The Electrician's Broken Doorbell

Melanie, our office manager, spoke wisely to me last week when she handed me the message:  "The electrician's doorbell doesn't work."

Cracked me up.  Reminded me of an interview Diane Sawyer had with Dr. Ruth Westheimer's husband years ago.  It always stuck with me. Remember Dr. Ruth…the tiny blunt talking sex expert on radio and television talk shows. Nothing could make that woman blush. With a smile and a wink, she would answer the most outlandish, curious, innocent, bold questions about sex that anyone would ask.

Diane Sawyer asked Dr. Ruth’s husband about the sex life Dr. Ruth and he had. Now, that’s a personal question to ask someone on national television…but this is Dr. Ruth we’re talking about. After a pause and a smile he said, “The shoemaker’s children don’t have any shoes.” Dr. Ruth is clear to say that he had a wild sense of humor and that this is a joke. Maybe…but I distinctly remember that wasn’t clarified at the time.

It really reminds me of how we used to be told as kids, “When you point a finger, remember that 3 fingers point back at you”. 

Gulp.

So, why am I telling you this?

I was reminded last week why being a therapist has multiple privileges. And it does. In amongst the stories of pain and depression, conflict and disconnection are incredible opportunities to witness other people discover things about themselves, find ways to find relief from obsessive thoughts, to feel freer and lighter, and to be able to celebrate the positive changes in their lives. To witness significant growth like that is huge…but that’s not my point.

To be a therapist means being with people, walking with them as they confront their fears and anxieties, their hangups and foibles, and work to come to a peace with who they are and how they want to be. To do that with integrity calls on me as a therapist to listen to what is being processed in session and turn a mirror on myself. Listening to people as they  work towards growing to become better individuals, is, quite simply, inspiring to me.  Challenging even.  And that is (mostly) good! :)

Which means that as they ask me help them with something that requires courage, I have to ask myself if I have courageously faced something similar in my own life. How can I work with someone to do something difficult that requires vulnerability if I wouldn’t dare do it myself?

• As people are deciding to have difficult conversations with loved ones, I ask myself, “Are there conversations I would like to be having, that I am putting off because I think it might be difficult?”
  
• A client is working through a lifestyle choice to live healthier, and processing the challenges and benefits to living a lifestyle more in line with their values. It happens that after a conversation like that, I think about some of the same things for my life…and maybe that helps me get out the door for a run that day.
  
• After a session where I have the privilege of being part of a dialogue where someone relates to me a story about the value of being present with someone, and their sheer delight in listening to a loved one, with a “light bulb moment” at a deeper level internally of how valuable it is to really spend time getting to truly know another’s perspective on something, I find myself just a little more attentive to my loved ones when I get home.
  

Such is the side benefit of being a therapist—our clients inspire and challenge us to be better people

Usually that’s a bonus. Last week, what prompted Melanie’s comment about the electrician’s broken doorbell was her reminding me again, (this was about the 3^rd time) that I had yet to return a certain phone call. It was about a contract that we have…and I needed to deal with it. But I had been putting it off. The conversation’s content is unfamiliar territory for me, I wasn’t quite sure how to have this conversation—so I was putting it off. I was finding all sort of reasons excuses of things that had to get done before I made the call. It was delayed for days. I was anxious about the call and I was avoiding it—that’s the bold truth. I’m not proud of that, but if I’m candid, I was putting off something that had to be done because of my anxiety about the call.

What was ironic was that I had just stepped out of a session, helping a person understand the role of anxiety in what was happening…how things were not happening in the relationship because of how much their fear of approaching the relationship stopped engagement.

It was one of those moments when it was very inconvenient helpful to be a therapist…when one has meaningful conversations with people as they confront what is not working in their life, one is very much challenged with what is going on in my life. It became much more difficult to pretend my excuses were legitimate reasons not to make the phone call…that wasn’t pleasant. But ultimately, it was a worthwhile reality check…not only to make the phone call, but to have me do a bit of a scan in my life of what I might be avoiding because when I might start to approach it, I get an uncomfortable feeling I’d rather avoid.

It’s an awesome privilege I have to work with clients. While my focus is solely on providing a therapeutic experience in session, there are side benefits that I take home with me, that make me a better person, I think. My clients are my teachers, and they teach me much as they go through therapy.

They challenge this electrician to fix her own doorbells.