Earlier this month I started my new internship. I’d been both excited and nervous to get back to it. Excited because I’ve been feeling like I need a schedule in my life. Somehow with nothing but free time, I tended to get nothing accomplished. Other than the role playing game (which is going well, by the way!) my writing wasn’t going anywhere. I felt dry and uncreative. I think part of that was because I would spend so much time watching TV… and part of it was the depression and anxiety. Either way, now that I have more limited time, I’ve become a bit more productive.

But I’ve been nervous about going back, too. I’ll be working mostly with adults, as I did at my first internship. I worried that I wouldn’t remember how to do talk therapy. Doing play therapy with kids is a very different thing - almost completely non-verbal. And I looked for different things in the session. Grief in kids manifests in a different way than it does with adults. More than that, I worried that I wouldn’t be able to handle it anymore. That I’d burned myself out at the last internship.

Now that I’ve had my first two sessions with one client, and a first session with a second client, I am less nervous, and still excited. Each session is an hour where I don’t focus on myself and my own little problems. I get out of my head, and I make an offering of myself to someone in need. Yes, I did have a rather stilted first session with one client who was having trouble knowing where to begin - but they agreed to come back for another session.

The first session with the second client was more difficult, emotionally. She has had a lot of loss in her life and she is in a very dark place. I left her house yesterday wondering how the short time we spent together would put even a dent in her pain. I wondered how I would ‘fix’ her. It took me some time to remember - fixing is not my job.

I’ve been trying to do 90 meeings in 90 days, an assignment from my sponsor. I haven’t been doing great at it, but I’ve put together a week and a half now. So last night at 8pm I dragged myself to Noe Valley for a meeting, grumbling the whole way. There was no parking. It was late. My head hurt. But I parked myself in a chair anyway. In the meeting we were reading one of the stories from the Big Book, about a physician who also was alcoholic. Suddenly my perspective shifted.

In response to gratitude from a husband for ‘healing’ his wife, the surgeon wrote, “What healed those tissues I closed? I didn’t. This to me is the proof of the existance of a Somethingness greater than I am. I couldn’t practice medicine without the Great Physician. All I do in a very simple way is to help Him cure my patients.”

While my first thought was to replace Great Physician with Great Pumpkin, because I am a dork like that, my second was that this meant something to me. I don’t heal, or fix my clients. I open a way for a Somethingness (whether that be God, or their own inner strength) to heal them, to shine a light in a place of darkness, to relieve pain even for a moment, to plant a seed that will later bare fruit. I am not doing this all on my own.

I hope I can hold to this perspective shift, because I believe it’s a way to keep from burning out. And it offers me hope that I am doing good in the world, in a small way. One person at a time.

Posted on September 29th, 2005 by Kat
Filed under: AA, Spirituality, General