Staring Into Abyss: Failed Healer's Confession
Channel: Prof. Sam Vaknin
Date: 2021-04-05

"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." - Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886), Chapter IV. Apophthegms and Interludes, §146).

I feel so helpless when I work with a client whose mental health condition is hopeless and unmanageable.

Self-interested hype by therapists aside, many patients are just beyond help, they have strayed away too far from home, their mind is a jumbled, tangled mess, pulsating with the traumas and agonies that had shaped them.

Some of them inherited miswired brains or toxic cocktails of neurotransmitters and hormones.

I lose sleep over such clients, I agonize and fret and pit the full might of my formidable intellect only to be defeated time and again. It is a humbling, traumatizing experience, especially for a grandiose narcissist. Maybe I just see myself in them.

These clients are so vulnerable and raw and so abused, exploited, and shunned by everyone that they succeed to penetrate all my defenses and dysregulate me badly.

They are endowed and great looking and sexy and sensitive and hyperintelligent and such a terrifying waste. This cruel discrepancy induces burnout in us who attempt to salve and heal and soothe.

When I studied medicine, I had witnessed the most authoritarian and resilient doctors dissolve into tears having lost a patient they got attached to, despite all the training and the warnings to not do so.

Sometimes, in secret, when no one is watching, so do I.

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