The Most Challenging Job in the World

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Hello, Mentatrix readers!

I’m thrilled to continue a series of guest posts written by fellow Substack writers, here on Mentatrix, on our themes: reflection, inner journeys, nature, human relations.

Today I’m bringing you Rolando Andrade.

Rolando writes Outside the Therapy Room, where he publishes fiction, poetry and essays on psychology and human behavior. He also publishes on Medium, here.

Rolando pays great attention to detail and everyday life in his writing, which comes partly through his day-to-day job. As you may have guessed from the title of his publication, Rolando is a psychotherapist.

Enjoy Rolando’s story about the most challenging job in the world!

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Hello Mentatrix readers!

I ask you to imagine someone, a man for example, whose job is to spend a third of his day sitting down in silence listening and studying to other people's problems and worries.

At the end of each day the man returns home, where he has a family waiting for him, for whom he has to be physically and emotionally available. But when he's at home, he needs to have a different kind of availability to the one he has during the day in his job, because with his family, the man in our story can be totally involved, without limits or barriers, and he can also let others listen to him. To do this, he has to be available to talk, to open up and to let others take care of him.

On the other hand, in his job, the protagonist of our story needs to have a different kind of availability, since he has to listen to others, but he has to listen to them with limits on his involvement. It's a kind of listening in which he is both listener and observer. As you can imagine, this man has to play many roles throughout his day, since each of the people he sees in his office requires a different kind of availability and brings different problems.

You might be curious about this man's profession. I'll talk about that a little later. For now, all I can tell you is that he has the most challenging job in the world.

I also have this job. And I love what I do, even though it's very challenging and often physically and emotionally exhausting.

That's why I find it fascinating.

Why?

Part of that fascination has to do with the professional and human richness of my job as a psychotherapist. Being a psychotherapist gives me every day the opportunity to listen to incredible descriptions of people's lives.

This allows me to gain an awareness of individual experiences, essentially from two perspectives: the often anguished accounts of human struggle and suffering, but also of diversity, of the human species' capacity for resilience and individual and collective overcoming.

I think that suffering is currently seen as something rather abstract, which cannot be clearly defined and which, in a way, has been trivialized by the massification of information. This dehumanizes suffering, as if there were no faces, names or identities associated with it.

The truth is that these are lives with protagonists who often suffer over several years, many times in silence, and who feel lost, misunderstood, empty, neglected, abandoned, angry or simply detached from the surrounding reality.

The trivialization of suffering that I mentioned above, I believe, begins early in people's lives, with the process of education. People are brought up to be happy and successful, almost as if a certain amount of frustration and suffering wasn't also to be expected along the way.

As a result, people grow up with some fantasized ideas about life. This is why, for example, many children's books begin with the sentence “Once upon a time”. However, this is never the case in psychotherapy, nor do psychotherapy processes end with a “happily ever after”.

On the contrary, most patients begin with a silence, a shy look, a hesitation, or sharp phrases such as “I feel desperate”, or “I don't know what to do”.

I find that, when it comes to mental health, especially after long years of suffering, the line between the person and their illness is often thin and subtle. It can even be indecipherable.

“I'm sick” is the indelible mark we can find on someone who has lost their identity, who feels shattered and overwhelmed by suffering. In some situations, it seems that there is no longer even a person (human creature), but an identity built around an illness.

This is the characteristic scar of hopelessness, surrender, lack of strength, the cry of someone who sees no meaning or direction for themselves.

However, I'm sure that everyone has something that connects them to life, or they wouldn't be looking for help. Everyone is trying to free themselves from some kind of suffering, find meaning, recover their dreams or feel heard.

There are those patients who “just want to talk”. I found myself thinking about how important it can be for someone to feel heard. In a way, it makes us present in the lives of others and validates everyone's need to be accepted and understood.

Deep down, most of us seem to be looking for what everyone wants: someone to listen to us without judgment, prejudice or accusation.

This is why, for me, each psychotherapy session is like a chapter in a fascinating adventure called life.

Rolando Andrade