Welcome to my country Book

[ In the final chapter, Slater writes poignantly about her own history -- the fact that she was once diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, hospitalized multiple times, suffered an eating disorder, engaged in self-mutilation, came from a chaotic family background, etc., etc., to the point where her hospital records reflect the prediction that she would be chronically admitted and readmitted to inpatient settings.

By the time we meet Slater she is clearly a successful psychologist, one who spent eleven years working with patients and expanding her clinic. The fact that a woman who had suffered so greatly went on to earn a Ph.D. and become someone who helped others who had suffered in similar ways is inspiring in and of itself. But what truly touched me was Slater's honesty about what might be called hypocrisy in the mental health field.

"I'm supposedly in a profession that values honesty and self-revelation," says Slater. "Training programs for psychologists like me...have as a credo the admission and discussion of countertransference [i.e., the therapist's emotional reactions to aspects of patients' presentation], which by necessity claims elements of private conflict." Yet, adds Slater, we therapists are given a double message. "Admit your pain, but only to a point. Admit it, but keep it clean. Go into therapy, but don't call yourself one of us if you're anything more than nicely neurotic." She writes about the "us vs. them" mentality which uses language to pathologize patients and separate them from their supposedly healthy and functional therapists.

At least one of the founding psychologists -- his identity escapes me -- emphasized the need for psychologists to be healthier and more functional than their patients. And of course that makes sense; you can't really help a troubled person if most of your emotional space is taken up with your own pressing uncontained issues. On the other hand, this concept was one which troubled me for a long time. I'm not a perfect person, or a perfect spouse, or a perfect mother. How can I present myself as any kind of guiding light to someone who struggles with issues that I struggle with myself?

Of course there are answers. My fallback one is that anything you've struggled with makes you a better therapist. And of course, we're not really supposed to have all the answers. But Slater's answer was a new, and powerfully articulated, one for me. "What sets me apart from these 'sick' ones," says Slater, "is simply a learned ability to manage the blades of deep pain with a little bit of dexterity. Mental health doesn't mean making the pains go away. I don't believe they ever go away. I do believe that nearly every person [including psychologists]...has the same warped impulses...as the wobbliest of borderlines, the most florid of psychotics. Only the muscles to hold things in check -- to channel and funnel -- are stronger. I have not healed so much as learned to sit still and wait while pain does its dancing work, trying not to panic or twist in ways that make the blades tear deeper, finally infecting the wounds."

Perhaps what Slater is saying is that mental health means a greater ability to compartmentalize. And that's why a therapist with their own pain can reach out to someone else in pain and teach them to contain that pain so that it no longer overtakes everything else they try to do. But Slater's honesty, and her perceptive discussion of the inherent irony of being taught that you can't take a patient where you yourself haven't gone, but on the other hand the real fear of crossing a boundary and facing judgment when you reveal too much about yourself to a fellow therapist, resonated with me. (hide spoiler)]