To Be a Therapist

“A therapist must find a way to follow the rules of his clinical profession and also be a therapist, and at times the two are incompatible. Similarly, to be both human and a professional expert is a difficult task for some therapists. Because the situations a therapist encounters are so various, he needs a wide range of behavior. Sometimes he must take charge; at other times he must be helpless so that others will take charge. He must be serious but at times introduce humor; he must be flirtatious at one moment and distant at another. One of the therapist’s tasks is to be intensely involved in a situation at one moment and to sit on the periphery of it in the next. Sometimes the therapist must be repetitive, insisting over and over on the same behavior; at other times he must be changeable and not offer the same directive twice.” --Jay Haley in Leaving Home: the Therapy of Disturbed Young People, pg. 281