I Came to Learn Psychotherapy

I Came to Learn Psychotherapy

I knew my second quarter at Antioch would be demanding. I expected a heavy academic load, long hours of reading, and the challenge of learning unfamiliar theories and therapeutic approaches. I hoped to deepen my understanding of psychotherapy. What I did not anticipate was how often the classroom would become a mirror.

This quarter stretched me in unexpected ways. At times it was intellectually exhilarating. New ideas broadened my perspective and offered fresh ways of understanding personality, attachment, trauma, and human relationships. More surprisingly, they helped me understand aspects of my own life that I had never fully put into words.

At the same time, the quarter was not without frustration. One course left me deeply disappointed. I found myself wishing for greater depth, stronger organization, and a richer learning experience. Outside the classroom, practical challenges repeatedly tested my patience. For the second consecutive quarter, the registration process became a source of uncertainty and aggravation. Adding to this was an ongoing struggle with the loud HVAC system in two of the classrooms. Instead of listening to a discussion, I often felt as though I were sitting beside the engine of a boat, expending as much energy trying to tolerate the environment as I did trying to absorb the material being taught.

Looking back, however, I realize that none of these experiences became the real story.

The real story was my response to them.

Whether I was wrestling with disappointing instruction, advocating for better registration policies, managing the constant distraction of physical discomfort, or participating in group therapy, I repeatedly found myself asking the same question: What is this experience asking of me?

That question slowly became the quiet thread running through the entire quarter.

Every classroom, every interaction, every frustration, and every moment of insight became another opportunity to observe myself. How do I respond when I am disappointed? How do I react when I feel unheard? How do I contribute to a group? How do I carry my age, my experience, and my history into a room filled mostly with younger classmates? And perhaps most importantly, how do I remain open to learning, not only about psychotherapy, but about myself?

I entered the quarter believing I was there to study theories of human behavior. By the end, I realized that I had also been studying my own.

The Circle

Every Monday afternoon, our interpersonal process class gathered in a circle. Eight students sat in the middle of the room while the rest of the class observed. Two classmates served as co-facilitators, introducing prompts intended to move the conversation beyond the surface and into genuine interpersonal exploration.

At least, that was the intention.

More often than not, the conversation drifted toward familiar territory: classes, assignments, practicum sites, and the logistics of graduate school. I found myself growing restless. After twenty-six years in Twelve-Step recovery, I had become accustomed to a different kind of conversation. There, people do not gather to exchange information; they gather to tell the truth about themselves. Each person speaks for a few uninterrupted minutes while everyone else simply listens.

That rhythm had become part of me.

When I chose to speak, I found myself doing what I had practiced for decades. I tried to be concise, authentic, and intentional. If I was going to take the group’s time, I wanted my words to matter. I wanted them to come from somewhere real. I have little patience for talking simply to fill silence. I am drawn to conversations that reach beneath the surface.

Then something unexpected happened.

Instead of allowing my words to settle, classmates often responded with follow-up questions. They wanted clarification. They were curious. In another setting, I might have experienced those questions as thoughtful or even caring. In that room, however, they landed very differently.

I felt exposed.

Not because anyone was hostile. On the contrary, I believe the questions came from genuine curiosity and goodwill. But my nervous system reacted before my mind had a chance to make that distinction.

Almost instantly, I became guarded. It was as though the thoughtful, reflective part of my mind stepped aside while an older survival system took over. My body tightened. A familiar impulse arose to protect myself, to push back, to reclaim control. It was not dramatic rage. It was something quieter and older, a sternness I recognized from my childhood home, where anger often served as protection against vulnerability.

The follow-up questions themselves were not the problem.

They touched a deeper question that has accompanied me for much of my life:

Is it safe to let myself be known?

Beth’s Question

One afternoon, that question became unexpectedly personal.

Beth, one of my classmates, looked at me and asked gently, “Did your father speak softly like you do?”

It was such a simple question.

There was no accusation in it. No interpretation. No attempt to analyze me. It was simply an observation, offered with genuine curiosity.

Yet something inside me reacted immediately.

I answered, but I was no longer fully present. Looking back, I realize that my nervous system had already taken over. My mind narrowed. Instead of responding thoughtfully, I responded protectively. The answer I gave was not the answer I wished I had given.

It was only afterward, driving home and reflecting on the conversation, that I understood what had happened.

Beth’s question had quietly opened a door I did not know was still closed.

I found myself thinking about my father—his gentleness, his quiet presence, the unimaginable burden he carried as a Holocaust survivor, and the complicated relationship we shared. As a child, I learned not to ask too many questions. It wasn’t that he rejected me. It was that I sensed there were places inside him I was not supposed to enter. Behind his silence stood an immense reservoir of pain, and without anyone teaching me, I learned to protect both him and myself.

