Some things I learned along the way

If it’s true that the biggest surprise you’ll ever have is to realize that you’ve grown old, then the second biggest is to believe that you have learned something useful along the way. Sometimes it takes an unbiased observer to start you thinking along those lines or, in my case, a roomful of them.

It was the beginning of June, our interns were preparing to move on to the next phase of their training and I was two weeks away from a retirement that, as my friends remind me now, I both relished and feared in equal measure. In the hospital where I worked, a newly admitted young man was found with a knife in his room. He insisted that the knife had been left there by the previous occupant, and so we assembled as a team to interview the man and decide how best to handle the situation.

As we were waiting to begin, the intern sitting next to me asked what we were waiting for. “Well,” I replied, “we’re waiting for someone very old with lots of gray hair and experience to come in and interview this guy and share their wisdom with the team.” When I looked back around the table, everyone was looking at me. Oh no, I thought. Dawn breaks on Marble Head. I’ll just have to do my best. And so I began.

Experiences like these are both challenging and affirming, and I was honored to have another when I was asked to speak at a training conference at the University of Hartford in June. The conference, titled “Trends in the Training Field: Adapting for Action,” was a wonderful assembly of speakers, poster sessions, and small panel discussions on a wide variety of subjects related to the training of clinical psychologists. The schedule included presentations on the current state of the psychology workforce, preparing psychologists for careers in advocacy, leadership and management, issues in clinical supervision, diversity, contemporary psychodynamic psychotherapy, the use of art and poetry in therapy, spirituality in psychology practice and training, and many other interesting topics. The menu was an embarrassment of riches, and my only regret was that it was impossible to attend everything on offer.

At the end of my own presentation, I concluded with a list of seven things I had learned in my long career with the hope that some of them might prove helpful to the new generation of psychologists just beginning theirs. I repeat them here, perhaps a little less surprised that I may have something useful to offer and a little more confident in imagining that I do.

1. It is important to combine received knowledge from lectures, textbooks, and research with what we learn from our personal experience. If our goal is to develop a more complete understanding of the human person, we will achieve it only when learning, reasoning, investigation, and imagination work together to bring us there.

2. When we look at the world through the window of our personal experience, let’s be sure to bring people with different perspectives to the window with us. Not all windows look out on the same scene, and even when they do, not all viewers see the landscape in the same way.

3. We must strive to understand the perspectives of others, to understand their points of view, to reconcile differences when we can, and accept them when we can’t. This is especially important in our world and in our country today when polarization and divisiveness are preventing people who disagree from working together to solve our common problems and achieve our common goals.

4. Learn from everyone – teachers, peers, patients, family, friends, and acquaintances. We all have something to teach one another.

5. Read literature and poetry and find there the universal themes of the human struggle fleshed out in the particulars of another person’s daily challenges. Then we might see our patients as living books and be enthralled by the stories they contain and help them to make their stories more satisfying. Help them to find or make in their lives more stories of redemption where we learn from our mistakes and turn our failures into blueprints for success.

6. Psychology is an art and a science. We need the tools of both – the clean field of the surgeon and the well-controlled experiment, and the overarching theory and the story that connects seemingly disparate research findings and personal experiences to one another, to our therapeutic practice, and to the context in which we humans live out our lives. Learn new techniques and strategies for doing therapy but see them as part of a more comprehensive model of the human person and not just as more tools for your toolbox. We do the work of the scientist, philosopher, artist, and poet. We seek knowledge, understanding, beauty, and connection.

7. Let us always look for and speak to what is best in one another, what some call the soul or our better selves, and what just might be the key to respectful dialogue in a broken world in desperate need of healing.