In Defense of My Sanity

This is a bridge in Andimesk, Iran. I was four years old when my parents and I were walking over it on one beautiful day. We must have been coming from the downtown bazaar back to the car. I remember it being busy with people, noises and colours, and my naked feet in red sandals.

As we passed by a begging woman sitting on the pavement against the thick stone wall and holding a miserable looking child. Flies were flying around the eyes of the child; it had a crust of dried snot under the nose, looked dirty and caught my attention. I stopped and asked my father for a coin to give her. My father told me that we shouldn’t give to “these people” because they were part of organized beggar rings, and bad people in reality that we should not support.

After all these years, I still remember the feeling of not being able to reconcile this message with my desire to help, yet I followed along trusting that my dad knew better. Perhaps this was the first time that I was confronted with the notion that meaning good didn’t mean doing good.

This memory has been floating in the back of my mind lately, in parallel with another incident seemingly unrelated, but that feels equally incongruent to me.

Recently, somebody I am acquainted with, who happens to have an utter disregard for the professional field I have engaged in, threw this line at me that I have heard many times over the years. I have always found it to be the lowest and cheapest, under the belt form of insult albeit the most hurtful as it is meant to not just punish you for what was said or done, but annihilate you at the core by discrediting the whole person in one stroke.I think the consecrated term is character assassination. It is not unlike killing the messenger because you don’t like the message.

This recent moment, reminded me of another one, years ago. I had been seeing a client, a young male in his early twenties, suffering from delusions of grandeur alternating with self-destructive practices. He sang my praises for a few months when he was feeling acknowledged and validated in his struggles. Note: when they praise you , they will hang you later. The tide moved when he had to put thought and realizations to work. He became less reliable by either not showing up for his appointments, or making excuses for late payments reliably putting his sabotage pattern to work instead. As I was taught, I welcomed his “dysfunction” as an opportunity to address the sabotaging of his work, and learn from it. Then came the day when he cancelled a session ten minutes before the time. He had previously missed sessions and despite our agreement and my cancellation policy, I had so far never charged him for them. This time I did however remind him that I was going to enforce the rule and that the missed session was due. That’s when he uttered that same sentence, and could probably have conducted a defamation campaign against me had he wanted to.

The magic phrase was uttered once more in a different context, and by someone I briefly interacted with. I had found myself in a position where I had been trying to politely distance myself from this individual I had recently met, and didn’t want to know any better as I did not find much similarity. Thy however kept crossing boundaries to the point where my polite but determined demeanour became more direct and assertive towards what I saw as harassment. All of sudden, he seemed to have heard, he had received the message and, at the end of his pushy wits, lashed out that same message at me, as a last resort weapon.

The violence contained in the message has left me speechless each time. I could not understand the intention behind it. Was I being punished? What crime did I commit? Each time, I struggled with it. It hit hard and my first thought had been “what if they were right? What if I was incompetent?”. I suppose that my own doubts about how competent I was made me more vulnerable to the attack than if I had simply brushed the words off, as I usually did, that is take them as a piece of information that had nothing to do with me. I should have trusted that competency also includes being capable of introspection, examining what is said and asking the question: “is that really true?”

anyway, it goes like this and has a few variations to it: The core of it is: “what kind of shitty therapist are you if…?” followed by: “if you have to resort to that tone with me?” “if you can’t get your own life in order?” “if you still struggle [like the rest of us]?” “if you couldn’t rescue all of your clients?” “If you weren’t able to fix your own marriage?”…

It used to be a lovely relief to sometimes get out of the therapist suit, and be a flawed human amongst other flawed humans, not having to act within ever tightening ethical professional boundaries, not always having to be understanding, empathetic or non-judgmental. being able to call out lies, BS and manipulations directly when I saw them, mixing in as much emphasis or pathos, anger, indignation and love as I felt were necessary to make my point. Everybody else kept acting in un-reflected ways and silly emotional outbursts. Why shouldn’t I have that freedom too to engage with the living with doubts and questions of my own? Not only do therapists not read minds, as is sometimes assumed, they also have not discovered the recipe for life and the secret to happiness. They too, learn as they go through whatever life throws at them.

I have gained some expertise at detecting deceit even if by character I initially refuse to see it. It has however become so omnipresent and accepted to be dishonest in our society that still holding on to the belief that nobody does the worst they possibly can is beginning to sound naive at best.

I was trained to observe, to notice what others don’t, to read body posture and facial language, to listen to the words people use and how they say them. It took also many years before I had the courage and the confidence to trust what I noticed and to address it with the client. I don’t do this to offend, shame or destroy the person. I do it because I see it. I do it to destroy the lie the person is trapped in.

But, you see, everybody takes things so personally these days, nobody likes to be caught distorting the truth to make their point. Nobody is fond of feeling disarmed and unmasked and/or having their projections and other enemy figures undone. This painful moment is usually when, instead of taking new information in and examining it, they resort to offence because defence has just proven to go nowhere. Has humility lost its virtue? Is introspection a relic of the past? Does our society require us to see an enemy, and never a potential friend (which might be a safe approach nowadays)? Attack before you even try to understand seems to now be the norm.

A light version, but of the same verve of this “disqualifier” may be illustrated by this example of what I had to hear: “What kind of a fraudulent French girl are you if you don’t even speak German with a french accent?” It basically translates into “Why can’t you meet my expectation to hear a sexy french accent and dare to speak better German than we do? You are disappointing me.” Yes, I heard that one more times than I can count. After putting my soul into speaking the most perfectest German, (!) people were disappointed because they didn’t get the stereotype?! What a strange world was I living in where nobody recognized merit?

In that moment of confusion I experienced on that very old bridge, I must have understood that most people pretend to present somebody they’re not. Why was that? And what was the point of that? The explanation I had been given by my father left the four year old pensive and slightly disappointed…at what? I would have a lifetime to figure it out.

Some teachings take years until they are fully integrated. Experience and lots of unnecessary drama have taught me that whatever people say rarely, if ever, has anything to do with me, but rather reveals a lot about them. Therapy training also entailed becoming responsive instead of reactive. To be responsive ultimately means being response-able = responsible. Being who I am, I still pay attention to the information delivered and appreciate the opportunity to learn and gain new insight. For that opportunity I humbly say thank you!

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