by Luba Palter, MFT

While I eagerly await submissions for our new column “Who is NCSPP,” I will share a little about my practice. By the way, if you are hesitating to send a blurb about yourself, please reach out. I would love to hear from you and support you to gain some visibility.

I have had several patients who refer to themselves as “we” over the years. For the longest time, I thought they meant themselves and me. I thought they were being relational, including me as they changed geographical locations, involving me in their processes. And then it dawned on me. I had nothing to do with it; they were referring to their states. They housed multiple and distinct personalities. Those personalities were so distinct that they could not touch sides or corners and only belonged in one singular container that could carry them through their lives. That container was the outside “I” that protected the inside “we.” In therapy my patients talked about the outside “I”, but only with safety they began to let me know about the “we” they carried.

How do we get the patients that we do? I do not know how my caseload ended up feeling like a family of multiples. Is there something about being an immigrant that I can identify holding multiple, distinct personalities inside? Is there something about being a therapist and a writer? Is there something about being a crisis therapist in a call center and a psychoanalytic therapist in private practice? Is there something about those types of distinct splits that I can identify with on a personal level? Maybe it is all those things.

But what I started asking my patients was: who is here today? And a whole new world opened up to me. I found out people were so eager to tell me about their “we.” It was as if my patients were saying to me, “All you had to do was ask. I have been waiting for you to ask me so I can tell you what is happening inside.” What was striking to me at first was how distinctly different my patients' lives were. Some were highly accomplished and professional folks. Others struggled with day-to-day living. And yet unless I asked and was entrusted with privileged information, I would never know.

I have been trained at the now-defunct Women’s Therapy Center where relational therapy was the queen that ruled the day. Years after graduating, I had to unlearn asking, “what about you and me?” at every turn. Patients felt compelled to participate in a conversation that forced them to think about me. I discovered that some were not even registering me as a separate person, much less capable at that particular point in their lives of thinking about the relational dynamics that were flowing between us. I had to grasp that what I thought was “doing good therapy” was me being intrusive and prematurely inserting a separate “I” into a complicated soup that was “we.”