07 Feb More Dilemmas! More Letters!
Greetings All,
As I hope you know, I gathered many of the letters and responses that appeared in this column into a book, A Developmentalist’s Guide to Better Mental Health: Navigating Everyday Life Dilemmas. (My editor at Routledge urged that title, although I would have gone with something more provocative.)
If you haven’t gotten a copy, please do! I hear good things from readers, and am especially gratified that people are sharing letters with clients, family, friends and colleagues as springboards for new kinds of conversations.
I’m pleased, too, that I continue to receive letters—and so, the column continues.
I Feel Abandoned by my Profession
Dear Lois,
I’ve been reading your new book “A Developmentalist’s Guide to Better Mental Health: Navigating Everyday Life Dilemmas,” and am really getting a lot out of it. I saw you are still accepting questions, so here is my question for you with a description of my dilemma:
The further I go into the field of psychotherapy and learn how to be a better psychotherapist, the more depleted and torn down I feel professionally, in my personal life, and as a human being. I can often feel more like the “patient” and “victim” of a system that keeps me stuck, rather than a developing therapist and adult. I started out wanting to help people. I feel terrible even though I’m trying to do the “right” things as a therapist. I carry the weight of safety and liability on my shoulders and feel abandoned by my profession.
My colleagues don’t seem to want to engage in playfulness with me, something I crave, which helps me learn the best, and that I think we should be doing together. It’s like they’re not interested or I feel pathologized for wanting that and that is very painful for me. I didn’t know that I would become so isolated in this work and the professional boundaries inhibit my ability to develop a better support network for myself. As I read your book, I’ve been considering other ways to engage with other people in this field that would feel more beneficial and helpful, rather than stuck.
I had done an art education program years ago which is where I first learned about Vygotsky. I’ve never forgotten it! I had an “aha!” moment a few years ago and looked back into him, because the mental health field has minimally adopted his theories, especially with adults. To my amazement, I saw Vygotsky had written a book called “The Psychology of Art” and proceeded to spend the next year reading it. It completely blew my mind and I started getting all these ideas about making a program where people can share art with each other in the Vygotskian way.
He talks about catharsis a lot and how we fulfill each other through the making of art and experiencing other’s art. He illustrated how the arts developed through language over human history and development, starting with fables and then leading to Shakespeare and Mozart, etc. and onward. He also questions why is it that art has stayed with humans all these years? What does it do for us that is so important? We would have given it up long ago if it was just looking at a pretty picture.
I love that he talks about “art is the social within us,” and this has become my mantra. Ever since, all my ideas and his ideas have bottled up inside me with difficulty having somewhere to go being in the mental health paradigm. I’m frozen in the where do I go from here? I can’t seem to engage with other people on this outside of my household. I can’t get other therapists or friends to engage with my invitations to do something with me on this. I think everyone is in survival mode. The one person who will is my partner, and we’ve started working on some ideas with the precious time we have. I feel almost phobic of taking these special ideas out into the world because of the bad experiences I’ve had. I think I want to protect them.
Vygotsky makes the case that art making is the way we human beings continue to go on, to exist. “Without new art, there is no new man.” It’s so existential! My dream is to use my career in social work not in the way I’m doing now, but to become an artist, a social work artist, a labor artist in the sense that our human power to exist and create is beautiful and is central. I don’t want to be alienated anymore personally or professionally. I want to develop. I’m so glad that I found you and your work Lois. Thank you for taking the time to consider and read my impassioned letter.
Sincerely,
Bottled up Vygotskian
Dear Bottled up Vygotskian,
Thank you so much for your impassioned letter! I hope you don’t mind that I abridged it a bit for this column.
I’m so glad that my book is helpful and maybe even inspirational to you, especially as a catalyst for “considering other ways to engage with other people in this field that would feel more beneficial and helpful, rather than stuck.” This is certainly a developmental way to go—for you to play around with who you are, who others are, and who you-and-others are together—and who all of you can become. So, bravo—it’s a big step for you to take.
You will have to create the other ways to engage people, especially your colleagues and the professional system that you feel betrayed by (that’s my word, not yours). What I can do is give you some direction for imagining new possibilities, ways to think relationally as you begin this journey.
We cannot remind ourselves too many times that we are social beings. You say that for Vygotsky, art is the social within us. I too call upon the brilliance of Vygotsky, for whom ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ were not a binary, but a dialectical unity. The wonders of the dialectical unity of human relations are many, too numerous to discuss here. I’ll just mention two that might get you thinking new thoughts—thinking is transformed, not expressed, in speaking; and self and other are not separate, but always in relation, and together create something other than either of them.
Getting back to your situation, I wonder what you’ve tried that has you feeling pathologized and victimized. I wonder what your conversations with colleagues are like. Are you curious about who they are? I wonder what you mean that they won’t engage in playfulness with you. I wonder what has them also feeling stuck and, perhaps, victimized. I wonder how they think of you, and whether they like talking with you. I think you have to explore these kinds of questions as part of the process of creating other ways to engage them. If you do, you will already have transformed the conversation!
Conversation is an art. Maybe it’s the ultimate “social within us.“ I invite you to imagine conversation as your playground/artist studio and become an artist of conversation.
And you can carry that with you as you build relationships with others in the field. Make friends with others who feel much the way you do. There are many hundreds of them all over the world. To begin, you can get to know the folks of The Taos Institute, The Radical Therapist , and the East Side Institute Associates.
Developmentally yours,
Lois
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