I found TBIPS as I looked on-line for a psychoanalytic
community to call home after moving to Jacksonville, FL following my Psy.D.
program at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Despite numerous psychoanalytic
supervisors, psychoanalytic courses, and personal psychoanalytic psychotherapy
while in graduate school, I still felt not quite ripe with my own education and
training. I honestly appreciated in myself that nagging feeling of wanting
more, intellectually and professionally. The clinicians I’ve admired most have
been the ones with endless amounts of training and they paradoxically combined
their experience and expertise with humble disclosures of feeling they didn’t
know enough and needed to know more.
My clients have
also indirectly nudged me toward getting more training, as their efforts to get
better and their “faith” and “belief” in my ability to help them were all taken
as hints as “Go get more training, girl!” I was drawn to TBIPS, in part, by its
offerings of long distance training via Skype and telephone. I am deeply
grateful to TBIPS for being my intellectual home, and an answer to this need
for professional sustenance and support. I’m a Filipino American woman, and
there’s a saying in Filipino called “utang na loob.” It is translated as “debt
of gratitude” and signifies the Filipino cultural trait of “reciprocity” in
relationships or the “debt of one’s inner self.” I feel indebted so, and deeply
grateful for TBIPS’ psychoanalytic training and for supervision.
Training and supervision at TBIPS have helped me feel
more connected to my clients, helped me to express that connection, to be more
human with my clients, and to listen in a particular way that makes sense of
our clients’ most troubling symptoms. Psychoanalytic supervision has sensitized
me to the ways that I may unintentionally shame clients in well-meaning
attempts to be helpful, and how to normalize intense feelings and emotions
reported by clients and mutually felt by myself as therapist. It has brought the
world of psychoanalytic literature to my home, suggesting relevant articles by
contemporary relational psychoanalysts, which I feel have connected me with a
wider psychoanalytic community that has such a rich history of thinking deeply
about common, difficult, tricky clinical scenarios. Ultimately I feel
stimulated and nurtured, and much less isolated as I do the day-to-day work of
inching towards emotional intimacy and understanding of clients. Clients report
feeling understood, accepted, seen, recognized, as we attempt to bear witness
to their emotional suffering. The results have been longer patient lengths of
treatment due to decreased premature terminations, more spontaneous expressions
of gratitude by clients, greater retention and return rates of clients, and
lower no-show rates.
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