Making mistakes.

That sounds about right to me. We are all "beggars." My life's pretty good some days, and a mess on others.

My friend Tom liked to say "I find no matter what I do, I've always got problems. But today my problem is that the engine in the boat I keep at my lake house won't work. That's a pretty good problem to have. I think life is at least partly about improving the quality of my problems."

I tell that story to couples I work with especially. I say "I can't solve all your problems, and even if I could you'd just have a bunch more by next week anyway. But I can teach you to see that they're not as important as you think they are..."

Self-doubt still plagues me too, unless I'm doing something that I've survived failure at. As a professor, therapist and public speaker (three things I've done a lot in my life) I have made pretty much every imaginable mistake (actually, the CLC thing this week was a new one, so almost every imaginable mistake ;-)), and lived to tell the tail. I remember being completely terrified for about my first four months at The Meadows because here I was at a world class treatment center, and I couldn't figure out who the weak link was. You know how they say if you're playing poker and you don't know who the sucker at the table is, it's you? I was pretty sure it was me. I was quite scared! Then one day, it happened. In front of a peer a client chewed me up and spit me out. Then her family did too. Then one of the other client's parents, who had been observing the group, said "this is total crap. We're leaving." They went down to my supervisors office, chewed him out, and took their kid home.

I thought I'd better get my bags packed. I called my supervisor and he said "Hey, tell me next time someone's coming to my office all pissed off, ok?" I said "OK." and waited. He said "Have a good weekend." I said "... OK." And hung up. Then I went home.

After that day I was a lot less nervous. See, one of the things I'd feared the most was that a client wouldn't like me. Then it happened, and I survived it, and then all the sudden, it didn't bother me as much. There were countless other fears I had as a therapist (and teacher, and speaker). Many of them came true. And I grew from the experiences. Teaching therapists is like teaching electricians; you want to give them the necessary information so they know enough not to kill themselves or someone else, but once that's done they have to go do the job until they get good at it. Grad school is learning enough that you can't hurt people, your internship and first two or three years are about actually learning to do the work. So, no need to get to worried just yet.