An interview with Victor Yalom
An interesting read - an interview with psychotherapist Victor Yalom who, among other things, runs the website psychotherapy.net - and is Dr. Irvin Yalom’s son.
(excerpt):
What would you recommend to people who are about to embark on a career as a psychotherapist?
I would recommend a number of things. Don’t get pigeon-holed in terms of your training or your orientation. Expose yourself to as many teachers and supervisors and personal therapists as possible. One of the most powerful ways I think we learn is to be in personal therapy, to be able to have the experience of how therapy works from the client’s perspective, to be able to observe first-hand how another therapist operates, and how it can really make a change in one’s life. I think there is no better teacher than a good personal therapist.
You could say that about almost anything: whether you’re learning to paint or you’re studying history at university, find teachers who move and inspire you and then don’t be afraid to take risks. One thing that really interests me these days is the creative aspect of being a therapist; when you talk to therapists and find out what they’re like and what interests them in their life, there’s a high percentage who are engaged in artistic pursuits on the side. But I think far too often we don’t bring our creative spirit into the therapy sessions. I think we get very stuck in our ways: we sit in the therapist’s chair, we stick to a forty-five or fifty-minute schedule and we have certain things in our brain about what a therapist should be like and what our professional boundaries should be like. I think this inhibits us greatly from experimenting with different approaches that could be helpful to clients…
…It’s a craft, it’s an art and you gain confidence and mastery over years in seeing dozens and hundreds of clients; I also think you gain maturity as a person, you know yourself better and you know what you can do and what you can’t do and you work with that and, as you’re more comfortable with yourself, you’re able to reveal more about yourself and bring more of your person into your work.
Bring in more of yourself….
Yeah, but show more of your own person, your vulnerability.
And in that way act a little bit like a role model, not just as a therapist who knows it all?
Yes, exactly. So I think, yes, part of what we call boundaries, or holding back, is maybe a way to protect neophyte therapists from feeling the need to expose themselves. When you’re in your twenties and thirties you’re still working out a lot of things about life and about yourself – that just seems to be the way it is. Of course, we continue to do that but I think for many people as they grow into middle age – maybe I’m just saying this because I’m turning fifty next month – but I think as you mature you get more comfortable with the different parts of yourself and in doing that you feel able to be authentic and real with clients and I think you do them a service by doing so.
