No, I wouldn’t. Here’s why.
From my 20’s to my 50’s I worked hard on healing my trauma and coming to terms with my childhood. I did therapy, followed New Age thinking about accountability, responsibility, soul contracts and other nonsense. I owned my part in what had happened to me, though I never could work out what a 3 y.o. is supposed to be accountable for. It never helped me achieve healing but it did equip me with skills to help others on their healing journeys.
I knew how to listen. Knew what questions to ask, when and how to ask them to invited enquiry into the issue and not trigger defensiveness. I went so far as to get a diploma in counselling and start a bachelor of arts psychotherapy. I was told I had the stuff to be accepted into a graduate diploma course without ever having a bachelor’s. I knew how not to take on other people’s trauma.
Sounds perfect for a therapist, so what happened? What I did not understand then but do now is, that was all part of my masking and special interest in human behaviour so I could fit in. It wasn’t that I had learnt to not take on other people’s trauma, what I was actually doing was working hard to stay disconnected from my own experiences and emotions so I came across as emotionally balanced and healthy so I could help others better.
This was hugely damaging to me but it was the only way I knew to exist in life. I was simply doing what I’d always done. I never experienced shutdowns from this because I never let anyone’s trauma impact me at all – and allowing yourself to be impacted by others’ stories and navigating through it, is the real mark of a good therapist.
After it being confirmed I’m autistic with adhd a lot began go change, most noticeable recently is how I process emotions. For me this has always been a mental exercise but now I’m much more aware of the process. Due to my alexithymia I don’t always know what emotion I’m experiencing and it can take several hours if ever, before I can label them. What I once thought was disconnection from other’s stories was simply not processing them and not being aware of what emotions were being triggered in me at the time.
I have become much more consciously aware of what is going on inside me when I hear of other people’s misfortunes or tragic events (genuinely tragic, I’m not being sarcastic here). I become confused, I have ‘something’ going on but what? I don’t know what I’m feeling or how many different feelings I’m going through at the same time. My mind becomes confused because I know there’s a lot of emotionally heavy ‘ick’ going on inside me but I don’t know what it’s called. If I had a name for it I could work with it. I then become overwhelmed emotionally and shut down. I’m not able to communicate the depth of my sympathy or empathy for them because I don’t know what that is myself. I’m not able to communicate beyond a few short sentences, (I’m sorry for your loss), which sounds like I’m cold and uncaring and actually opposite of the truth.
Now I find myself actively avoiding tragic or emotionally triggering stories. I stopped watching the news decades ago and now I actively avoid youtube channels that focus on the horrors of what humans can do to each other and other living beings in this world. My knowing won’t make things better. My not knowing won’t make the situation worse but knowing will adversely affect me. The conflict here is when I get to know someone well and really like them as a person and friend, I want to know about their life experiences, the good as well as the bad. I just have to learn to navigate the conflict of wanting a deeper friendship with people and the risk of coming off like a cold bitch because of my responses to their stories.
And to be clear, ‘stories’ for me means people’s lived experiences, not made up events.
The risk here is not rejection because I seem uncaring, it’s that other people will feel hurt and rejected by my response because it isn’t appropriately deep enough compared to what they just told me. At one of the most intimately vulnerable times of sharing deeply personal experiences society has inserted rules on expected norms of behaviour. Veering too far to either side of that will cause suspicion. I’m aware enough to know the rule exists but not enough to know where the line is or how to dance on it. What others see as cold, uncaring, callous behaviour is my genuine struggle with drowning in a flood of sensations where I’m struggling to grasp the lifebuoy of a label.
I would not make a good therapist because the last thing a person struggling to understand their own emotional quicksand needs is someone else struggling with their own.