I get asked what it’s like to be a therapist right now. It can be tough to repeatedly encounter so much ongoing fear, anger, and shock. Mostly, I’m glad to be in a job where I share it with other people. Our whole worlds (mine and theirs) change on the daily. We’re in this together. And we are.
Therapy is on the front lines of a monumental struggle. It’s partly about helping people cope with this crisis, like the M.A.S.H. tent of mental health, but more importantly, it’s about the kind of healing therapy affords.
The bad actors of the world rely on fear to control us. One way to do that is to cultivate enduring shame, so we move through the world afraid to be fully honest, authentic, real, vulnerable, or spontaneous, lest we reveal our shortcomings.
Shame and fear compel us to create an artifice to hide our true selves. Like heavy armor, it protects us, but at a cost. It weighs us down. It takes up headspace. It zaps our energy. We are controlled from within, not from without.
The movement afoot to oppose these bad actors seems to be driven by people whose authenticity and genuineness draw us to them. They espouse values that they actually live, making it easy to call out the current cartoon villains in power. There’s a straightforward sense that they want to make the world a better place, and it seems earnest.
At its core, psychotherapy helps us access a feeling of basic ok-ness within ourselves, allowing us to act from a sense of inner safety. This helps us be more authentic as we move through the world, because when we are less afraid, we’re freer.
This is what psychotherapy is about: literal freedom. Not being weighed down by the armor of self-protection or the shame we think we’re supposed to carry. Instead, we can act in ways that are intellectually, emotionally, and relationally fluid, agile, and genuine. This makes us more powerful and much harder to control.
Psychotherapy is us exploring and learning to face the fears tied to shedding this artifice. It’s about nonjudgment and acceptance of self, of what is, and of others. It’s about moving away from moral proscriptions and towards earnestness, truth, and vulnerability.
It can feel like we don’t have time to heal because there’s too much coping to be done, but getting stuck in “coping” is exactly what the bad guys count on. Healing, on the other hand, yours, mine, and ours, is a direct counter to the bad guys’ agenda. We can make meaning out of the fact that our healing is already a deeply rooted part of the movement to make the world a better place.
-Chad
Chad Corbley, Ph.D.
Psychologist/Owner
City Counseling: A Home for Growth