You’ve probably heard the phrase: The shoemaker always wears the worst shoes. Well, that’s kind of how it was with me. Though my shoes were hollow long before I became a shoemaker.
There is a joke in the professional circle of psychologists that a person becomes one for for the sake of oneself and not of others. Nothing is absolute, not even this fact, and neither one excludes the other, so someone can become a psychologist to help himself as well as others.
In my case, it started, it seems to me, very early in my childhood. I remember feeling like I didn’t belong, like, in some general sense of the word. In my environment, only we didn’t have our own house and we moved all the time, only I was the only child, only my dad drank, etc. In music school, only I came ‘from the other side of the Una’, in English I was the youngest, always and everywhere the smallest. I didn’t like my name and I experienced my face as ‘impersonal’, ‘expressionless’. That’s how I defined it then.
On the outside, as I hear, a sweet, desirable, and smart child, as well as a later successful young girl whom some seemed to looked up to, on the inside I was in an eternal struggle.
(Without intending to mention diagnoses, anamnesis, and phenomena, I merely talk about my experience of my inner world.)
The need for psychological (or rather psychotherapeutical) support appeared early, so perhaps the experience with a wonderful psychologist from Split (Dr. Juraj Žarković) marked me and showed me how healing contact with an appropriate expert/person can be.
To enroll the Faculty of Psychology in Sarajevo the following year, was a wish I made at the age of 17 in my home town, peering at the full Moon through the ring that my Emina gave me only for that purpose.
It did not come true. But it went on silently existing as I made wonderful digressions of my life. After completing the in-the-meantime goals, I started gestalt therapy education in Sarajevo. My internal struggle was then rewarded with a stage and obtained gestalt notions such as introjects, unfinished business, deflection, retroflexion, projection & co.
Depression was not a term used to explain my condition in Sanela’s room in Armaganuša, where many have reunited with their souls: there are psychiatrists for that. Almost 20 years have passed from the first, mild, to the third or fourth, (who could keep count). It sounds paradoxical that in those 20 years I undoubtedly “grew up” a lot, enriched my being and saved my soul with rich contacts in my environment. Embark on something new, experiment, not be afraid of life, new experiences, mistakes, and even pain and suffering, start working on yourself through psychotherapy, work on conscious being in the now and here… All this gives depth and meaning to our I being.
During our studies, my namesake and I used to joke after some difficult or bad experiences of ours: well good, this will come in handy in working with our future clients. Because, as one mentor told us, only a wounded therapist heals. Neither this, nor the statemend above, is the absolute truth. Still, as a client, I often felt that the therapist didn’t get me and I was all Greek. To conclude, there is one story, which may or may not have anything to do with the topic. 😊 Until the next blog stay healthy and by your side.
In some village, a man fell from a pear tree and was badly hurt. The villagers came to visit, but as his wife would announce them from the door, he‘d ask: Did he fall from the pear tree? If not, send him away. And so the villagers returned confused, one after another. One even said that it was not from a pear tree, but from an apple that he indeed once fell off and that that must be the same. He was sent away too…