a trip to Eastern Europe
in June; he'd been asked to teach. I decided to go.
In Poland and Romania,
the countries we visited, therapy did not exist. When people had
problems they went to a church, lit candles and prayed. I met
many women on this trip and the subsequent others we made and
we talked and talked about what feminism was, what caring about
yourself could mean. I was just Sharon here, an American woman,
not a therapist. But
I had all the skills I'd fine-tuned over the years and began to
notice how they'd changed me — I'd internalized them of course,
and now that I wasn't working, I
had more time to just be with people. I didn't just zone in on
their issues. I had become a much better listener. There was no
therapy talk because the Eastern European women were unsophisticated
in western psychology — it was wonderful. We
learned from each other. These women were more mature in many
ways than I was. They'd endured enormous suffering under communist
oppression, and were resourceful and strong. I admired them.
That was five years
ago. My husband and I sold the barn and bought a new old house
that we love, with an office over the garage for me. I thought
that I would give up practice completely and just do the volunteer
work with writing and juvenile delinquent girls that I had begun,
as well as my own writing; but old clients called me for 'checkups,'
and in seeing them, I realized I was bringing a new energy to
my work, a new detachment and understanding. I didn't have to
work so hard. I could just be there, one human being sitting with
another human being.
And there was time
for friends, and the writing retreats that I continue to lead
on Block Island, and for the garden I planted, and travel. Time
for my husband, and grandchildren.
I will be 60 this year
and feel the growth that my years of work as a therapist have
brought to me; unknowingly I, of course, had been seeking my own
healing and empowerment in my profession. It has taught me about
life, and people, and relationships in a way my parents were unable
to do; my clients have helped me to hold up a mirror to myself
and together we have struggled for light in our lives. I don't
need to do the work any more for the reasons I started with — I
don't need the money or the power or the position that being a
therapist affords one in the world and that I sought as a younger
woman.
I don't need to save
myself, or the world. I am free, finally, to just enjoy it.
Part
One of The Life Cycle of a Therapist
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.
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.
