therapy | most hopeful

when others tell their stories

It often takes only a few minutes into a counseling session for me to realize that I have no way of speaking solutions into the room. A story begins, a tear drops, and people began to share with me the kinds of things I would never be brave enough to speak out loud to another…or myself for that matter. And after only a little bit of training in graduate school, I learned that me offering advice isn’t the craft of therapy to begin with.

And it also doesn’t take long to realize the kind of disrespect or arrogance that my solution-speaking or advice-offering would actually be suggesting. It seems, when I think about it for a moment, that in no situation would I ever allow someone who has talked to me for thirty minutes, once a week, for a month, tell me what to do with my life or how to orient my grief or what to do in my marriage.

And yet the role of counselor or therapist or even pastor sometimes has those connotations attached.

So in a kind of powerlessness, when others begin their stories, begin to tell the truth about the life they have been living in and wrestling with and learning from since birth, my only option is to switch into the mode of curiosity. And in that curiosity, I become another human being in the room, asking questions that the person sitting across from me may never have asked before even to themselves.

And in the magic of the room, new things are learned. New things are learned for my own life and for the client’s life.

Good helping doesn’t come from being the answer-man, but rather from being the questioner, a facilitator of the insight that is buried within the person who has come in seeking counsel. And more often than not, as two human beings sit in the room listening to each other in spaces that don’t judge, don’t lie, don’t have other agendas… people find their ways.

There is a deep, dangerous humanity in offering to simply bear witness to the grief, pain, fear, horror, loss, confusion or despair of another. And in staring it in the face, we both become, together, a little more human.

djordan
Pine Tree Dr.

we can assume

I remember once, as a scared-to-really-break-the-rules child, maybe twelve years old sitting at the dinner table, and having made an assumption. I can’t recall what it was about, because to this day, that isn’t what lesson was made clear to me at the table.

What I do remember, though, is that once I had made the assumption, my mom asked me: “Donald, do you know what happens when we assume?”

You all know how this goes. I had not heard it before, so mom made me break the word down from the back to the front.

“me.”

“u.”

I couldn’t do it. I remember my eyes getting very big, and mom, with serious face, saying, “you need to say it.” “I can’t.” “You need to say it. What’s the other word?” “I can’t.” “Donald…”

“ass.”

Then a read face, then giggles, then I’m scared for breaking the rules again.

***

Several years later, in grad school, I was taught one of the golden sets of, yes, assumptions, that we as social workers are to carry like a carpenter carries a hammer. Known as Saleeby’s Strengths Perspective, those who are close to me have no doubt heard me repeat it as a mantra, probably (hopefully) most often for myself. One in particular comes to mind most often:

Assume that you do not know the upper limits of one’s capacity to grow and change, and take individual, group, and community aspiration seriously.

Almost daily with clients, with today as no exception, as they come into my office and sit down on the couch, my own arrogance and ignorance trumps my skill and I find myself assuming that I know someone’s upper capacity to grow and change.

A drunk.
A lazy parent.
A greedy slumlord.
A bad kid.
A messed up family.

Paranoid.
Depressed.
Perpetrator.
Manipulator.
Narcissist.
Insecure.

There is an incredible gift I’ve been offered by those who love me well, and love me most, and that is the gift of assuming they do not know my upper capacity to grow and change. And because of this, they take my aspirations seriously. And because of this, I am often able to meet my own aspirations.

And so, in my work as in my life, the challenge is to assume I do not know the upper limits of others’ capacities to grow and change, and to therefore lean into their aspirations with great expectation. This results in treating people with dignity and respect, and assuming that I don’t know all there is to know about another. Not after the first, fiftieth, or five-hundredth time meeting them.

So, we can assume that we do not know the upper limits of one’s capacity to grow and change, and we therefore take individual, group, and community aspiration seriously.

And thanks for making me say it, mom.

djordan
Pine Tree