by Candice Turner, Psy.D.

Since Luba’s post last month, I’ve been holding some of her questions in mind. (I’ve also been singing, “Thank you for being a friend…” nonstop. Thanks, Luba and the Golden Girls!) I spend a lot of time thinking about “secure bases” in general but it was helpful to orient specifically towards my professional secure base and the idea of “daring ventures” from that base. Is a lack of daring ventures a reflection of how secure my base is? What would be considered “daring” professionally and/or within NCSPP?

We, the board of NCSPP, often wonder if our programming is speaking to the interests and needs of our community. We wonder, and I ask you, is our programming daring or do we play it safe? To the instructors and writers who have submitted your work, did you feel you needed to clean up or censor yourself? To those who think about submitting your ideas to us, what gets in your way of hitting send? Is there something NCSPP could do to offer a more secure base and thus foster more daring submissions?

I still struggle with this greatly, being daring in the professional world. The analytic superego, though more quiet than it was years ago, is still quite present and gets in my way of writing and creating. Its presence has many sources, of course, but one that seems important to bring to our attention is how we show up in our own community with each other. I’m not sure that analytic spaces have done a great job of fostering a secure base for clinicians. I have seen too many instances of calling out “bad analytic behavior” or judgment of even the slightest lean-in to CBT thinking. Am I not welcome here if I think my patient would benefit from some concrete tools? (My writing about this right now feels daring, so I suppose I am making progress.) 

The insecure base would tell us that if we dare too far (become too different?), we might lose this home. I am always aware, consciously or subconsciously, about the risks of losing a professional home and how then does that impact my work? An insecure base would shut down our creative thinking with our patients, wouldn’t it? An insecure base would narrow what we teach, thus what we learn and how we think, right? So, my challenge to myself and all of you is, can we show up to classes, case presentations, workplaces, lectures, etc., and offer each other more room to be daring with a safe place to be rooted? As a community of analytic thinking and working people, can we say that you can explore a different working modality or make a clinical choice that is not typical of analytic work and still belong in our consult groups, courses, etc.? I hope that we can. Write to me at cturner@ncspp.org. I would love to hear from you!