Powered by RedCircle
Episode Description
On safari, a tracker unclipped a radio from his belt. Ashley Charbonneau suddenly flashed back to her days doing therapy in a jail, where she had to carry the same tool everywhere she went. Different setting. Same job underneath: watch for danger and get everyone home safe.
In this solo episode, Ashley picks up where her last vacation episode left off and shares three more lessons. She talks about why therapists never really stop being themselves, even on vacation. She also gets honest about a lifelong habit of hustle that makes rest hard to learn, and about how slowing down helps you notice more, in a new city and in the therapy room.
Then she opens up her vacation reading list. It covers disease and power in Pathogenesis, body image and ballet in Don’t Think, Dear, and the Red Rising trilogy, plus a few fiction picks with lines she can’t stop thinking about. Each one ties back to therapy: trauma and memory, why “panic” is sometimes your body protecting you, and how often we sort people into categories.
The common thread is perspective. The more of it we can hold, the more compassion we bring to our clients and to ourselves.
CHAPTERS
[00:00] Vacation Reflections Intro
[01:13] Lesson Six: True Self
[03:54] Curiosity Versus Rest
[08:03] Lesson Seven: Shared Work
[10:30] Lesson Eight: Bookish Takeaways
[13:46] Fiction Lines And Therapy
[22:35] Perspective Wrap Up
Transcript
Vacation Reflections Intro
Ashley C.: Welcome back to The Art of Being a Therapist, the space between training and real life. It's Ashley, and it's just me again today with some more thoughts from vacation. Last episode on vacation, I talked about some of my adventures, and today I wanted to share some more things. Some are a lot different.
Vacation always slows me down just enough that I notice things that I normally don't. Some things are funny, some are unexpected, some came from conversations with family this time as I'm traveling with my sisters, and as always, a lot comes from the books I read while I am away. Vacations don't just turn my brain off, right?
Vacations don't just turn my therapist brain off. They just give it different material to work with, I would say. So here are some things that I've been thinking about. Three more lessons. Lesson number six. So the last episode was lessons one through five. Here are lessons six, seven, and eight.
Lesson Six: True Self
So lesson number six, you never really stop being yourself.
One thing I noticed on vacation is that even when I leave work, I don't really leave behind the parts of myself that brought me to this profession in the first place. I spoke a lot about how I've had to learn to relax and really set boundaries between work and non-work stuff. It still takes me a lot of practice and intention to rest and relax.
People often ask, "Did you unplug?" Well, yes and no. Getting more towards the yes, less towards the no. I wasn't answering emails. Just kidding, I, I definitely was. I wasn't seeing clients, though. I wasn't writing reports, so those two things are new to me. And this morning, I found myself having a pretty long conversation with my sister, who has been a guest on this podcast.
She's also a social worker, clinical social worker, and we were talking about EMDR. My sister, if you've listened to that episode already, she is very smart, a very talented and naturally gifted therapist, and I just love hearing her perspective on things, including therapy. And so we were having this conversation about EMDR and some of the techniques that we've used specifically, and after the conversation wrapped up, I, I turned to my husband and I said, "I did it again, didn't I?"
Referring to talking about something that seemingly has nothing to do with our vacation and everything to do with work. Not because I couldn't stop thinking about work, but because learning, curiosity, and understanding people is so much more than work to me. Vacation reminds me that there are so many different parts of myself.
There are so many different parts of ourselves. And, you know, for example It is the height of World Cup right now. We are just finishing up the round of 16, and there's a huge part of me that wants to watch some of those games, and there's a big time change, and we're supposed to be disconnecting. I haven't been watching the games much, but there's a big part of me that wants to.
We were in London. There was a, a big part of me that wanted to spend one of the days at Pride, and these parts of me are really excited by culture, community, and being part of something bigger than myself.
Curiosity Versus Rest
And of course, there's this part that wants to rest, to sleep in, to have those slow mornings, to sit, and I wasn't really wired to rest growing up.
Productivity has always felt familiar. Productivity was always instilled in me. Even movement, I would say, has always been familiar and has always been instilled in me. Doing something always felt easier than doing nothing because of this, and like I, I've said before, resting isn't something that comes naturally to me, and even as doctors after injuries or therapists after particularly stressful moments have told me to rest to heal, I had to learn it again and again and again.
There's another part of me similarly that wants to keep my eyes and ears open all the time. On vacation, I notice buildings. I love to learn about languages. I love places that have great public transportation infrastructure. I love watching people. I love seeing what exhibits are at local museums, even street signs, historical markers for sure, um, of course bookstores.
And I think living in a society like the US where we're constantly encouraged to move faster, consume more, optimize our time, do something, be someone, check the next thing off the list, that is also just me. I don't think you can separate me from how I grew up either within my family or the state or country that I grew up in.
Sometimes I think I collect information the way some people collect souvenirs. The challenge is that curiosity can accidentally and very quickly become another form of ... I can turn vacation into another checklist, right? Did I see enough? Did I learn enough? Did I do enough? Did I experience enough?
And I have to remind myself that I don't have to maximize every minute It usually somewhere around day three or four, maybe that's day two now, something shifts and that go, go, go, hustle, hustle, learn, learn, learn pressure that I am so familiar with and that I put on myself, of course, all that starts to disappear a little bit.
As the vacation goes on, it, it disappears more and more, I would say. I stop wondering what's next. I become okay wandering into a store, especially a bookstore, without a time limit or without telling myself I need to buy something. I love to not necessarily get completely lost in a new place, but lost in the sense that I have no rush to figure out what's next or where I'm walking to next or what time I'm getting back to a hotel.
