“It’s hard to take someone where you’ve never been.”
Earlier this week, I met with a prospective intern who asked me, “How do you learn to do therapy?” Beyond school, there are formal licensure processes. Yet, these procedures weren’t satisfactory. Psychotherapy is not mechanical.
I became a therapist wishing to be a part of others’ healing. That is sacred. Side quests have mostly inspired the tools I’ve gathered along the way as I sought to sharpen specific practices to meet the needs of individual clients. I learned from their stories and presence.
My clients and I all walk the same roads. We strive to cultivate a deeper sense of peace, foster meaningful relationships, and cultivate self-awareness. I have also tried out all the tools that I have gathered.
A few have significantly changed how I live and process through life.
What follows are four such tools.
- Loving Kindness Meditation
I encountered loving-kindness meditation while sitting on a grassy hill, reading a book on Buddhism. The book called it ‘Metta’. As a college student wrestling with the anxieties of graduate school applications and wondering where my life would go after this, I wanted to find a path to calm.
Loving-kindness meditation gave a portal to refocus my frenzy into well wishes I sent to others and myself. It was the first mindfulness strategy that really ‘clicked’ for me. The strategy has been repeated in several psychotherapy modalities, including dialectical behavior therapy and compassion-focused therapy. It can be applied to help people find a sense of peace. It has helped me to work through resentments and worries. Sometimes, I swim reciting ‘may they be happy, may they be healthy,’ in rhythm to my strokes. This carried me through my early days of crisis intervention, where I often met intriguing people suffering greatly. As I breathed this mantra during my time off, I could give a final hope for their well-being while helping myself to let go of the pieces beyond my control.
2. Self-Enquiry
Self-enquiry is a practice of self-exploration from radically open dialectical behavioral therapy (RO-DBT) that can be done with others or alone. Usually, it takes the form of a journal entry. Rather than searching for answers, self-enquiry seeks a good question, opening our gates of reflection to allow us to see just a bit more than what we understood before. In self-enquiry journaling, you start with a question that is usually sparked by a reaction you noticed in yourself or something that surprised you, and you process through writing. A part of training in RO-DBT is to pick up the habit yourself. Through these short entries, I’ve faced a few difficult realities while breaking a natural tendency to ruminate (self-enquiry is meant to last less than five minutes).
3. Values Clarification
Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) helps clarify what truly matters to us and directs us with active steps toward clarity. It might sound simple, but in our minds, which are often plagued by fears, sadness, and negative thoughts, we can lose sight of our valued goals in favor of trying to chase away painful mental experiences. In ACT, other strategies allow for a range of emotions and dance with tricky thoughts so that we can focus most firmly on our values. As a human who has struggled with difficult thoughts and feelings, I engage in values clarification and the other ACT skills every day. ACT has given me a way to derive meaning regardless of whether these visitors are present.
4. Mentalization
Mentalization sounds like a made-up word, but it’s not. It’s a phenomenon we all partake in involving connecting with our own and other people’s mental states. Sometimes we mentalize more effectively than others. In mentalization-based therapy, the therapist partners with the client to build mentalization capacity. Awareness of mentalization and taking time to pause and rewind has deepened my understanding of myself and given me more compassion for others.
Closing
Therapists often employ the same strategies in their own lives that they instruct clients in. There are no limits regarding human capacity for self-growth. We can always work on ourselves, and people grow in a million ways. Therapy is just one of those pathways. Still, I am eternally grateful for the unique perspectives and skills that psychotherapy has granted me.
