My Practicing Principles as a POC psychoanalytic/experiential therapist

01.

I understand the desire to find a therapist that’s somehow “similar” to you, or staying in the same old, familiar environment.

In my work, I constantly meet clients who wants to find something in common with me — and I deeply relate to that.

We feel vulnerable when we seek medical services, no matter what kind; and when we feel vulnerable, we try to grasp anything that’s familiar and safe, that we can somehow relate.

I remember how vulnerable I felt when I received a surgery last year. Laying on the operation table, I was totally naked, my body totally exposed to the cold air-conditioned room. When the surgeon came in, she asked if I wanted to listen to some music in the next hour. I told her that I wanted one of my childhood favorites, Symphony No. 4 in E minor, by Brahms. However, she couldn’t seem to find it, and we ended up listening to some random music.

And that detail — I understand how childish that sounds — made me cry. I forgot that I was in my late 20s, that I was a professional and I was a calm adult for most time of my life. I just felt so miserable, like a whiny puppy. No one asked for this medical condition, okay? I didn’t want at all to get naked in this cold room and listen to my body being cut open, okay? How brave I am to be there, now, all I wanted was some familiar music! Damn it!

Luckily, I calmed down pretty fast, and the surgery went well. Later on, when I was meditating on this experience, and think about “being childish”, I thought about how on a literal level, we are all children that are seeking familiarity and comfort when we feel vulnerable.

At the same time, as a training psychoanalyst and a patient myself, I happen to agree that psychotherapy is one of the most vulnerable and intimate experiences one can expect.

Then, how therapy is different from receiving a surgery? Why, with all the experiences and knowledge of how vulnerable and uncomfortable it feels to work with someone “unfamiliar”, I still advocate that you try?

02.

However, what you are doing right now, i.e, “familiar with”, might be hurting you.

You came from a world where you can only survive if you were acting or feeling a certain way.

Now, you are not in that world anymore, and it’s time to let go.

I am currently a Post-Graduate Clinical Fellow at Gestalt Associates for Psychotherapy in New York. In Gestalt therapy, we are very serious on building up the novelty - in plain words, "to create new ways to adjust to your new environment”.

As the world around us is constantly changing, what worked for us in the past may not work anymore today. If we stay fixated in the past, in what felt familiar and safe, we may never heal.

I never view a patient’s symptoms as something that needs to be immediately taken away. When someone complained of constant anxiety, low self-esteem, depression, OCD, or anger problems, what I am hearing is “I came from a world where I can only survive if I was acting or feeling a certain way.”

Now, you are not in that world anymore, and it’s time to let go.

In Gestalt therapy, we call the strategies we create to deal with our everyday life “creative adjustments”. For some people, it means “when I hear mom and dad scream at each other, I shut up, and hide, and make sure I don’t make one single noise”; for others, it means “I check my lock 10 times every day, for if I don’t, uncle Johnny can come in and do something weird to me”.

All these strategies might have been really, really important to us in our early life, however, as time goes by, we somehow forget that our environment has changed, and we keep the same old way.

And “surviving strategies” become symptoms.

03.

Tolerating unfamiliarity and differences is the secret towards healing and growth.

And therapy is all about opening ourselves up, to that which is new and unanticipated in our encounters with other people.

In my work, therapy is about (1) helping you put everything into words; (2) to realize that what you are facing now is different from what you are facing in the past; and (3) make changes accordingly.

In this procedure, we are constantly facing the unexpected, the strange, and the foreign. You may find your world a little bit shattering — what was familiar to you is no longer familiar, what you took as granted over the years is no longer there.

And our task here is to help you challenge what is familiar (and no longer healthy), and to step into what is foreign.

That sounds really scary — and believe it or not, when you find out that you are able to bond with a therapist that’s so different from you, you will feel so achieved, that if you are able to bond with someone so different from you, you will also be able to bond with a new world, and a new way of living your life.

04.

Keep in mind that we will always be different from each other.

My experience (as a minority) can be very different from yours. Even if we share many things in common, I also need you to put everything into words — as if I know nothing, as if we do not share anything in common at all.

And if we share nothing in common, that’s a perfect place to start, as well.

“I am not your teacher,” as a person of color, I used to tell my fellow trainees years ago, when I was attending my post-graduate psychoanalytic program. “Become more competent first; go and do your homework; read a book and some articles, venture into a different neighborhood, reflect on your bias and privilege, and then maybe we can have a conversation.”

That sentiment, although totally understandable, is something we have to work against in our therapy work today. Because it’s not about me—it’s about you. It’s about you taking the time and effort to express yourself, to tell me who you are, what is important to you.

Even if in my heart, I already know everything about you (which is impossible — how much do we know about our own mother, or a roommate we talk to everyday, for example?), you still have to do the work. For the healing comes from organizing your language, creating your narrative, and empowering yourself.

And thus, when I decided to market myself as a therapist that identifies as BIPOC/LGBTQ+, I was reflecting, what does it mean for me to market myself as a BIPOC/LGBTQ+? What does it mean for you that you are finding a therapist like me? These are definitely questions I will be asking, and I am eager to hear it from you.