Treating the work as sacred - how?

When a therapist treats a client's pain - regardless of the source - as sacred... you just know it. You can tell in all those nonverbal ways that they feel privileged to hold your pain with you. Some of the ways it looks is... they never minimize or are dismissive. They never push for disclosure, but they do all they can to create an absolutely safe environment. When you are able to speak about the pain, you can just feel that what is going on with you is the ONLY thing going on with them. They are just totally *there*. They treat the whole process with an attitude of reverence.

That's been my experience anyway. My therapist treated my pain as if it was a precious gift. I guess it wasn't the pain itself that was a precious gift, but it was that I trusted her with it.

The other thing I was thinking when I originally read TR's question was more specifically about CSA. I was thinking that CSA takes something sacred from a child. There is a kind of confidence, ease and safety within the bodies of little kids. They move about unselfconsciously and usually quite happily. The fear and shame and pain of CSA can really kill that. So I could sort of imagine that the project of restoring trust, safety, confidence and pride can be sacred work.

It was my original comment, I think, on a different thread that Tinyrabbit is referencing.

I said to someone else, who was thinking about opening up about CSA to a therapist:

"You don't have to open up your heart or your secrets to someone who hasn't earned the right to bear witness to your story. It's a privilege to work with you on the CSA and I hope this T realizes that and treats the work as sacred.

You deserve nothing less, no matter what you've done in the past. It's true of all of us."

What I meant by that was a lot of what people have already said!

The T needs to realize that this isn't just a JOB. You can't just flake out or treat it like the work doesn't matter. This is people's lives that therapists are daring to enter into, and bear witness to, and listen to. And people's stories are special and unique and people take a chance by opening up to a stranger.

I was hurt badly by a therapist who really didn't care. I didn't need the T to care about me in a special way, but I at least needed the T to take the job seriously. And this T let me down and it felt worse than when friends let me down.

My new T says it's an honor and a privilege to hear people's stories. That's the right attitude, I think.

Each of us get one life on this planet (according to my belief system, lol!), and once we are adults, we get to choose whom we let enter into that life and bear witness to parts of our life and our own story.

One of the definitions of sacred is "sacrosanct," which does not have a religious context. Sacrosanct means, "regarded as too important or valuable to be interfered with."

In other words, your stories are valuable and precious because they are the stories of your life. And particularly stories about times when a person was a child or when a person was vulnerable or when a person was hurt by the people around him or her -- these stories are precious.