Part 3, Change

This will be the final post in the series. I started out enthusiastic but am losing steam. Ventura did such a good job of describing the wisdom of psychotherapy's elders that my attempt to summarize is going to be inadequate, no matter what. Will just quote a few more things and call it a day. My mental health is suffering enough.

Since I’m not an insider, but not exactly an outsider either, my “voice” might be of limited value. Still, as a person, I deserve to be heard. Pages 5 and 6 of the Elders document are about therapists taking positions on social issues. “The very fact that you’re neutral is a position,” said Hillman. There is nothing neutral about a political act, and taking a stand is political. A therapist’s mission is to awaken a sense of responsibility. How is this done? Erving Polster suggests extending psychotherapy into communities of large therapy groups, available for a lifetime. Therapists would “institutionalize friendship and group connection… and become, in effect, therapeutic community organizers and leaders.” Another elder, Mary Catherine Bateson, said, “All of us are complicit in a world system that maintains poverty and leads to environmental degradation.” To the question of political timidity, she said, “we’re using a lot of our energy to repress and stop thinking about the asymmetries in our relationship to the rest of the world.” Etc. Etc. Etc.

As mentioned in part 1, I attended the 2009 conference. When it was over, I spent my last night in California at a bed and breakfast in Newport Beach. It was a relief to be out of there, quite frankly. Although the training was superb, ultimately I would walk away from an internship and abandon the idea of becoming a therapist.

The End

(Newport Beach, 2009)