Why 'Your Deep Genius'? 🎇
I believe that a return to your innermost genius, the part of you that is your compass, your creativity, and your truth, is really the only way to be whole or real. 🧡 Your deep genius cannot be acquired, learned, received, or created. It just is. It is your aliveness and your power. However, getting by in this world usually means that layers form atop or around our genius, we learn to be good, or to be impressive 🏅 instead of staying connected to ourselves - usually, at great cost.
Unsurprisingly though, being in connection with this part of yourself is a vital aspect of being a whole and effective therapist. To be equipped at the most basic level for accompanying a patient through the process of meaningful, mutative psychotherapy, we need to know ourselves (or at least be in the process of knowing). To flourish and excel at it, we need to be initiated, not into volumes of antiquated theory texts, but into our own, particular, deep genius - what uniquely wells up in us in response to the unfolding world around us.
What has been lost in recent years in the (to use words from Nancy McWilliams) silent reconfiguration of therapy as a series of techniques, is the reality that every therapeutic relationship is different. Every therapy is a unique story. And not only that, every therapist has their own cadence, their own particular, idiosyncratic, special way of accompanying their patients through treatment.
Beyond “the Manual” 📕
Patients often arrive in treatment after spending many years being really great at learning ‘the rules’ in order to survive their lives. These rules come from many places. In families, we learn the rules of how to be in order to be loved and stay connected to others. In school and university, we learn to follow criteria sheets, to behave correctly, and to win the favour of others. While they can have many adaptive functions, these rules can start to translate poorly in adult life, and often create problems outside the environments in which they were learned. For example, the patient who arrives in a state of chronic anxiety, all their attempts at perfection having failed to secure them the relationships and life that they really long for. Or, the patient for whom always trying to find the “right way” has precluded their capacity to make decisions and they’ve become depressed and stuck. Many different clinical presentations can find their roots in some version of this dilemma.
What I’ve noticed, in myself, my colleagues, patients and friends, is that psychologists, as much as anybody (maybe more than anybody) are master-level rule learners. The paradigm of psychology in the modern day also encourages this way of being, through both its celebration of the notion of ‘evidence-based practice’ (the term currently used for the idea that the ingredients of good therapy can be distilled, measured and repeated en masse) and the instillation of fear of severe consequences should the clinician deviate from the ‘rules’.
(Is your bestie a master-level rule learner? Are they texting you in the middle of the night worried Medicare adherence? Gift them a YDG subscription.)
Into the Forest 🌲🌲🌲
Psychoanalytic theory has offered us so many tools that helps to notice and peel back the layers blocking us from our own deep genius - our own unique ways of being people and therapists. It also helps us every day to do the same for our patients. In any therapy where something is really happening, eventually we must leave the pre- designated trail and walk with our patients into the unmapped terrain of their pain, memories and unanswered questions. In the forest, we have come to realise that we cannot rely on manualised ideas, recipes, maps, pre-packed lunches, things that can be memorised. Instead, we must be capable of understanding the inherent principles of what we’re trying to do. We must know how to forage, how to follow the sun and the stars, to take what is offered and transmute it into what is needed to further our patient’s journey through the unknown and back to themselves. Good therapy relies on us being connected to this part of ourselves, our reservoir of life and aliveness, to guide others to this part of themselves too. We want to talk a lot about psychoanalysis (its theories and techniques, as well as the experience of being patients) because it has helped us with this more than any other thing.
With all that in mind, I could not think of a better use of my energy at this junction in my career than sitting with the notion of deep genius, and creating a portal in which friends and colleagues can join in this conversation. The ‘how’ will no doubt reveal itself over time, but our goal is to begin to support you, our reader, to start accumulating confidence around the following five touchstones. I have found that as I each have developed confidence and competence in these areas, more space and a greater sense of permission has been created for our geniuses to flourish. 🥳👽
Comfort with language and concepts. My resources share psychoanalytic ideas in a space free from elitism, institutionalisation and defensive intellectualisation. I want you to have a feeling of confidence that you understand psychodynamic ideas and that these aren’t shrouded in mystery or saved for a special elite club.
Recognition of psychodynamics in real work and life. I want your new knowledge to translate into changes in your experiences, not just stay theoretical. Psychoanalytic theory is useful because of how it translates into real life and real clinical practice. I want to help you notice these things in yourself and your patients, both intellectually and through a gradual awareness of the felt sense of different experiences.
Cultivation of a technical toolkit. I want you to feel like you can apply what you’re experiencing to how you set up your practice or interface with your place of work, how you initiate clients into working with you, and to your technical practice of therapy - what to say, how to respond (or not), and how to navigate working with different presentations and challenges.
Holistic self-protection and development. I hope you can start to utilise psychoanalytic ideas to treat yourself better as a human being. I want my resources to centre on your lived experience and humanity, and place your comfort and safety as the therapist as a fundamental tenant of any therapeutic experience.
Enrich experiences for patients. Ultimately, I also want my resources to help you with your goal of being a better therapist (conscientious high achiever that you are 😆😘). I recognise that outcomes are complex and go beyond the notion of patient symptom reduction, and hold a vision for a more truthful, healthy world for everyone.
Lastly, I want to make it really clear that I don’t see genius as a cognitive thing. I’m not talking about having a big brain or being really clever (in fact, we’re kind of tired of that!). These ideas are tools: a frame to hold the heart, body, and intuitive essence of something more.
Lastly lastly, if you’re picking up what I’m putting down and you’d like to 1) support our work, 2) come along for the ride, 3) lurk in the background watching what unfolds, 👀 please SUBSCRIBE to our Substack! You’ll get access to all my new articles, be part of the community and be the first to hear our upcoming podcast.
Anna 💕