A diagonal glimpse at what it means to walk in our clients shoes
Walk in my shoes
This hurt inside is too much for me
Just walk in my shoes
You’ll see I want the love that used to be
Try on my heartache
Go ahead and try it on for size
Just walk in my shoes
Then you’ll see through someone else’s eyes
Glady’s Knight sang of the heartfelt desire to have, in this case, someone she loves, see how their rejection has made her feel. It’s dramatic stuff and a great song. No wonder it’s an all-time classic. In the counselling room we strive to slip out of our footwear and walk a mile or more in the shoes of our clients, or at the very least fall in step with them so that they hardly feel our presence walking beside them while they tell their stories.
But what can that mean for us as counsellors to walk in the shoes of our clients? Well, it will be a walk that can show us the dark and challenging places our clients have walked, but also we will be shown the gentler images of the journey of their lives. You will meet brothers, sisters, parents, neighbours, friends, teachers and work colleagues. You’ll be shown special places. A tree in their grandparents’ garden where they used to dream. The long winding journey back home from school. These are the details, the stories of our clients’ lives, it’s how we orientate ourselves in their internal village and the people that populate it, it’s how we fall into step with them as they lead us. And on the walk, their struggles are revealed, moments when their dreams are shattered or perhaps when life became to feel less safe for them.
‘It happened on the corner – I’d walked around it a hundred times.’
‘This is where we met.’
‘I was in the corner shop when I heard the news.’
It’s this subtle content that helps us to see what they see when they take us back to their memories. And their memories become our memories in the sense that we hold them, we give the stories our focus as we reflect on the content and process of each session, then we lock away our notes but our minds go on, whether we are aware or not, incorporating and mulling on the memories and filing them away with our own. I hold memories of people important to my clients, people so well described I remember them quite naturally, fluidly. They don’t jar against the rich and vast memories I hold of my own life and my own people, where they came from, how their lives flowed. It seems amazing that I can hold so much that we all can hold so much.
Do you ever worry or puzzle over how you manage to hold all this content, details of other people’s lives? We know as counsellors what we need to do around self-care, we also know that society is bombarded with sensational, usually bad, news from all points in the world. There are concerns that the public report feeling overload and stress, commonly they become desensitised to the suffering of people they have never met and can’t reach to assist. Who hasn’t felt helpless and hopeless at a news item and the tears fall? So how do we counsellors hold so much of our clients’ content and keep it all together so well the majority of the time? Are we in danger of being emotionally damaged?
The dangers to counsellors of overload, vicarious trauma, desensitisation and other emotional injuries are real, and while I believe we have to be self-aware of the possibility of suffering in this way and seek support if you feel the need, I believe we do not need to be too fearful.
We can do this work, in the main safely, because knowing about and storing the details of people’s lives comes naturally to us, simply because we are human. As an evolutionally part of being human, our village mind is another one of our superpowers.
Go back centuries and most of our forebears will have lived in small communities, with perhaps just several hundred families or less, these people, our people, had most likely lived in the same community for generations. The family histories and times of hardship, tragedy and joy would have been experienced and shared amongst the inhabitants, everyone knew something about everyone else, either first-hand or over the garden fence.
I write this as just a bit of reassurance – if you have ever wondered, as I have, where did all the details of your client’s lives go, or feared that one day the internal filing cabinet of other peoples memories would burst open and create mayhem in your memory banks. Have little fear. As a human you are perfectly designed to live in a village of hundreds of families, knowing details of generations before, the struggles of the present and hopes and dreams for the future, you can carry that village with you wherever you go, and it will not be a burden. And as you meet each of your clients, they are as a member of that village, and you of theirs. And when the therapy is over, you may never meet again, but tucked away in your village mind they will never be forgotten, and I seriously suspect, never will you.
Motown Alert
Do go on iTunes or dust off that 7” black vinyl and enjoy that Gladys Knight classic. I couldn’t resist a sing along every time I reviewed this post before I threw it out for reading. Indulge in a bit of bedroom dancing – and hairbrush singing. Fantastic.
Have a great day.
Lois