If you’re reading this—thank you for coming! Like all of the posts on here, my thoughts are my own, not a reflection of anyone else or whoever is employing me at any given point. Read at your own risk.
My job frequently surprises me in unexpected ways.
In our grad program, we were told often that our job as counselors would shape us until the day we retired. It’s inevitable that any career will mold you over time, but it almost scares me the depth of what this profession has taught me in the year and a half I’ve been doing it. Standing at the edge of the abyss and staring into the void with a wide-open heart seems to be my new daily routine. And what do you do when you’ve contemplated the depths of love, heartbreak, and your own mortality all before lunch? Suck it all back in and pretend you’re normal? Pretend to be less?
The phrase “living life to the fullest” usually conjures up images of skydiving or riding on the back of a moped in Bali or someone quitting their day job in search of their own Eat, Pray, Love manuscript. In a sense, this is what counseling has given me. It is the emotional equivalent of the wind burning your face and pushing tears up and out of your eyes. It’s the feeling of freefall, the sound of the parachute opening, and the jolting relief of your feet hitting the ground. Every day, I am privileged to bear witness to the most vulnerable moments and areas of people’s lives. By title alone, I am given special dispensation from the niceties of social mores. By law, the space I hold is protected: no one can intrude. No mother, no father, no boss or sibling or child, no past trauma or current stressor. The hour I spend with someone is sacred, and it is sterile, as we put on our emotional PPE with boundaries and ground rules. In our space, you can be whoever you are at your most core self. There is no shame. No demands, no prying eyes, nothing to be gotten or asked for. It is where you can finally take off the armor, the past, the expectations, and be free to truly learn.
Staring into the abyss
Whenever I tell people what I do for a living, the first thing they say is usually something like, “Good for you. I could never do that. It’s so heavy.” What people don’t realize is that it’s never the topic that’s heavy—it’s the reaction the topic brings up in us that’s heavy. Every patient or every client that comes into my office, I am a mirror for them. They are reflected themselves so they can gain insight, keep what they love, shed what they genuinely dislike, and transform themselves. But the therapeutic relationship is not a one-way street. They are also mirrors for me.
For example, one man I worked with had a really significant abuse background—childhood abuse, sexual, physical, emotional, and psychological, some of which continued on into adulthood. He had been tied up and tortured at times as a child, and now he was in the later years of his life, diagnosed with a terminal illness, and left grasping at straws with no support network to cling to. In the moment, listening to his stories was sad, of course, but the feeling didn’t hit me until he had left session. As I sat at my desk and the tears began to spill, I realized I wasn’t crying for the bad that had happened to him in the past. What was so heart wrenching to me was the hard reality of the situation: in front of me is someone who spent their entire life believing they were unlovable, and it is entirely possible that he may die not having experienced the beauty of allowing himself to be vulnerable.
Wrapping up the session with this client, I asked, “do you believe there is something fundamentally wrong with you?” After bursting into tears, he asked to leave early. Why? Because he felt awkward crying in front of me.
I didn’t ask that question because I wanted to pick at an old scab; I didn’t do it out of fascination or to add a notch in my therapist belt of people-I-made-cry-today. I asked that question because I used to be that person. I used to be the person who was so deeply uncomfortable with any sort of vulnerability, that I missed out on years of love and human connection and healing. Coincidentally, I also used to believe that there was something fundamentally wrong with me, and it took me four years of my own therapy to realize that statement was the underlying theme for everything.
The tears came from seeing this man’s tragedy—his life, in what may be the final act, coming to a close without the hero’s journey being complete, or possibly even started. Again, I used to be that person. There was a time in my life when I broke a bone, hid the pain, and never told anyone. There was a time when I hated hugs and affection was deeply uncomfortable to me. There was before—when I was closed-off, quiet, judgmental, cynical, and alone. And then there was after—when I began to open up and experienced life in all of its glory and depth. When I opened up, the world shifted from monochromatic grey to technicolor. And every day, I am reminded of not just the beauty of this experience, but the darkness of what could have been had I not grown through it.
Clarity
Another lesson I learn repeatedly from my work is this: coming face to face with horrific situations makes you really clear very quickly on what matters and what doesn’t.
If we aren’t hard pressed by life to find meaning, it can be easy to fall into routine. We work during the week, get pissed at traffic on the way home, eat dinner, live for the weekend, get drunk, have fun with our friends, date around, and become complacent. Because our deepest sense of meaning is the latest concert we went to, we get bent out of shape at someone’s politics or the fact that our Amazon package didn’t get delivered on time. And to be honest, why wouldn’t we? When we are so far removed from our own mortality, the little things become the big ones.
