Beautiful and demanding process of training as a therapist - From Aruna Gopakumar's LinkedIn Post

 

Working with my CTA (Certified Transactional Analyst )groups continues to be one of the most interesting—and hardest to explain—training experiences I know. Not because the ideas are obscure, but because therapy rarely looks like technique. 

The larger work is about creating contexts where people can show up as themselves in the world, take responsibility for who they are, and offer those same permissions to others. All this while learning how to set boundaries, how to be interdependent rather than fused or cut off, how to get close without losing oneself, and how to live with unfairness, pain, loss, and limitation. 

And always, we hold in mind that this work does not happen in a vacuum—our clients’ distress is shaped not only by personal history, but by systemic forces of power, inequality, culture, and context that constrain choice and complicate responsibility.

Much of our impactful work happens through process - the unspoken energies and tensions in a conversation. Clients put pressure on themselves to change; therapists quietly put pressure on themselves to make that change happen. What if we dropped that pressure? What shifts when something changes internally in the therapist? If I’m afraid of strong emotion, how might I unconsciously steer a client towards thinking instead of feeling? If I hold moral positions—about productivity, desire, boredom, ambition—how might they block genuine acceptance? And what do I do with the fact that some clients draw me in, while others evoke irritation, anger, even disgust? And how do I use my own power in the therapy room. CTA training keeps returning us to this uncomfortable, essential question: how my own history shapes the way I meet another human being. People change in ways that they didn't imagine - all in the process of learning to help others change!