Permission to be a human in this work…
Recently I was in a session and I had to take an abrupt trip to the bathroom. This has happened and will continue to happen and I always do a back and forth in my head before, more recently, giving myself permission to take care of my body and excuse myself to get relief. In this particular instance, we were discussing the client’s digestion, so there was an added humor to the situation. The permission I gave myself to be human has been on the tail end of a lot of recovery work, and also having noted to myself that the most consistent positive feedback I receive from the clients I work with is that I model / modeled something important to them- usually related to boundaries and self care. As someone who needed that to be modeled to me in my own healing, it feels important to continue that lineage of healing. I live in a body that has idiopathic pain, that needs emergency trips to the bathroom related to chronic digestive distress, and that suffers from the mental impacts of Trauma. I’m not sure how pretending I am not navigating these things aids in my own and my client’s healing process. I hold this and work to center my client’s healing process.
Part of professional training, and how I was trained to be as a professional, was ripe with perfectionism, with performing a status. Many of my colleagues have named this internalized pressure that they feel- to know all of the things, to have a body that looks a certain way, to have the perfect diet and lifestyle behaviors. I also remember, when I had just graduated and was working in a very disordered and toxic work environment- where the perfectionism, hustle culture, and palpable anxiety around meeting these unrealistic standards was rampant, chatting with a colleague who had been in the field a decade or more saying how futile it all felt, and how she wanted to move away from talking about food and talk about things that felt more meaningful, more potent.
In a training more recently, I still hear that my colleagues don’t feel like they can be their human selves with their clients. That there is a performance, a pretending, that we must engage with. I question this, because of the power dynamic it upholds, because of how it makes our client’s feel, and because of how it squeezes us into unrealistic standards, which sure does sound a whole lot like dieting. Follow the rules, “win the game”. But, what if the game is rigged, and we can all just really unmask, and take a big, deep, breath and say: No More.
As I work with more clinicians, I am wondering to the clinicians/ healers out there- how do you contort yourself to fit into the mold of how you were trained to show up? How is it helping you / your client? How is it hurting you / your client? How much of your ego is running the show? Are there things you can find in your training that conflict with and act in odds with strengthening your relationship to your own body and your relationship to your client and their healing process?