Bad Therapist
Photograph by Ashley Jurius
Ever since I began the practice of psychotherapy, I have felt that there has been a loss of at least some of my vitality. As I started to tune into the part of me that could be empathetic, that could understand more deeply, that could refrain from making simplistic assumptions and judgements about people, I started to become just a little more cautious, more serious, and considerably less funny.
It makes sense to me though, and I was able to articulate this further during a recent conversation with a friend who is also a therapist. She was talking about how she feels less able to be mean or rather, remain mean during conversations outside of the therapy room.
“Sometimes I just want to be bitchy. Sometimes I don’t want to empathise with someone. I just want to call them an asshole and have that be it”. And I have felt similarly. Sometimes I just want to be petty and judgemental. Sometimes I just want to be sadistically funny and shockingly simplistic in my appraisal of someone. I don’t want to make you feel “seen” or “heard”. I just want to be a rude, selfish bastard. But it becomes really tough to do that as a therapist because it would mean that I break one of the cardinal rules of the therapeutic stance- Do not generalize a particular part of the person to the whole of the person.
A particular part- thought, emotion, or action- can be bad, or unhelpful, or unhealthy, or mean, or stupid, but this does not mean that the person as a whole is bad, unhelpful, unhealthy, mean, or stupid. And this aspect of the therapeutic stance isn’t just theoretical. Once I truly started to believe in its validity, it became exceedingly hard to switch it off outside the therapy room. I have felt unable to chastise someone, or be uncharitable and unempathetic towards them, because it would mean that I am seeing them only for a part of them, and not for the whole, worthy person that they are. It would mean that I am doing a disservice to their humanity.
And I LOVE doing disservice. The amount of disservice that I silently do in my head to people’s humanity, gives me so much glee and satisfaction. It makes me feel very good about myself. Oh I love shitting on people. I love judging every little thing they say and do. And I love making fun of them for it. I love mocking the things that are meaningful to them, and I love laughing at their misery. And I want to be able to do this in person to people’s faces. SOMETIMES. I love doing all of the above, and I want to do all of the above in person, sometimes. I am not always this person, and I don’t want to always be this person. Most of the time, I’m a decent person, who has operated just fine within society.
You see what I did there? I qualified the part of me that I think is shitty, or that others might see as shitty. I qualified it so that I don’t make myself out to be a total fucker. Just a partial fucker. And this is what I do with people. I may call someone an asshole one moment, but the next moment I qualify that in some way by saying that well, they’re not always an asshole. Or that I understand why they were being an asshole in this moment. Or that, if they were raised in a different way, or had different experiences, maybe they wouldn’t be this way. I damn them in one moment, but I redeem them in the next moment. And sometimes, I just don’t want to redeem anyone.
In the process of constantly redeeming, I have become safe. My humour is safe, my sass is safe, my criticism is safe, my judgement is safe. And safety is boring. It’s great, but it’s boring when it’s always safe. Vitality, creativity, humour, sarcasm, spontaneity- none of these moves towards safety. They all spring forth towards this place that is risky and uncertain, potentially dangerous, and probably unsafe. Because you don’t know what the outcome of it will be. But you just have to do it, because they spring forth from the life force within you, and who the hell can structure the force of life itself.
And so, once I make my vitality safe, it loses some of its outward intensity. But since I value this vitality so much, the unsafe part of it has to go somewhere. Consequently, the only time I can be unsafe, is when my humour, my sass, my criticism, and my judgement is directed towards myself. I can be unsafe all I want towards myself, and no one will call me a shitty person. I can be shitty to me all I want, because it’s only me. So shut the fuck up, and get lost, I don’t need your concern.
The amount of self-deprecating humour I see from therapists is as sad as it is funny. It is genuinely sad that we feel so comfortable being so open and humorous about our worst parts, but can’t take equal comfort in just doing the same to someone else. Just for fun. Not to traumatize them. But just to sting them a little, make them fall down a couple stairs. But that wouldn’t be very therapeutic or empathetic of us. But I just want to be bad. Really, really bad. Sometimes. Smh.
