The Therapist Who Still Gets Caught

There is a particular kind of humbling that comes with the school holidays.

I know what is happening. I can name it, frame it, hold it in theoretical context. And still, still, I feel it. The slight unravelling that comes when my structure falls away, when my routine, that quiet scaffolding that holds my days in shape, is suddenly gone.

I go from one version of myself to another. The working me, anchored in schedule, purpose, professional identity, gives way to something more fluid. I am needed differently. My attention belongs elsewhere. I put on a different self, one oriented entirely toward others, and somewhere in that shift, I notice a low hum of frustration that I am not proud of, but that I think is worth being honest about.  Because this is the thing nobody tells you, or perhaps the thing we forget to keep telling each other: insight does not grant immunity.

I have spent years studying the mind and heart. I sit with people in their most tender and complex moments. I understand, intellectually and experientially, how identity is not fixed, how we carry multiple selves, how context calls different parts of us forward. I know this. And yet, when the holidays come, when the rhythm changes, I am still caught.

Part of this, I have come to understand, is simply how my brain works. Structure is not just a preference for me  -  it is genuinely regulating. When it goes, something in me has to work harder to stay oriented. The fluid, open-ended nature of holiday time, which many people find restoring, can feel to me like losing the ground beneath my feet.

This is not a flaw. It is simply the shape of my neurology. But it is worth naming, because I suspect I am not alone in this, and because the shame of still struggling - even when you know better, even when you are supposed to know better, it can be quietly corrosive.

There is another layer to this time of year.

When I travel home, and I mean home in the oldest sense, the place where the earliest version of me was formed, I notice something shift. A younger self surfaces. I hear it in the way I speak, softer, more lilting perhaps. I notice it in what I want to eat, old tastes, old comforts. I notice it in the dynamics of a room, how quickly and how completely the child I once was can become present again, as if she never really left, as if she has simply been waiting patiently in the kitchen.

This is not pathology. This is what it means to be a person with a history.

We carry all of our selves with us. The child, the adolescent, the early adult finding their way, every version shaped by the particular love and difficulty of the families and places that formed us. Returning to those places, even briefly, even happily, can reactivate something ancient in us. Not because we haven't healed, but because healing is not the same as erasure.

What helps me -  and what I keep returning to is something closer to purpose than to effort.

When I am connected to why I am doing what I am doing, when I remember that this different mode of being, this service orientation toward the people I love, is meaningful, the frustration loosens. It doesn't vanish. But it loosens. There is something in the transpersonal dimension of experience, in aligning with something larger than the self, that has a genuinely settling effect. Viktor Frankl understood this. Meaning is not just comforting, it is orienting.

But I want to be careful not to make this sound too tidy. Because the truth is, some days the meaning doesn't quite reach. Some days you are just frustrated, just unmoored, just a little too much in your own head. And on those days, I think the most honest and most useful thing we can offer ourselves is compassion.

Not the soft, vague kind. The real kind. The kind that says: yes, this is hard, and you are allowed to find it hard, and that does not make you a failure.

We are, all of us, fragile.

This is not a weakness to overcome. It is the condition of being human. We are also, all of us, capable of extraordinary things.   Of growth, of insight, of love, of resilience. These two truths live together. They are not in conflict.

The work, perhaps, is not to master ourselves completely, but to meet ourselves honestly. To notice what is happening without too much judgment. To extend to ourselves even a fraction of the compassion we might offer to someone sitting across from us.

I find this easier to write than to practise. But I keep practising.

If any of this resonates with you  -  the sense that you should be further along, or that knowing something doesn't seem to protect you from feeling it -  you are not alone!  That is, in fact, one of the most human things there is.