I was at training on the weekend, learning about understanding and preventing vicarious trauma. It was interesting. But there’s something about having a group of therapists in a room together that could be described as unsettling. By-the-way, the collective noun for a group of therapists is “a worry of…” apparently. Although AI may be playing a little joke on me.
There are so many earnest people in the world, and therapists might be near the top the list of earnest-ness; when you are learning about somewhat difficult topics I wonder if what is also needed, running alongside the grizzly truth of how horrid people can be to each other, is a smatter of humour. In these therapy training courses there is much chin-rubbing on a tilted head, the low hum of "hmm-ing", moments of weighty reflection, (unfortunate moments of audible stomach grumbling), and many voices politely trying to have their profound thoughts about their work heard by all.
Somehow there is little room for wit on these training courses. And I know – it is because we are talking about Very Serious Things. But when a rather short man in his mid-60s, wearing CND-emblazoned DM-boots topped off with a purple paisley shirt is delivering the hard-hitting content it’s quite testing (especially from the front row because you forgot your glasses) to take everything Extremely Seriously.
His DMs squeaked on the hard village hall flooring and the shirt dazzled the eyes with excessive swirling patterns. I am not one to not take these topics seriously, trauma is a hugely interruptive and daunting thing to live with, let alone talk about openly. In this line of work we therapists need to be careful that we don’t end up inhabiting something dreadful that has actually happened to someone else. This is big stuff and cannot be taken flippantly, a person is relying on us to support them with this toughest of material, and the training helped remind me how best to manage with it.
BUT.
Come on therapist colleagues. Please. Just a little loosening of the tight-grip-of-This-Is-Serious.
At the start of the training Mr Paisley invited us (we’re always being invited… in hindsight I should maybe have politely declined…) to meditate.
We sat there eyes closed, earnestly ‘clearing our minds’ and ‘listening to our breath’ and ‘connecting with the calm beneath the storm’ etc etc and when Mr Paisley said ‘now watch your breath come in and out of your lungs and let your mind be free of … ‘ (something remarkable, I can’t remember what) – when he said the word ‘lungs’ I automatically went into a visual of the recent Silent Witness I’d seen, where Emilia Fox was intently dissecting the lung of a murder victim.
And I really got into this replay as it was quite a realistic lung and I remember thinking at the time I wonder if this is fake or some animals lung? Which animal? And then somehow I got to going back in time and thinking about when my dad was in hospital in 1997 after a mega grim operation (called the Whipple Procedure where much of your guts are removed) and when I went to visit him he was in such a terrible state with drips and needles galore and his mouth covered in blood because he kept coughing up gross things from inside… it was deeply disturbing. And then that made my thoughts wiggle (you know how dots join in a funny way in your head, leading you willy-nilly from one place to another) to a conversation I’d had with a friend recently where I’d admitted I not-infrequently imagine the sorts of places you might accidently find a dead body.
Oops! I was meant to be clearing my mind and grounding! Not replaying a cheap horror-movie. Mr Paisley invited us to open our eyes and I saw a squirrel zipping up an oak tree that was in the carpark outside the window. Which felt quite normal.
Mr Paisley then invited us to talk about our meditation and what nice things we’d encountered.
I wasn’t sure that sharing my minds contents at that point would’ve sparked a laugh in the crowd of Earnest Therapists (they may have called 999 and invoked the mental health act 1983), so instead in my gnarly head I laughed like a hyena, while a very clever therapist spent 5 minutes telling us all how marvellously empty her head had been and what a grounding experience the meditation was, thank you so much Mr Paisley.
Sliced lung anyone?
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