15 Week Transformation from Identity to Becoming

I have forever, maybe not quite forever, been plagued by the research suggesting that therapists do not improve over time (Goldberg, et al, 2016), but that they decrease in efficacy. It has been a painfully difficult pill to digest that today after over a decade of practice, I am most likely less effective than in that distant year of confusion. From that position, I want to start my experience of the 15 weeks (about 3 and a half months) of creative transformation I have undertaken. 

I remember my first clients as a therapist. I remember every single one of them. I remember all my current clients. I have forgotten many of those in between. As a new therapist, I remember being moved to tears sitting across from a young man who sold drugs and hearing his deep need to be loved and seen by his family. I took it to class with me. I asked them, “How do you keep yourself from crying?”  It marked the beginning of a decade's process of losing myself. I did not realize I lost myself until 15 weeks (about 3 and a half months) ago. As I have progressed in my career, not only have I learned to completely emotionally detach from clients but also from life. I can successfully manage the pain with no tears as well as the joy with no excitement. 

My journey into therapy as a career was not intentional.  It stemmed out of disregard for applying to graduate school and my family's desperation to ensure I continued my education. I was set on a year of working and learning about my father’s company before deciding what the rest of my education would look like. Although it was not my decision, it was not a decision I regret. I thrive in academic settings. It is this important fact that shades the last decade + of my story. During my master’s program, I thrived in the discussion forums. I loved everything I was learning. All the information learned in my bachelor's in psychology was applied at a granular level. I could gather information and get live feedback. My extroversion could thrive. It was there that I realized I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be a professor and practice therapy. I wanted to create programs at the population level. With glowing letters of recommendation, a heart for change, straight A’s, not so great GREs- I applied for a PhD in Psychology at the University of Southern California (USC).  

Denied. 

Denied due to my GRE’s not meeting the cutoff. Glowing recommendations from professors at the university (USC), straight A’s, top of my class, fabulous undergraduate records. Good, but not good enough. Not quite the profile defined by the institution as to what makes a worthy candidate. The ability to answer test questions created for white males who live on the East Coast and come from generations of wealth is necessary to perform despite repetitive proof of the ability to perform. (Zwick 2023) 

This is one of my first experiences of not fitting into the box of expectations outside of my home.  It is my first major denial.  My first, not good enough.  Interesting that I abandoned my pursuit for higher education at that point despite a deep yearning and feeling of connection through academic pursuits. It was the first time as an adult that I just accepted that I did not fit into the box, but that this box was very important to fit into for success. 

Noticeably, I never grieved this particular denial.  I accepted it as part of life’s plan. I moved forward. I got a job. I became a therapist. I became less myself. I got a decent job for someone right out of school, in community mental health. It’s an interesting place, community mental health. I can assure you that it will not help you pass a licensing exam. I can also assure you that it is not therapy being done. However, therapy is being billed. I lost even more of myself while simultaneously believing I was living out some profound journey of existence. began losing the idea of identity and experiencing the process. I cannot speak of the process without also speaking of the perception of loss of identity. 

After losing myself for a few years, gaining a license, and a few kids, I finally found myself in my own practice. I was finally in my own space. Alone. An extrovert with no one to talk to except their own internal monologue found themselves in private practice. I nearly lost the opportunity to regain myself to what people commonly describe as depression. I describe that period as rejection rather than depression. It was acceptance that I did not like being a therapist or whatever a therapist was up until that point. I also did not like community mental health. 

I did know that I was meant to be in business for myself, and if therapy was the format to achieve autonomy from the system, then that is what I would focus on. 

I dove into systems theory as a mechanism to build a company, become a consultant, and exit. I believed I was creating a journey to find myself again. In reading, and research I found myself in a deep internal dialogue with myself and all my internal classmates. I created an internal experience of school. I created a program for leadership that is not attractive but infinitely honest. If you want to be a great leader, get comfortable with never achieving anything. Leadership is a cybernetic process that never ends. It is constantly in flux. Leadership is no different than life (That piece of golden insight only came after the start of my 15 week transformation). Growing my group practice, I found myself again. I did not find myself in the therapy room but in the relationships around me.  

I did not find myself in my identity, but in the experiencing of time and space as it interacted with the people and relationships I came into contact. 

Ding Dong. Is it the doorbell or my internal self-talk calling myself out? I began to thrive. I was teaching. I was sharing. I was engaged in dialogue and critique. My clients benefited from my own finding of myself. 

