Is Your Therapist With It?
January 10, 2017Many therapists aren’t with it, as Alyssa Bereznak points out in her article “Therapy’s Digital Disconnect” on The Ringer. Bereznak shows the divide between patients who are active online and on social media and their therapists who are baffled by Instagram, Twitter and other digital tools.
But, therapists can be out of touch in other ways. Not only do they not know how to use their phone, but some therapists are also disconnected from the world in general. Why is it important to have a therapist who is with it?
What Makes A Therapist With It?
What I mean by “with it” is a therapist who has some connection to culture. I don’t think there’s a definitive list of things a therapist needs to be in touch with (There’s no Common Core for therapists). Your therapist doesn’t need to know Jay Z’s music, but having some awareness of who he is in the world feels pretty important.
Is a therapist who doesn’t have this awareness automatically less effective? Of course not. People can have a different location in the world and still build quite a lot together–perhaps even more richly. But, rather than specific knowledge, therapists need to have a sort of worldliness–a sense of the world outside their therapy office. Curiosity, here, is key.
The Therapy Room Isn’t A Sealed Bubble
In “Therapy’s Digital Disconnect,” Bereznak recalls a moment with a therapist who, after listening to the writer discuss her active digital life, asked if she could show him how to open a PDF attachment. In 2016, it’s hard to imagine someone not knowing how to open a PDF, largely because opening PDFs is essential to so many ways of engaging with the world.
It begs the question: If you don’t know how to open a PDF, how much engagement with the world have you missed out on? Where have you been culturally? It is evidence of a narrow location in the world and very likely an absence of curiosity. Therapy suffers from being set up in isolation from the world. The therapist’s office is related to, in a sense, as a sealed bubble.
Therapy Is A Cultural Activity
A counterargument is that a therapist, like a plumber or a cardiologist, can be effective without an understanding of PDFs. Perhaps. The bigger point, though, is an appreciation that therapy–unlike plumbing and cardiology–is an engagement with culture.
We exist in and of a culture. Particular individuals inhabit various subsections of those cultures and are more immersed in some of those sections than others. But, what’s vital is that a therapist recognizes that engagement with culture is critical to their work.
Matters of race, class, the political zeitgeist, shifts in attitudes about work and gender and values are inseparable from the emotional and relational premise of psychotherapy. It's impossible to assess and intervene with someone's emotional challenges without appreciating that what we understand as well and unwell and how we understand and attempt to alleviate emotional pain are cultural activities. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we are engaged in a cultural activity when we sit together and examine a life. And if we're with it and aware, we have more choices about what we do with it.