Writer, painter, thinker, madman. Dec 21
Many psychiatrists and psychologists share a secret which is totally unknown to their patients. It is the main characteristic of the profession, and it's hidden beneath the doctor-patient barrier.
Take our friend Celia.
She is a pediatric psychiatrist who constantly struggles with her thoughts which are often inconsistent and weird for someone who has spent 11 years studying Medicine and psychiatry.
Actually, I should say 12 years, since she spent a year in a mental institution due to her suffering from Anorexia since she was a teen, which had grown into a life-threatening condition. Deep down she still has it, since Anorexia never leaves your mind. Celia is always counting calories, always professionally hiding some of her food under her silverware, and often skips meals.
(Her husband hates it, but there's nothing much he can do.)
Although her weight has normalized since a long time, she is tortured by the image she sees in the mirror, and worries about it during most every waking hour. The weighing scale is her mortal enemy, and it constantly calls her for an update.
Celia helps kids with mental issues on a professional basis, but her own mind is a mental mess, and it's really hard to imagine how she can help her patients if you know what goes on in her own mind, how she can untangle the patient's mental knots if she cannot untangle her own.
Celia is unfortunately not an exception.
Most every psychiatrist we known suffered from severe mental issues at some point in their life (and usually still do), and it seems to be a common divisor of the profession: they are attracted to psychiatry because of their own mental unbalance.
It's a contradictory plague we nowadays see everywhere in our everyday life: people becoming "professional" trauma coaches because of personal experiences. Mothers who become birth healing coaches after their own traumatic childbirths, people who become divorce therapists after their own deeply unsettling divorce.
I had a pretty nasty divorce myself, but does that make me a specialist ? Of course not — actually on the contrary. This brave new world of "experience therapists" consists of people who project their own meagre experiences on the problems of their patients, and that's not how professional therapy should work.
This relatively new phenomenon has been hiding in the world of professional psychiatry and psychology for ages, and it's the biggest secret of the profession — an invisible contradictory elephant in the room.
Because trauma does not turn you into a specialist at all —
It turns you into a patient.
SOURCES: painting by Beksiński.
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