As I reflect on my time as a therapist, the bulk of that time was spent on becoming an expert on trauma. About 6 months ago, I crumpled up that expertise and threw it into the trashcan where it belongs. No one person experiences the same experience both in the traumatic event itself and in the experience of the symptoms that we commonly group into post-traumatic stress disorder. At some point, I realized that I could diagnose anyone with anything. I was faced with the idea that diagnosis and whether someone fits a diagnosis is a construct of my own experience.  

I had a professional identity crisis. 

It was not a sudden onset. It was the realization that I have been in a professional identity crisis for over a decade. I was on a constant mission to be better than everyone because I absolutely hated the idea of defining myself by the expectations of models of therapy that I saw holes in all over. I was bound by the gate keeping to valuable information for the therapy room by an industry increasingly focused on wealth. I was frustrated. I was angry. I decided to do something different. I decided to press the restart button. I don’t mind wealth, I don’t think any of us do; however, I realized that my wealth was not in the therapy room. My contribution to the world was being stifled by 4 walls and a confidentiality agreement. 

I yearn for critical thinking. I yearn to critique. I yearn to learn. I yearn to expand. I yearn for the innocent confusion of that first year of therapy. The curiosity. The learning. The academics. 

It was like that. I found myself.  I found myself applying for a program I have been looking at online for years. 

15 weeks ago marked the beginning of my own creative transformation. It marked the beginning of identity exploration and the reopening of the recursive process of becoming. 

The stale stagnation of soured processes.  

The loss of contribution to the macro system.  

Stifled simplicity in the stability of consistency.  

Day in and day out.  

Do they like me? Do they think I’m good enough? When I do clever work, they leave. They don’t agree.  

Improvement. Advancement. 

A snake eating its tail. 

A dog chasing its tail. 

Dumb dog. 

Dumb human. 

Dumb me. 

Reinvent. 

Reidentify. 

Re- 

Become. 

15 weeks ago I remembered, reconnected, re-became. I had a realization that I never lost myself, I have been on a journey of repetitively redefining and rediscovering that which works and that which does not work. I love the therapy room because I love the change. I love the wonder. I hate the therapy room because I hate the confinement. I hate fear. I hate the constant rules and trying to understand what I am doing. I’m an expert, but don’t act like one. I think something a client is doing contributes to their unhappiness but meets them where they are at. Confrontation is necessary, but if you do it too much they’ll leave.  

All I want to do is have a client hug a giant fork. (Keeney & Keeney, 2012) 

Over the last 15 weeks, I have reconnected with change as the effect of the defining and engagement in the distance between myself and someone else. I have realized that it is not the technique, but the bridging of the distance between myself and the person in front of me. It is the lack of understanding, trying to figure out, and asking where this client was at. Where is this client in space and time? Where is this client at in juxtaposition to where I am at any given time? Change is not necessarily a stagnant place that I am leading a client to arrive at, but an ongoing process of understanding, defining, and punctuating.  

The last 15 weeks have been a healing process for my humanity. My tears have meaning in the therapeutic context of change. Love has value in the 4 walls that are sealed by a confidentiality agreement. My excitement at the excitement of my clients has meaning in the process. Over the last 15 weeks, I have realized that the stripping of my own experience in the room deadened my efficacy in the therapy room. An empty room with a nodding head and 100% empathy and agreement with everything brought in is not therapy. It’s delusional. It is just as delusional as enforcing my worldview upon a client. Therapy is the space between my own existence and the existence of my client. It is a microcosm of the systems and patterns that play out in both of our lives. Sharing in that experience and its absurdity is what makes the therapy room such a powerful tool for spontaneous change. 

Therapy is where theoretical physics and experience collide. It could also be the preface to an amusing joke. Two people moving towards two separate destinations sit on a couch where they both realize that their experience in the therapy room is a granular example of their experience in every area of their life. Systems. 

I remember seeing my first therapist. It was horrific. I finally had the guts to let her know that I struggled in relationships because I had a tough time connecting intellectually. I have a rich internal experience and conversation that most conversations with other people don’t come close to replicating- so I choose silence or limit what I talk about. Her response was, “So you think everyone is not as smart as you are?” Ouch. I never went back. The weight of that comment took me years to unravel. I was angry. I was hurt.  

I have always felt less intelligent than people around me because I struggle to communicate my internal dialogue other than writing. My fear of expressing my internal process is shaped by the experience of people struggling to understand me because of my unique thought process and the speed of my thoughts. It happened that day in the therapy room. Instead of diving into the difficulty of my expression and describing my experience with that therapist at that moment, I re-lived the pattern. I struggled to express myself. I expressed. I was misunderstood. I shut down. I termed the relationship and assumed she thought I was a narcissist when all I wanted was a deep connection with another human.  

I have never been able to express that deep need in a therapy room again.  

