The Power of Human Connection

“Feelings are not supposed to be logical. Dangerous is the man who has rationalized his emotions.”

David Borenstein

My time with my female patient yesterday truly provided a moment of existential shock for me. Sitting with someone and sharing their emotional pain is the essence of what it is we do as psychologists, and at the core of what we can do to facilitate human change. But… It was only possible because of the pain I was in. Why? In theory a psychologist should be able to meet someone in their emotional space and truly feel what they feel and then go back to their normal lives unscathed.

This is of course bullshit. No one that I know of can truly feel someone’s intense pain without it taking something out of them. This is why people who work in Mental Health are often so troubled. Wallowing in a sea of pain, loneliness, fear, anxiety, depression, day after day after day takes a horrible toll. Alcoholism is rampant in our field, as are broken marriages.

Role call, therapists who have committed suicide include Bruno Bettelheim, Paul Federn, Wilhelm Stekel, Victor Tausk, Lawrence Kohlberg, Michael Mahoney, and perhaps most significantly Sigmund Freud himself.

So why do it? What leads a person to want to subject themselves to intense negative emotions and story after story containing tragic life scripts? The fact is many people with intense mental health problems of their own drift into the field because it offers a refuge from the storm that is their life. This was certainly true of me. I rationalized that while I was getting help with my own life, I could do the same for others. This is a very common script for a Mental Health professional, and one that can lead to some degree of success in the field if one learns to regulate their own emotional response.

Than there are those with more sinister motivations for entering the field. These are the people that seek a narcissistic mirror for their own high opinions of themselves. By assuming the role of “The Great Healer” they get to trade on people’s pain to continue to aggrandize themselves. The field is full of such people and it is an especially rampant trend in the field of education.

But there are those of us who truly want to ease people pain because of the amount of the pain we have experienced ourselves. We have been in the fire, suffered greatly, and found that the only road out of this suffering is the service of other people.

But meanwhile we’re never quite healed from our own scars, and these ghosts may come back to haunt us when we least expect it. Although we have been trained to make “choices” about emotional response, this is never entirely possible, not really.

So meanwhile we trudge on. I didn’t drink today because I felt something very deeply yesterday with that woman, and that feeling was enough to sustain me. It was a moment of true and real human connection, and this is the gift she gave to me. Perhaps I to am selfish, and use my patients to share my own feelings of sadness and loneliness. This is real food for thought and has kept me reading and writing and thinking for the last several hours. In the meantime I look forward to going to work tomorrow. I have been touched very deeply by another person, and for today this is enough to keep me going.