The Impossible Profession.

sometimes feel that I have signed up for a profession where inadvertently I sometimes end up hurting clients for whom I am meant to be a healer of sorts although that's not how I recognise myself. If the client's traumatic flight response doesn't make her terminate therapy in the face of that hurt that is inevitable in any relationship, even the idealised therapeutic one, we survive it and it can be a transformative experience for the client.

I am perceived in multiple roles though by the unconscious transference of my clients. I am mostly a reparative parent in the room who offers a corrective emotional experience to the internalised wounded child. I am a best friend who holds space for the adult with a broken heart or unfulfilled dreams. I am the idealised woman who is understanding and easy to talk to for a male client in an unhappy relationship. I am the parent; the friend; the older sister, the romantic interest, and so on within the therapeutic relationship. But along with all these projections that make my client feel safe, I also in an instant become the reason for intolerable hurt when I emphatically fail to be who they want me to be.

The session is about to end and a client breaks down and shares a painful secret that she had not shared with anyone when she was a child. She is crying inconsolably and I offer her a box of tissues. I don't have a choice but to announce to the distressed adult who had finally opened up after months that we will process this in the following week.

In that announcement, I am taking the risk of shutting away the abandoned child within her who had finally dared to share her pain with me. It's the hardest thing to announce the ending of the session to a client who has invited me into her world of pain and to turn her away because her time is up. As a therapist do I not think of that client more than once, wondering If she will trust me to show up the following week? Will she trust that I care for her? Is it easy to announce that her time is up to that wounded child who hopes that I will not fail her as her parents have? Although trust is an illusion...