I'm not at all sure how to apply some insights that came last week, as I was feeling grumpy about my private practice, but they came, and I know they're what I've been looking for. Basically, the sluggishness of my practice has been both painful and mystifying to me for the last year. I've known more or less what to do, logistically, but have dragged ass on actually implementing my ideas.
So what came up early last week was some understanding that the practice I've been trying to build is one I didn't actually want. In the mid-1990's, when I contemplated what I wanted to do with my life, the impetus towards practicing psychology was that of service, rooted in my vipassana practice. It wasn't to build a business per se, or to accumulate money. Yet my efforts this last year have had the background assumption that that's exactly what I had to do, even if I didn't want to. Not having a clear conception of how to do a business or what myself as a business person was, the culture's default model became my own, though not clearly so. I realize now that it's been felt rather than seen, felt as resistance, as a fear or aversion to making contacts, as a general sludginess in building the practice.
I've always heard therapist complain, or interns worry about, the isolation of private practice. For me, the isolation, as in solitude, is not a problem, but rather what it has meant to me under the surface. It hasn't been clear that the setting has felt so atomized, so selfish in a way, in some deep way, stingy.
Recently, I wanted to read a novel, and picked up some mystery my mother had given me years ago. In a different mood, maybe, but it wasn't now. So that was put back on the shelf, and down came Ursala LeGuin's The Dispossessed, the best anarchist science fiction novel ever. I get now why that's what landed in my lap, and I think of how the protagonist, a scientist from an almost 200 year old anarchist culture on a moon, travels to the home planet to live among the "archists." When he realizes that his ideas are intended to be co-opted and controlled by his hosting government, for their gain over others, he feels physically nauseous. And that seems to be what I've been struggling with, this low grade nausea at feeling that I was commodifying the benefits of therapy. Not so much in its structure--it's inevitable that only some are going to have the money and time--but rather in my thinking about the practice and business.
The short of it seems to be that I really do not want to build something for it's own sake. To structure a business that allows me to serve people, that makes sense; but without that sense of service, it feels like hoarding, which comes with a sense of nausea and deep distaste. Like: why would one want to collect anything? I want to get rid of stuff at this point; I don't need more clutter in my world or especially in my own mind. Building walls, making divisions, excluding and segmenting: ugh. It actually has a disgusting feeling to me. My self is already plenty walled that there's no need of actually choosing to make more. The inherent, unconscious wall building of typical capitalist business feels so utterly pointless. Inasmuch as business is "find scarcity and exploit it," I just don't want to do it, and yet, lacking another model, I've been taking the cultural default as the inevitable given.
So now I'm faced with shifting footing and creating and doing my work from a different center, which feels a bit daunting but mostly invigorating. It's just a matter of keeping my head in a certain framework and breaking down the assumptions about what's possible.
