There comes a moment — hard to anticipate but impossible to ignore — when a professional identity begins to peel away from you. Not with rebellion, not with anger, but with a mixture of clarity, sadness, and gratitude.
That’s how I slowly and almost silently stepped away from the role of being a therapist. Or more precisely, from the idealized image of what being a therapist means.
In psychoanalytic training, the therapist is often invested with impossible roles:
“the good mother,” “the supportive father,” “the alpha function,” “the ultimate container,” “the one who always understands”...
But in reality, no human can become a substitute for an actual historical absence.
And more importantly — no one should try to.
I didn’t learn this from books, but from real contact with people in the clinical space.
And when I said to a client, with complete sincerity:
“I am not — and will never be — the mother or father you didn’t have,”,
something shifted — not just for them, but also for me.
It was a therapeutic act of truth.
And perhaps more healing than the promise of an endlessly prolonged symbolic repair, a never-ending “containment” that turns therapy into a ritual of mutual dependency.
The Illusion of the All-Powerful Therapist
This illusion is one of the most dangerous traps in the psychological world:
It demands the therapist to cancel themselves as a human being — all in the name of an ideal, often impossible, therapeutic relationship.
I experienced this pressure as a subtle form of self-abandonment:
- To contain things that didn’t resonate with me,
- To stay silent when something in me wanted to speak,
- To continue a therapeutic relationship when, in truth, it had already ended.
I came to understand — painfully honestly — that sometimes, to continue in the name of the method is itself a lie.
And if “truth heals,” then the kind of therapeutic silence imposed by rigid frameworks can become pathological.
Therapy Cannot Replace the Decision to Live
I began to see theories not as absolute truths, but as angles of perception — from real people, with real histories and real limits.
And if I’m being completely honest:
I’ve lost my blind faith in psychological tools
— not because they don’t work, but because I’ve started to see their actual limits.
No method can force someone to want to live.
No therapeutic relationship can replace the personal process of maturing.
Growth cannot be contained from the outside — it must be lived from within, in one’s own rhythm.
As Above, So Below
Systems — just like people — are born, they grow, and they die.
Some reach a point of maximum coherence, then begin to fall apart under the weight of their own complexity.
Others become rigid, turning into doctrines. And when they become more important than the life they claim to serve, they need to be allowed to die.
The same is true of professional identities:
- They grow from a need for meaning,
- They are shaped through work and devotion,
- But they can become subtle cages in which we lose our humanity.
Letting go of the therapist role wasn’t a giving up.
It was a rebirth.
One in which I no longer seek to contain, but simply to be.
Not to fix, but to be present.
Not to perform a role, but to create a space where truth is allowed to emerge — even if it hurts, even if it breaks, even if it transforms.
Theories Are Maps — Not the Territory
I believe, now, that:
- No one holds the whole truth,
- Each person must shape their own system of thought,
- And that system will one day die — and be reborn in another form,
- That’s the sign of a living system: it remains open to transformation.
Theories can be tools. But they shouldn’t be authorities.
The therapist can be a guide. But not a savior.
And personal truth is sometimes more powerful than any inherited model.