I Almost Got a PhD

I started off in this field working with addiction. Most people who know me now know me as a trauma clinician, but the early chapter was addiction work, and a lot of what I learned about getting underneath behavior I learned there. That is a different post for another time.

The story I want to tell you happened a couple of years after that. I was living abroad. I was about to start a PhD at Hebrew University. I had a professor who was going to take me under his wing and mentor me through the program. I had the right credentials lined up, the right institution, the right path. By any external measure, I was about to do exactly what a young, ambitious clinician was supposed to do.

In our first real conversation about my plan, he asked me what I actually wanted to work on. I told him I wanted to heal trauma.

He looked at me and said something I have never forgotten. He said:

“do not get your PhD. Go get advanced training and post-grad training in treating trauma. Go embody the work. The PhD will not give you what you think it will give you, and the years you spend on it are years you could spend becoming somebody who can actually do this”.

I want to pause on what that took on his part. This was a tenured professor at Hebrew University telling a graduate student to walk away from his program. He was not protecting his pipeline or his ego. He was looking at the person in front of him and naming what would actually serve her instead of what would serve the institution.

I went home, and I thought about it for weeks, and then I did exactly what he said.

Over the next ten years, I trained in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, did three years of somatic intervention, became an EMDR therapist and an EMDR consultant, completed IFS Level 2, did Sentry, and worked with people who had survived terrorist attacks. I went on what I can only describe as a journey of embodying trauma, of letting the wisdom move from my head into my body, of doing my own deep therapy alongside the trainings so the work would actually be in me, not on top of me.

That is not the journey I would have been on if I had taken the PhD.

I am telling you this because the path I almost took was the prestigious one. It was the one with letters after my name and the conferences and the publications. The path I actually took was less visible from the outside, and more transformative on the inside. The only reason I took it was that someone at a critical moment told me a hard true thing instead of a comfortable encouraging thing.

The clinicians I respect most have all had a moment like that. Someone in their career who said the thing nobody else would say, and they listened.

If you are at a fork right now, look around for the person willing to say it.

Warmly,

Esther