What’s the difference between being a normal person and being a psychotherapist?

The difference is that you start accepting every emotion as “yeah! it happens.”
Nothing remains abnormal anymore.
You lose the ability to distinguish the fine line of what’s ok and what’s not in the conventional sense
You lose out on what is popularly known as ‘rational thinking’.

You tend to become more ‘accepting’; to the extent that you start sympathizing with weird logics of your so called ‘abnormal’ patients because you can actually see and appreciate their point of view.

You are supposed to heal insanity.
But after sometime you yourself begin to lose the distinction between sanity and insanity; and not because you are going insane but because you get to know so many points of view that your belief system gets shaken to the roots. You realize that what your school taught you, what parents taught you, what society taught you may not be the only right thing.
Diametrically opposite things may be right too.

The whole foundation of your existence crumbles. You realise you are no more in a position to pass judgement of whats normal and what ain’t. You also realize that you are too small to even make judgment, let alone pass it on someone. Oh! the humiliation of seeing a person older and wiser than you, sit in front of you and weep, and try to give him the gyaan of rational world; while all the time he sees you with eyes that say, “No Doc! This is not what it’s all about…”; and all the time you are yourself convinced that you are merely feeding the holy crap to a man who is already wiser than all of this, wiser than you, wiser than convention. And you are doing it because you can’t do any better and you have charged him for your time.

And that’s when you become the guy who ran away from the phoney-ness, from the artificiality of it all;
And that’s when you become the person who can see through the facade that everyone wears to live a conventional life; desiring and despising the instinctual urges, at the same time in an oxymoronish way.
And that’s when you know you have arrived as a human; but not as a therapist.

Tags: healing, insanity, philosophy, psychotherapy, sanity, therapist