Have you had this experience? 
 
You need to review your work about a particular client situation with a close colleague or supervisor (with your client's permission) – yet, as you try to describe it, a sense of futility sets in.   You realize that the context is too nuanced to convey sufficiently: the uniqueness of its essence gets lost in translation.   Even when supervision helps, you carry a bodily sense of ongoing responsibility– somehow - in the meantime.  Clinical situations like this one become part of the daily (and nightly?) fabric of your life.
 
Even for those of us who have a strong professional community, our work life as psychotherapists is a private affair.  Yet many of our most challenging, extraordinary or surprising moments may occur within our psychotherapy relationships.
 
How do we hold this vast complexity – the startling,  the dark,  as well as the beautiful – that emerges from within our clients and ourselves in the evolution of our work together,  while living within the greater context of our lives?   What is it like to hold all this? – in a given moment, or over an extended period of time?
 
Whether our work is long-term, shorter or even within one visit, it requires the absorption of a truly creative process supported by a steadfast nature.  These qualities plus emotional courage are part of what it takes to sustain oneself as a psychotherapist.
 
Seasoned psychotherapists appreciate the inevitable mixture of concerns that go along with the serious work of good psychotherapy and have developed ways to live their lives as therapists.

What do you need in order to be able to hold all this? 
 
The inspiration for Your Life as a Therapist came from my own urgent moments as a therapist and about the relief that came when my colleagues and I spoke from an experiential level - not only about clinical dilemmas but also from our lives as therapist.

This workshop offers a model of group self-help that values supervision, teaching and our own therapy, yet is distinct from each of these. 
 
What’s different about this workshop from other “care for the caregiver’ workshops?

Massage, meditation and other mind bodywork are wonderful sources of relief from the stress of our work.  They help with the general effects of stress.  Yet, our work is uniquely intense because it necessarily reaches into our own inner life.  It crosses the professional/personal boundary that we must sustain in our daily practice and touches us on an experiential level. It gets under our skin.

If this description speaks to something in you, please let me know.  I will be arranging a time for our workshop in early 2014.  
Please contact me at joan@joanlavender.com,   212-866-0461 or send me a brief blog with your contact information.  Thank you.

I am sure you can appreciate the sensitivity and confidentiality of our theme, so I am not inviting an ongoing blog on this theme.