Finding a therapist today is a little like online dating. It's not that much of a stretch; therapy is a relationship after all. For it to be effective, the client needs to be at least as emotionally vulnerable with a therapist as with a potential partner. Things get personal in therapy from the very beginning. People often reveal more in the first few sessions with a therapist then they ever do in other relationships. In order for clients to be comfortable, they want to feel a connection with the therapist before they commit.
In contrast, from the time most therapists begin school we are cautioned against too much self-disclosure. There in lies the dilemma. How do we compete in this “dating game’’ without sharing part of ourselves? The truth is we can’t. So we put up profiles on Psychology Today (the Match.com of the therapy world) for potential clients to peruse in the hopes of finding “the one.” Many therapists have turned to blogging to close this gap.
I started by churning out listicles, blogs with titles like 6 Ways to Retrain Your Brain After Depressionand 8 Tips for Conquering the Dark Side of Early Motherhood. It was easy and garnered a certain amount of traffic, but didn’t feel like me. There were tons of other therapist bloggers writing pretty much the same thing. I needed to do something different to stand out from the crowd but that also was authentic to my own voice. How could I connect with the people without revealing too much and compromising myself professionally?
Then it hit me: I should be doing the things that I suggest clients do, but don’t actually do myself…like meditation, exercise, healthy eating and yoga. By spending a year taking my own advice and blogging about my successes and challenges along the way I could connect with potential clients by modeling the importance of self-care.
So in the spirit of Elizabeth Gilbert’s year long “search for everything” and Julie Powell’s Julie & Julia, I decided to spend a year taking my own advise.
It seemed like a harmless enough endeavor.
In the beginning, everything was great. Meditation relieved my excess stress, the new exercise and eating habits helped me finally lose the baby weight. I never felt better.
Then things started to change. It turns out the year I chose to document became the hardest year of my life.
Documenting the ups and downs allowed me to watch seemingly hopeless situations become manageable or even positive. I learned establishing healthy habits is tough during the best of times. During times of intense stress, it becomes almost impossible.
When it comes to sharing, there are some personal taboos.: politics, religion and sex to name a few. For me those topics are private. I also don’t want to be that person who “overshares” on social media. Still, some people might think I’m sharing too much in my blog. If you feel that way, that’s okay. Maybe I’m not the therapist for you. There are many others out there.
Through the experience of writing this blog, not only have I provided a window into my life for potential clients, I can also now empathize with them on a deeper level.
Initially, this project was a marketing tool created for other people, but it now it’s something I do for myself, too. It’s funny, in setting out to write about self-care, I found the act of writing to be the most healing.