Before I had an office, and well-before I started seeing clients, I was with my wife and friends at a busy restaurant. We were talking over the enjoyable izakaya ruckus and, as was the case with friends who didn’t know at the time, I mentioned how I was switching careers, to be a psychotherapist.
Telling someone, whether you know them well or not at all, that you are going to be a psychotherapist is like telling someone that you’ve written a novel (*ahem*). They inevitably want to know more, and that inquisitiveness often leads to questions that, at least for the first few months, you struggle to form into sound-bite-sized snippets.
I think I was able to describe the hows and whys and whats effectively, and was about to reward myself with a slug from my porcelain choko of sake when I was asked: “Do you feel pressure to be a better person?”
To some this may sound like an odd question, but for some reason it struck a fundamental chord, so much so that it lingered in my mind for days afterward (thankfully we were interrupted by a plate of eel so I was spared from answering it on the spot). Don’t get me wrong: I did not decide to become a psychotherapist because I wanted to become “a better person”, but rather there was this image in my head (inspired by real events) of a day in the future where I may be standing on my front lawn, yelling at the college student across the street because HE KEEPS PLAYING HIS GODDAMNED MUSIC SO F’ING LOUD and there behind me (the guy with the exasperated expression, who may or may not be wearing a robe and pyjamas if only because that’s what happens in movies) is a sign clearly saying: Matt Cahill, Psychotherapist.
The fact is, I was struck by the potential conflict between being a balanced, well-tempered (and empathetic) listener, and being a real person with real limits to his patience and real fault-lines in his temperament. What I had to do was work to define not just what a psychotherapist was, but what a psychotherapist could be – to unhook from that identity the popular conception that therapists are some sort of breed of agnostic priests, forsworn to some obscure Catholic/zen/samurai (I was in a Japanese restaurant) code. It took me a while to come to a rather simple-sounding solution: between the flexibility of the psychotherapeutic temperament and my own life outside of the psychotherapeutic world, I can exist in both spaces, I can be both people. I didn’t need to worry about co-existing: I am both.
So, coming back to that beguiling question (“Do you feel pressure to be a better person?”), the answer is: No, but I think from time to time I will feel the pressure to merge the two identities into a seamless whole, depending upon the circumstances. Working in film, I didn’t have this pressure because when you tell someone you work in film their eyes glaze over and all they want to do is either talk about films they’ve seen or get gossip; they don’t have preconceptions about what a post production supervisor does and so I don’t have to balance public preconceptions against my personal identity.
