The Personal and The Professional

“The personal cannot be divorced from the professional,” says author Parker Palmer.[1]

While we teach methods leading to competencies as a psychotherapist. In order to ignite the work within the walls of “professionalism”, we must not forget to go inward and bring forth our personhood into the partnership.

We can’t be “professional” in any real endeavor, without digging into our souls and unearthing the toil from our lived experiences.

To be a professional, we must get personal.

To be personal, we must have a dose of professionalism in the way we tend to our personal lives.

When we take the courage to not divide the person from the professional, we have to see that we are not mere technicians, slaying our clients with cutting-edge evidence-based practices. We can’t just do CBT/EFT/ACT or another one of the approaches unto our clients. We enter into the conversational nature of reality formation. In turn, we have to see – and convey a knowing – that our clients have inner lives as well.

Like a fruit is dependent on the growth of the tree, the way that we can excel in the craft of therapy is to nurture the roots from within.

The Greeks call excellence,  arete (Greek: ἀρετή): “The capacity to intensify a passion for excellence…”

May we come to see the person and the professional as one and the same.

 

Note:

[1] From Parker Palmer’s book, The Courage to Teach.