My friend came to me today
invoking the “client confidentiality” clause.
She needed me to be therapist for an hour
as all loyal friends do from time to time,
licensed or not.
I sat and listened
while her words split me open.
Beneath my sweater
my gut lost its structure,
and heaved like a silent rollercoaster
while blurred visions of a little girl’s dismembered limbs
fragmented the boundaries of my mind.
Mindfulness collapsed beneath atrocity,
horror eclipsed philosophy,
and it was only shock that kept the posture of my face intact.
Like parents holding suffering to spare the child
I hold this burden like a sin-eater.
But the magic has gone old and sour
and the evil creeps beneath my skin.
I must sage it, stomp it, name it, rage it,
beat it, twist it, dance it, scream it
Until the magic is hard and hot
and burns my spiritbody clean
until I can believe in humanity’s kindness and goodness
once again.
© Sabrina Santa Clara, 2012
A note on a cost of the work.
There is a cost to this work that we therapists and healers do not talk about enough, and it has a name: vicarious trauma, sometimes called secondary trauma. When you spend your life holding other people’s pain, some of it gets into you. You witness what human beings are capable of doing to one another, especially to the smallest and most defenseless among us, and sometimes, it leaves a residue.
Over the years I have learned that I have real protection when I am inside my professional container. When I sit with a client, I am my most resourced Self. I can hold enormous things without being flattened by them. The preparation is not a formality. It is what keeps me whole while I do this work.
But this poem came from a day when I had no container at all. A friend came to me, invoking client confidentiality the way loyal friends do, and I was simply a person on a couch, off guard, unprepared. So when something truly atrocious came through her words, it got in. It got past all the practices that usually protect me and went straight into my body and my sleep. This poem is what I did to get it back out. I offer it as a witness to everyone in the helping professions who carries what they were never meant to carry alone, and as a reminder, to them and to me, that we have to tend the tender ones inside us too.