My Specialty? I work with New Yorkers who hate therapy.
It started out as a joke. Generally it’s another NYC therapist who asks, though often it’s regular New Yorkers making small talk.
But it’s always with the therapists: What’s your specialty?
The question bugs me. It sets me up to define my therapy practice based on a category of person I work with as defined by that set of persons’ maladies or demographic traits. Except that to do so is a distortion of the work my patients and I create in the therapy room.
I discovered that my dislike of the question is the very thing that aligns me with the people I work with and that’s a category. And so that’s how I’ve come to answer. “My specialty is working with people who hate therapy.”
Coming to love New Yorkers who hate therapy.
Not everyone loves the answer but it isn’t untrue. I really love my work as a therapist. It’s a remarkable way to spend a day: Connecting with all different kinds of people who are striving to make their lives better is pretty awesome. What I hate is many of the conventions of therapy, most notably the seemingly perpetual need many therapists have to place people into categories based on a set of so-called symptoms. Diagnosis (which many therapists rail against) is but one way that can look. Those are the officially ordained categories, but they are but a narrow representation of the categorical ways we can talk about the complex human beings who seek our help.
The construction of specialty implies that either you work with people based on what tribe they’re from or based on what’s wrong with them. Before the therapy even begins, we’ve imposed a constraint. And so I’ve decide to make my preference the work of building with people who hate these constraints. Are we still subject to some of them? Inevitably, yes, but we can also use our shared hatred of categorization to build new ways of talking about who we are and what is and isn’t working in our lives and discover together, perhaps, new ways of loving therapy.
