A Rant to Clear my Mind

So I have a lot of junk rattling around in my noggin' lately, especially since I was forced to leave my job on Friday. The mixture of being frustrated/angry and having a lot of time to think is not a good one for me. It drags on my native optimism.

So, ironic as it may seem, I am ranting now to cheer myself up. Nothing adds a little extra silver lining to my own emotional thunderheads like complaining about someone else's mistakes or foolishness.

It seems like I have beat the economic bail-out into the ground lately, and I am personally tired of talking politics, so lets move on to greener pastures and talk about something I am equally passionate/disgruntled about but rarely rant about: psychotherapy.

Specifically, it bothers me to no end that therapists so seldom seem to practice what they study. I mean, generally, we tend to be good in relationships, and are great in clinical settings. But so often, those relationship/communication skills and understanding of the human psyche fall to complete crap outside of those clinical environments. Get us out of our offices and away from our couches, and we are just as instinctual and irrational as the general population.

I see therapists do crap of this sort all of the time. They make poor, thoughtless decisions, act on shallow and irrational emotions, and systematically avoid the very things that would bring greater productivity and happiness into their lives. In short - they are disordered.

The worst is when a group of several trained therapists fall prey to these negative behaviors themselves, and no one has the presence of mind to pull them out of the Group-Think funk. Even though they really ought to know better, they simply go along with the prevailing idea, not stopping to challenge the validity of it in the first place.

So, decisions are made poorly, and the consequences are terrible, and it is all avoidable from the outset. And even though therapists actually do know better, they don't use that knowledge except when asked to use it by clients. Because we lack the same introspective talent that so many of our clients lack. We don't have that native gift that some people have to question themselves and their own conclusions. We are therapists, so we believe that our opinions and conclusions are always right, and we don't second guess ourselves. More is the pity.

See, and even though I wanted to not rant about losing my job, I just managed to rant about it passive-aggressively. No different than anyone else, even though I do know better. It seems to still be true that knowing is not doing.