What I Notice on the Shelves

I have been doing this for a long time now, and there is a pattern I see in therapists who are losing their footing without realizing it. The pattern shows up on their bookshelves before it shows up anywhere else.

It is not the textbooks from grad school. Those are old, dog-eared, scribbled in. The shelf I am talking about is the one above, with the newer books from the last eighteen months. They are brand new, spines barely creased, and a few still in the plastic wrap they came in. I have been in offices where I could count the unread books on that shelf and tell you what was happening in the rest of that therapist's life.

The pattern goes like this.

It begins as a quiet sense, with one client, that the work is not landing. She does not know exactly why. So she buys a book. Another follows three weeks later. By month four she is paying for a course she will not finish, a webinar series she has not opened, and at eleven at night she is watching some video about somatic interventions while her child is asleep upstairs.

Her fees do not go up. She tells herself the timing is not right. Raising them while she feels like this would be a kind of lie, and she cannot bring herself to do it.

The supervision referrals dry up. Other therapists used to ask for her input on cases, and at some point they stopped, and nobody has explained why.

At home, her child goes to bed without the bedtime story tonight, because she is just finishing one more chapter. Her husband has stopped asking how the day went, because the answer used to be a long one, and lately it has been the same evasive sentence.

She tells herself she is growing. The honest word is hiding... from a client she is afraid she cannot help, and the books are the camouflage.

The cascade that begins with one stuck case is rarely a clinical cascade. It is a life-wide one. Every book on that shelf is, in some quiet way, a vote against the therapist's own gut.

The way out is almost never another book. It is the conversation she has been avoiding... with a supervisor she trusts, with the client herself, or, most often, with her own gut.

If you’re ready to listen to your gut and try another way, I am here to help.

Warmly,

Esther