I have never been able to free myself from the prison of my own internal dialogue. I once described this feeling as a black hole in the pit of my chest where my childhood arms were reaching out. I am reaching out and waiting for someone to reach back and connect. This same process, fear, and internal experience has affected my ability to feel free in the therapy room. The few times, I have let down the walls and spoken freely- connection has followed. It is followed by fear that I should NOT be having my needs met in the therapy room. However, is this not the very pain clients come in with? And if I can let these walls down, and be my authentic person while describing, defining, framing, and reframing wouldn’t I build one level of the foundations for spontaneous change? 

I find value in the idea from systems that no one person’s existence within the room is immune to its effects. I cannot exist outside of the triangle. I cannot exist inside of the room as something separate from what I am outside of the therapy room. The understanding that I am who I am with all my perceived flaws and strengths in and out of the room is freeing. This does not mean I am immune from the necessity of introspection, and the necessity of the ability to define or define the difficulties of defining within the room. This is the unique experience of the therapist. Through introspection and experience, we learn to define time and space within 4 walls fortified by a confidentiality agreement. 

Identity. Therapists all over the world marvel at their ability for someone to have an identity after therapy. Quickly, hand me a dart to burst that bubble before they float away. Identity is a construct that society uses to keep individuals static.  

Society must define you to a group and categorize you. The power constructs of society panic when you do not fit into its pre-suggested and configured groups and categories. How then does it control you? You’re a threat.  

Too often we, as therapists, become tools of society to help clients fit into these groups and categories distancing themselves further and further from their own process of existence. We become tools that interrupt the process of becoming. Through this interruption of the becoming process, we stagnate clients into rigid ideas of their own identity.  

We, even I, have supplied the boxes of identity that create safety and relief from the pressure of society. Perhaps who they are is subject to the context of time and the space that exists between themselves and someone else at any given time. They themselves are spontaneous existence. 

My own box: ADHD. It is such a helpful and protective box when I am experiencing anxiety that I do not fit into the mold of society’s expectations. Other people cannot keep up with my thoughts, “I have ADHD.”  Other people do not like the “chaos” in my office, “I have ADHD.”  Other people do not like that I am aloof, “I have ADHD.”  Other people don’t like that I am distracted when they talk to me. so, “I have ADHD”.  You see, these labels are not for us or for our clients. These labels are for society, and managing the space between what society expects and our own actual existence. Society responds, “Oh, ok, well something is wrong [different, unexpected] with you so that’s why you are not acting how I expect.” 

As I have aged, I have slowly set fire to the idea that I must be what I thought that I was. I have set fire to the idea that who I am is who I will be. I have set fire to the categories and groups that other people believe I should fit into. I have started a lonely journey of shedding identity and group membership in exchange for the freedom of process and becoming. Interestingly, this experience of wanting for connection in my life. It has been a want characterized by what I should want. I enjoy my own internal dialogue and exchange it when it makes sense to me. I don’t need a connection if it does now allow for my dialogue, for my selective silence, for my intermittent disappearance. There is not something wrong with me. There is nothing missing. There is simply the realization that I am not what the world expects and wants me to be, and the new secondary truth that has come to be after the last 15 weeks: I do not care to want or not want what the world wants from me.  The world has me, not an idea of me. It may be society’s primary motive to control me by categorizing me. To hell with that. 

I was not sure where this paper was going when I sat down to write it. This final compilation of the last 15 weeks of transformation has turned into my own call to therapists and leaders everywhere to burn it down. I did not expect this paper to be a healing experience; however, there is no more proper way to end a course on creative transformation but through your own internal transformation. As I write the final words, I find myself in tears. 

 Burn it down. 

Burn it down to ashes. 

Burn it down to ashes with no expectations of how it will emerge. 

Then burn it down again. 

Transformation is not defined by a preconceived notion of identity, but of becoming. 

References 

Goldberg, S.B., Rousmaniere, T., Miller, S.D., Whipple, J., Nielsen, S.L., Hoyt, W.T., … Wampold, B.E. (2016). Do psychotherapists improve with time and experience? A longitudinal analysis of outcomes in a clinical setting. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 63(1), 1-11. doi: 10.1037/cou0000131 

Keeney, H., & Keeney, B. (2012). Circular therapeutics: Giving therapy a healing heart. Phoenix, Az.: Zeig, Tucker & Theisen. 

Tracey, T.J.G., Wampold, B.E., Lichtenberg, J.W., & Goodyear, R.K. (2014). Expertise in psychotherapy: An elusive goal? American Psychologist, 69(3), 218-229. doi: 1 0.1037/a0035099 

Zwick, R. (2023). The Role of Standardized Tests in College Admissions. Civil Rights Project, June(2023). Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4wb5c