We lose perspective.
I’m reminded of something Joe Rogan said on his podcast (I believe with David Goggins)—everyone has the worst moment of their life. For some people, that was being raped or watching their loved one die in front of them, but for someone else, it’s having to wake up early for work. In a similar vein, maybe you’ve heard the popular internet quote, “You have no idea the violence it took to become this gentle.” It’s all about perspective. And in my line of work, it’s hard to listen to someone’s worst day on earth every single day and not find clarity or deep love in your own life.
What does this look like on my day-to-day? Sometimes it’s a young Marine who breaks down into tears because he wound up holding brain and skull in his hands as he told the deceased soldier’s best friend that he was dead. Other times, it’s a man with an eye-rolling amount of off-putting bravado, who, when you really listen, you realize is a scared boy who was asked to collect bits of dead children in a war zone, who really misses his wife, but has no idea how to connect with her because no one ever taught him it was okay to be vulnerable. Sometimes it’s a tough older lady with a terminal disease who stays positive and strong, even as you watch her deteriorate in front of you.
After sitting with these people all day, how can I hate someone I don’t know—or even someone I do know? How can I expend the energy to rage on about an issue I’ve never experienced and can’t see, smell, or touch? How can I? I can’t. Because the more I sit with the crux of the human condition, the more I realize that all of the stories and cliches were always true. It’s all love. And we have limited time here—why would I waste it hating a politician I’ll never meet? Why would I worry about what’s going to happen tomorrow? Why would I waste time not healing my own wounds? Why would I take it out on someone else?
We’re all on a chunk of rock, hurtling through space, second by second closer to our death. There is no time to waste here in anything else but labors of love.
But what about beliefs?
Because of my job, I’m not allowed to “not connect” with someone because of differences in personality, politics, or religious beliefs. I have to look into the deepest reaches of someone’s heart, and find that pilot light inside of them, no matter what it looks like or what they present me with. Does this mean I am wishy washy about my own beliefs?
No, it does not.
For those that know me intimately, I am convicted in my beliefs. And those beliefs are rooted in individual responsibility, individual freedom, love, and human flourishing. And what I have realized in this whole process is that I have that in common with almost everyone else. Sure, our beliefs may look different on the surface—who we vote for, what God we believe in (or don’t), how our families look—but at the end of the day, our hearts are aligned. And being forced to see this has softened me, not in my personal stances, but in my approach to others. I can ignore the flak and the superficial bullshit and see what’s underneath. And you know what? I’m a lot happier for it. I’m less judgmental, with a clearer head. I don’t feel pressured to follow social trends, to hate the hate-able, or love the love-able.
When it comes down to it, I want to embody the way we approach skittish animals—softly, gently, peaceably, and with love.
Why I share so much
Sometimes people are bewildered by why I share so much—or how I’m so comfortable being vulnerable. The simple truth is once I tasted life with vulnerability, it was too sweet to turn back.
When you’ve never had a good experience with vulnerability before, it’s like eating saltines and water every day. When eating saltines and water is your baseline, you have no idea that you’re starving. You just know that’s all you’ve ever eaten, and when you see other people doing what’s terrifying, you think, “hell no, that’s not me.” And you’ll stay in that superficial pocket of avoidance forever until you’re either forced out or you get brave enough to jump. But once you taste vulnerability—an eight-course meal of lamb and pheasant and hard-to-pronounce side dishes—you can’t go back to saltines and water, ever. You don’t want to.
Now, there’s a difference between trauma-dumping, oversharing, and healthy vulnerability. Healthy vulnerability looks like owning your story, so that when you tell it, you’re not foisting it upon others for them to hold. If you still need people to hold parts of your story, that’s an indication that part of you isn’t healed yet. And you share those unhealed parts of yourself only with those who have earned the right to hear your story. Trauma-dumping is when you have unhealed parts that you don’t know what to do with, so you force other people who didn’t consent to carry them for you. (I.e. they are doing the emotional work, not you.)
I share what I do for multiple reasons. One, as I said before, I used to be the opposite, and life sucked. Then I changed, and life became 1,000x more magical. Two, I have seen my vulnerability benefit other people, just as other’s stories have benefitted me. The way I look at it, if the price I pay for helping others is vanquishing my own cowardice, how is that not worth the fear and discomfort? Every time I’m vulnerable, I give someone else the chance to get something from my story. Every time I’m vulnerable, I encourage someone else to ask themselves, why am I not being brave? And every time I’m vulnerable, I am brave. And who doesn’t want to be brave?