![]() I am often sought out to be involved in community and societal issues, but I am kept at arm’s length after in invitation is accepted. For old patients, and perhaps would-be ones, I seem less stigmatized to them, making more normal interactions easier. Outside of clinical work, there are also blessings and curses. I miss the blessings of working with patients, but only now realize the curse of how much that took out of me emotionally. Since I retired from clinical work, blessings and curses seem more obvious. ![]() In addition to our own psychotherapy, a la Freud and his interpretation of his own dreams, we can have the same mixed feelings about analyzing ourselves, as least as far as that can go. We professionals have to do something different, for our self-knowledge becomes an important aspect of our therapeutic abilities. Who wants to be reminded of that in the presence of a psychiatrist? No wonder severe trauma is often dissociated out of conscious awareness. It is often worth warning the new patient about that sequence.įor the sake of normality and everyday functioning, people forget or repress what is emotionally uncomfortable. At least some of us think so.Įven in psychotherapy, patients are often uncomfortable with our ability to "read their minds." The truth, or the search for the truth, can be very painful before it ultimately brings relief and positive change. Who hasn’t been at a public gathering and, after identifying yourself as a psychiatrist, heard someone respond nervously, “Can you read my mind?” While you laughingly discount that to preserve our little secret, as I often did by saying I was "off work," we can indeed read minds and behavior (verbal and nonverbal). This “curse" is familiar to all psychiatrists. However, just as Thanksgiving can be compromised by family conflict, being a psychiatrist can feel like a curse at times in our public lives. This process can be enormously beneficial for many patients and satisfying for psychiatrist and other psychotherapists. ![]() One of our blessings, especially if we are knowledgeable about psychodynamics, is to have hindsight into the past to provide insight into the present. Once again, on this Thanksgiving, we should give thanks for these blessings. Psychiatry has many blessings, as I wrote in my " Thanks to Psychiatry" blog about 4 years ago. We are notoriously unreliable in predicting suicide or homicide, for instance. Unlike Cassandra, psychiatrists and other mental health professionals do not do so well in predicting the future, although perhaps we wish we did. She herself was captured, and then killed. One of the consequences was the ruinous fall of Troy to the Greeks. In Greek mythology, Cassandra was cursed for her ability to predict the future.
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