Honestly, it escaped my attention until about mid-December that a decade was ending and that this new year was significant in that occasional calendrical way.
But, once I got present to the turning of the decade, I started reflecting on all that had happened in my life in the 2010’s and really, how monumental of a decade it was for me.
I think the major theme of it was building.
Building my little family. Because it’s the decade where I met and married my husband. Had my precious daughter. And planted roots in the community that would become our home.
And building, too, because 2010 was the year I started grad school to become a therapist.
Looking back at who I was when I entered grad school, I’m reminded of the so-called Rumsfeld matrix that organizes what is known and unknown to individuals (and organizations) into a four-quadrant matrix.
Effectively, you don’t know what you don’t know. You don’t know what you know. You know what you know. And you know what you don’t know.
I remember arriving at my graduate school’s Fall intensive experience. (Held at the beautiful IONS center in Petaluma, CA.) Admittedly a little bit naive and holding the mindset of “put me in coach, I’m READY!”
I was jumping at the bit to be a therapist and thought I was totally ready to do so.
Because I had lived at Esalen for three years by that point. I thought I was well-steeped and well-practiced in psychology, process, facilitation, and personal work.
And part of that was true: Esalen was a sort of “pre-grad school” grad school for me.
But still, it’s safe to say that when I started grad school, I was still mostly in the “you don’t know what you don’t know” quadrant of the matrix despite all that amazing lived-out experience.
Learning not only the psychological theories, interventions, tools, and nuances of my craft was a practical vertical learning curve through grad school, traineeship, and my many clinical internships.
But also doing my own personal work to become a more grounded, more compassionate, more present, more empathetic and more effective helper was another learning curve on its own that took the remainder of the decade (and that will last a lifetime still).
20 Things I’ve Learned In 10 Years As A Therapist
These last ten years have been humbling in terms of all that I’ve learned and unlearned. How much I’ve been forced to grow as a person and as a clinician. And humbling, too, because even with over 10,000 hours of clinical work under my belt now, there’s still so much to learn and master in my field.
Still, though, despite how much there is yet to master, I’ve certainly learned a fair bit in ten years.
And today I want to share with you twenty highlights of key insights I’ve learned in a decade of doing this work.