The more I reflected, the clearer it became that the problem had never been Beth’s question.

The problem was that my nervous system could not yet distinguish between curiosity and intrusion.

Reading attachment theory gave me language for patterns I had lived without fully recognizing. Reading Bessel van der Kolk added another dimension. My reactions were not simply thoughts or beliefs. They were embodied responses. My nervous system was making decisions long before my intellect entered the conversation.

For the first time, I understood that what I had often interpreted as personality was, at least in part, an ancient search for safety.

That realization stayed with me long after class had ended.

The Search for Safety

Not long afterward, I found myself reflecting on something I had posted to the Deep Dance community. I quoted Donald Winnicott:

“It is a joy to be hidden, and a disaster not to be found.”

At first glance, the sentence seems contradictory. Yet I immediately recognized myself in it.

For me, the dance floor is one of the few places where this paradox comes alive.

When I dance, I disappear into the music, the movement, and the collective energy of the room. No one asks me to explain myself. No one interrupts my experience. No one asks follow-up questions.

And yet, I have rarely felt more seen.

The dance floor offers a kind of anonymity that paradoxically makes authenticity possible. Movement reveals something words often cannot. Without telling my story, I sometimes feel that others recognize something essential about me. I am neither performing nor hiding. I am simply present.

Perhaps that is what Winnicott meant.

We long to be found, but only when we are ready.

We want to be seen without feeling invaded.

We want to be recognized without feeling possessed.

As I reflected on both the classroom and the dance floor, I realized they were asking me the same question in different languages:

Can I remain open when another human being becomes curious about me?

I still do not know the full answer.

But another realization has slowly emerged.

Being the Elder

Often these days, when I look around almost any room I enter, I realize I am one of the oldest people there. It is a recognition that visits me in graduate school, on the dance floor, and in other communities. Age quietly changes one’s place in a group. Whether we intend it or not, people sometimes look toward experience for steadiness, reassurance, or perspective.

What has changed is not my awareness of my age. It is my understanding of what it asks of me.

That realization feels less like a privilege than a responsibility.

Not a responsibility to have answers.

Not a responsibility to be wise.

A responsibility to show up.

To show up with kindness.

With curiosity.

With humility.

With enough awareness to recognize when old patterns are speaking louder than the present moment.

There will still be moments when my nervous system whispers, Protect yourself.

There will still be moments when curiosity feels too close and trust feels uncertain.

Perhaps maturity is not the absence of those reactions.

Perhaps maturity is learning that I do not have to obey them.

Years in Twelve-Step recovery have taught me a simple but profound truth:

I am not responsible for my first thought. I am responsible for my second.

Graduate school has helped me understand that saying in a deeper way.

Beth asked one gentle question.

My first response came from decades ago.

My second response arrived days later.

Somewhere between those two responses, I began to glimpse what healing might look like.

Not eliminating the first reaction.

Expanding the space before the second.

I cannot always choose the first feeling that arises within me.

I can choose what I do next.

I can pause.

I can breathe.

I can answer if I choose.

I can decline with kindness if I prefer.

I can become curious about another person’s experience instead of retreating into my own.

Perhaps safety is not merely something I wait to feel before engaging another human being.

Perhaps it is also something I help create through the way I listen, the way I respond, and the way I remain present.

I began this quarter believing I was there to learn psychotherapy.

I finished it realizing that every meaningful encounter—whether in a classroom, a therapy group, a Twelve-Step meeting, or on the dance floor—was asking me the same question:

Can you stay present long enough for another human being to find you?

Perhaps being found has never required abandoning the joy of being hidden.

Perhaps it begins by choosing, one conversation at a time, to step gently out from behind the places that once kept me safe.

Healing is not becoming someone else.

It is becoming increasingly available to the person I already am.

As I reflected on this quarter, I found myself returning again and again to a prayer that has accompanied me for many years. Today I hear it differently. It no longer sounds like an ideal to strive toward. It sounds like a quiet invitation—not only to seek safety for myself, but to become someone through whom others might experience safety.

God, make me an instrument of your peace:

where there is hatred, let me bring love;

where there is injury, let me bring pardon;

where there is doubt, let me bring faith;

where there is despair, let me bring hope;

where there is darkness, let me bring light;

where there is sadness, let me bring joy.

Grant that I may not so much seek

to be consoled as to console,

to be understood as to understand,

to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive,

it is in forgiving that we are forgiven,

and it is in dying that we awaken to eternal life.

July 2026