THIS IS EDITED

This blog is not therapy. This blog is edited.

I weigh so many things. I have confidentiality to maintain - confidentiality of my clients, my colleagues, my therapists and supervisors. The confidentiality of my family and my friends and of myself.

Confidentiality is about ethics. And it is about keeping promises. And it is about privacy. And it is about not being ready or willing to share certain things - things that are personal or in process in a particular way.

I want to say something every week - but not too much. I try not to ramble or be too confessional. Or too academic or too...

I want you to like my writing, admire it, and mostly be impacted by it. I want to share and grow together.

I try to be somewhat measured - nothing too extreme so that I leave room for everyone’s truth. This is somewhat tiresome and I may do it less in the weeks to come.

I know your time is precious. And mine is too. I want to earn the privilege of your time and the space in your inbox.

I try to write on the border - to write in an embodied way that takes into account our actual experienced lives and the knowing and not-knowing of which they are comprised.

So I edit. And edit some more. And then stop editing. And then edit.

But this is not therapy.

In therapy we can say anything. We can rip ourselves open or show ourselves to be ripped open. In therapy we can react.

Infants don’t hold multiple possibilities at once. Infants are engaged, hungry, asleep - they are what they are. And it is those early parts of ourselves that need to fall out of us in therapy. That wasn’t good enough. I hate that. I feel this way.

"I’m all over the place today."

I hear that all the time and I always think - yes - great - you are allowing yourself the freedom to roam and sprawl and not make it all come together quite yet.

Good therapy is unedited.

We don’t have to qualify our feelings. They. Are.

And here I go with my editing… I’m not saying we should not struggle with ourselves and our words and their impact on ourselves and our therapist. But good therapy allows us to let go more than we usually do in service of understanding and growing ourselves.

That’s the thing - I’m not a therapy advocate though many people see me that way. I am an advocate of brave process toward self understanding and deep change that lasts - change that gets at the structures of ourselves. And psychotherapy is one way (among others) that can help us do this. And it is the way that I practice. But it’s the unfurling that I care about. The opening that can tolerate a bit more and can show a bit more. Aliveness.

While I love writing this blog sometimes I long to be able to roam around like a jungle cat not worrying so much about this or that.

Sometimes I long to be seen in ways the world can’t see me.

And I also feel the longing to swim in unedited waters - to read work that is less reigned in and live more fully in what is happening rather than the presentations that surround us that “tell us what is happening” based on so many different agendas.

We all have our personas - the jobs that we do, the ways that we are for the world. This keeps the wheel turning. It’s important. But it’s not everything.

We are. In fact. Alive.

And so we all need to be loved through our private trials. I learned that in therapy and it now extends into a special and close group of people.

We all need our circle of unedited love.

To support my work, please share it with someone.