Professional Growth

When we start our journey as psychotherapists, we have a sense of what we want without knowing the field. Like anything new, we may begin by believing that a little knowledge will enable us to practice, and only over time do we realise that the profession has many things to learn and practice.

That is a common pattern of learning when we still do not know what we do not know. Sometimes, we need a period of feeling quite incompetent as we start to realise all we do not know.

We even need to accept that we cannot know it all and that, somehow, we are creating and choosing a path of development and becoming. The training we chose is placed in a tradition, sometimes a sub-tradition of another tradition.

Knowledge works like a horizon, that the more we walk towards, the more we can see forward, and in many ways, we end up accepting that our incomplete knowledge is enough to do good work.

We can divide these stages as follows:

Curious: There are a few scattered ideas.

Student: Learning a model/tradition. 

Qualified: able to work ethically inside a model.

Competent: Fluent in model and star shadow work.

Mastery: flexible, creative, and able to include other ideas. Advanced shadow work.

Intra-grave: Connecting multiple models from a true self-position.

This system is biased towards the model I am proposing with crea therapy, as it invites you towards a more flexible and creative space to practice. This bias is a bit different than other models of development, which may focus on your theoretical knowledge, how many techniques you have learned, or how many diplomas you have collected.

I am taking this path inspired more by oriental martial arts than our bureaucratic learning systems. When learning martial arts, you practice some forms until you master them. When you know them all, you are, in a way, qualified in that martial art. However, you still do not understand it. You have not yet made it your own, and its practice does not flow naturally and creatively.

Only as you progress into the 'dan', the stages after the black belt in many traditions, do you start to understand the 'spirit' of the forms.

Something similar may happen as you learn an art, like drawing. You may take some courses, read books, and get a good grip on it. You become able to draw what you want.

After some point, the technique stops being what matters, and you start focusing on the language and the expression of your art. You start making this practice your own, gaining flexibility and creativity inside a reliable framework that you now feel free to bend.

I distinguish this from practising something and not having a framework. Even though some may be able to reach higher levels of art without training, in psychotherapy, it is helpful to join a tradition to start with so we get an ethical and safe way of working.

Personal and professional development

As we mature as therapists, our lives also move forward. Our life is one of the sources for our wisdom at work, even if we try to keep a balance and separate them.

Many authors have worked on personal development, having different views and angles. We can see the structures of Kernberg, the spiritual growth of Wilber, and the orders of consciousness of Kegan. We also have Erik Erikson proposing a human cycle related to our social roles and participation.

Early in my career, I proposed many lines of development, but there are a few groups here.

• The psychosocial (Erikson)stages refer to childhood, adulthood, late adulthood, etc. Those seem to be linked to our social and biological cycles.
• Abstraction steps, where Kegan is probably the more explicit about it. We move into more abstract stages of comprehension of ourselves and others.
• Psychosexual: stages of maturity of our embodiment and sexuality.
• Good and bad objects: Kernberg's deep structures relate to attachment (in my opinion) and how we can integrate love and hate relationships. They explain the borderline personality types.
• Value systems, where we understand others and ourselves in society, seem to belong to the abstraction type.
• Spiritual development seems to have two axes, following Wilber, one of abstraction and another of deepening into esoteric spaces.
• Skills development also seems to follow lines attached to intelligences and follow an abstraction pattern, but also relate to our maturity and becoming.

Becoming

I like to separate development and becoming as if they are two things, but they are actually two sides of the same coin. Development is usually described as a succession of steps, sometimes using the metaphor of a stair, nested complexity, or something similar.

On the other hand, we have becoming as the exploration, the letting go, the allowing yourself to be something else. It can involve trying new roles, exploring new groups of friends, or exploring new theories and practices.

We may become others in a dream-like exploration or spiritual journey; we may be playing a role-playing game and act as a character we created to later realise that character seems to be opening something new in us. We may travel and discover new cultures and ways of being and we become more like them.

In Piaget terms, I see becoming like assimilation and development as accommodation. This means that they are parts of growth; we need to explore a scheme or stage or something and fill it up with new experiences. That is the assimilation of Piaget. On the other hand, we need accommodation, which is when our minds need to move bigger structures and make a jump of comprehension. Like when you learn to make additions in maths and then do subtraction is kind of similar. It is a bit of an extension, even if more complex. Moving to multiplication from addition can also be some sort of assimilation, but it requires our minds to make a bit of a jump and reach a more complex and abstract understanding.

I am bringing this discussion here because academia seems to be polarised into two camps: the ones who are more 'hippie' and like to explore experience and arts and others who prefer to create strong models and systems that are more complex and extendable.

I think the divide can be blurred if we understand that we need both. If we over-obsess on the development side, we become over-adapted and rigid. We may be a bit violent and aggressive with ourselves and others to reach that goal of abstraction.

If we lean into becoming too much, we travel the world and never stop with the next adventure. We never make a knot; we never commit to anything to discover more deeply what is there.

So, my way of seeing it is to make it two coins, becoming/developing. Becoming first because I think playing and exploring are the basis of an abstraction to make sense; without that base, the abstraction becomes dry and difficult to swallow. On the other hand, making the abstraction step at the right time helps us to reach an abstraction that is interesting, flexible and full of potential for discovery.