04/24/2024
Hello my shiny therapist friends!
I have an important question for you.
When seeking your own care, what do you look for in your MFR therapist?
As for me, I’m just going to say it: I want it ALL.
🌐 I want a therapist who sees, understands, and treats my needs through the global influence of fascia.
💪 I want them to have the intention, patience, and endurance to stay at the barrier and wait, without forcing.
🌀I want them to be deeply present, and authentically compassionate.
❤️🔥 I want them to be utterly uncompromising with honesty and trustworthiness.
🤝 I want high-level technical skill wrapped in the openness of a beginner's mind, and the benevolent curiosity of a fellow traveler.
💞 I want them to have done enough of their own work that they have abandoned the crutch of relying solely on their intellect, and have shifted into humility and interconnectedness to guide their actions.
🌈 I want to feel seen, heard, respected, and safe.
🌟 In other words…I want mastery.
Notice I didn’t say, I want someone with “x” years of experience. Or, hundreds of hours of coursework. Or the ability to explain it all in lofty scientific rationale.
Ultimately, I'm seeking the experience of being compassionately witnessed and supported, rather than the experience of being intellectually categorized and "fixed" through someone else's lens. I feel confident that you and your patients are seeking that as well.
So as therapists, how do we honor our technical and intellectual skill sets, yet shift into this masterful way of offering care?
What makes you a master is this: the depth with which you have integrated humble curiosity, honesty, felt-sense experience, and self-knowing into your practice. These are the ingredients of deep presence, attunement, trustworthy connection, and resonance. Only after these are established can we rely on technique and intellect to be helpful.
Embracing these principles as your primary foundation for care takes some courage, because we have to un-learn the popularly held belief that our patients want us to be the expert on them. This belief is reinforced through our educations, through popular marketing principles, and even through the misguided desires of some of our patients.
Here’s a tough truth: if you lean too heavily on technical proficiency and logical intellect to guide your treatments, then you are not fully present with your patient; you are actually more present with your own need to create change.
😳
Maintaining the position of "expert in the room" is the fast path to blindly veering into the two biggest "F words" in MFR: Fixing and Forcing.
Simply stated, dear friends, we must prioritize our ability to feel, and to stay fully present with the feelings of others. This is partnership, instead of hierarchy. This is healing presence.
This is not to say that technical proficiency, analysis, scientific understanding, and logic have no place. They certainly do.
But if they are applied through a relationship of hierarchy, rather than offered through a trusted partnership, this is actually disempowering for your patient. We are not the experts on them, THEY are their own expert. Our job is to help them remember that.
I know this can feel overwhelming, foggy, or out of reach. Please hear me when I say, we don’t need to be perfect, we just need to be honest. And we don’t need eons of inner work to be “ready” for the sacred responsibility of treating.
We DO need to commit to self awareness. It is vitally important for us as therapists to be aware of our own blind spots, assumptions, challenges, moods, triggers, and ego. We must bring grounded and centered energy to the table, devoid of judgment and linear goals. We need to keep clearing the blocks that affect our ability to practice compassion and mindfulness not just in the treatment room but in all of our relationships, especially with ourselves.
If you want to explore this more, it's helpful to start by clarifying your own ideals. Here are some questions for you to roll around. First, answer them as yourself; then go back and contemplate how your patients might answer:
What do you look for in your therapist?
How/when do you feel safe in the presence of another?
What qualities, actions, or gestures help you feel seen, heard, and felt?
What makes you feel dismissed or misunderstood?
What parts of you (or your story) do you hold close to the chest as you decide whether your therapist can be trusted with them?
What helps you decide to risk vulnerability with them?
Much of the time, we are inviting our patients to peer into the places which have been too scary or difficult to connect with on their own. They need to know that we are trustworthy companions in those places, and that we happen to have some technical and intellectual tools to help out once we get to that place which is creating or holding their pain.
But we must get there before opening the tool box. The key for the door into that journey is trust; your presence and compassion light the path.
Shine on, Friends. We're doing important work in a hurting world. Reach out if you need some support; it is always my honor to be on your team.
✨