And those end up being some of my favorite moments, this idea of getting lost in a city, in a museum, in a conversation, even in a book. Usually a moment, right? Or a series of moments themselves that becomes lovely. And ironically, slowing down is what allows me to notice more or get lost more. And as I say that out loud, I think that's true in therapy, too.
As helpers, and I think for those of us who are also clients and doing our own work in therapy, we try to rush towards answers, rush towards healing, but the more we rush, the more we often miss. The more we can slow down, stay curious, and notice what's happening, the more we often discover about ourselves and about other people as well.
Lesson Seven: Shared Work
Okay, lesson number seven: more jobs are similar than we think. This was actually a super interesting realization I had while on safari, was several of us in a Jeep, and we had someone driving who was our guide, and then we also had a second person who was a tracker, and they were with us, those two were with us the whole time at this one place that we stayed.
And they were carrying radios through the bush or through the wild, communicating all the time, watching for danger, making sure everyone is safe. And I had this moment when I saw our tracker unclip the radio from his belt. And I thought, "This actually isn't that different from my work in a jail when I had to carry a radio everywhere I went."
And when I worked in a jail, radios were required. Different environment, obviously. Different purpose, obviously. But same tool. And it made me think about how often we imagine jobs as completely unrelated, or industries as completely unrelated, or you do this for work and I do this for work, or what do you do for work?
Oh, that's so cool. That's so different. But if you really zoom out, right, like my husband's a firefighter, but nurses, corrections officers, safari guides, pilots, right, air traffic control, they're all monitoring risk, and they're all making decisions under uncertainty. They're hopefully communicating clearly with some sort of team, and they're trying to get everyone home safely.
The setting, of course, like I said, is very different, and human behavior is not predictable, and human behavior, of course, is, can be very different depending on the setting. But it was a curious moment for me when I realized sometimes we spend so much time focusing on what makes us different from someone else that we miss so much of what we could have in common with someone.
Lesson Eight: Bookish Takeaways
And lesson number eight. I am excited to share some thoughts on the books I've read on vacation. And I've read a lot. I'm an avid reader, and I love to discuss either lines or themes, so here I go. Book one Jonathan Kennedy's Pathogenesis. On the surface, it's about disease. The author walks us through a series of diseases in specific timeframes, but very quickly I realized the book is also about power, and colonization, and infrastructure, and politics, and religion, and reproduction.
The author talks about how microscopic organisms have as shaped civilizations just as profoundly as leaders of those civilizations, and it was really interesting to see through a different lens. For example, disease changed which societies survived, who colonized whom, why some empires expanded while others didn't.
He talked about how Christianity evolved from a small Jewish sect into one of the world's dominant religions fairly quickly, if you think about the entirety of, of human history. Talked about the transition between hunter-gatherers to farming and agriculture and the Industrial Revolution, and how reproductives, reproduction cycles in humans changed because of the way our living situations shifted.
And I didn't know this either, but the word vaccine comes from the Latin vaca, meaning cow, because of the role cowpox played in developing the smallpox vaccine. Just little bits and pieces here and there that, you know, really shift perspective and just show the importance of reading and the critical thinking and reflection we can do on our own lives and how we sit in history.
And a big takeaway for me was, history is shaped by systems, by environments, by infrastructure, by public health, by inequality. The author spent a lot of time at the end of the book talking about how poverty influences disease spread and the disparities in healthcare systems impacting who lives and who dies.
And we know that changing systems is a social justice issue, and that feels incredibly relevant today, and this is just another one of those themes that is relevant under that larger social justice theme Book number two, a hard right, I would say, from pathogenesis. This is a fiction book of a cute story, I would say cross between Big and 13 Going on 30.
Fiction Lines And Therapy
It was called The Good Part by Sophie Cousens. But there's one line that hasn't left me, and that's, "Do you think memories make us who we are?" And it's one character asking another character, and one of the characters says, "Who we are is our code of morals, the things we stand for." And that is such a thought-provoking question, right?
What makes us who we are? Especially as a therapist, right? Because memory can change. Trauma changes memory, as we know. Other things change memory, aging, illness, injury, so many different things. But the values that we have, those often remain. They're more steady in most people's cases. And this was an interesting thought that I had, that identity is bigger than recollection.
And I also loved a part of this book where the author writes How an oyster slowly turns an irritating grain of sand into a pearl, and it's in the context of this scene about a difficult experience. And that's often what therapy feels like, right? Not erasing pain, not getting rid of it, because that's not possible, I would argue.
But returning to it enough times or differently somehow that it becomes integrated into our story instead of constantly hurting us or irritating us. Book number three, so totally different topic again. I apologize. I'm kind of bouncing all around. Book number three, Don't Think Dear by Alice Robb, is a book about ballet and feminism, and I thought to a large degree embodiment and the perception that we have about our bodies, especially for those of us who identify as women.
Passage asks, "How does growing up constantly being evaluated for your appearance shape the way you move through the world?" And the book is not just about ballet, and this, this question made me re-remember that we are socialized to think about how we are perceived before thinking about who we are or what we want or what we need or how we view ourselves.
And the author talks quite frequently that so many of us experience ourselves from the outside first or from someone else's perspective, especially a critique first. And as it relates to our profession as therapists, often asks us or asks the client to come back into themselves or inside themselves to notice what they feel, not just how they appear to others or how they interact with others, but what is it like in your body, increasing the mind-body connection.
And that was a really powerful thing for me to ponder for a couple days, I would say, is that we grow up and we're shaped so much by influences our- outside of ourselves before we even know how to conceptualize ourselves. And finally, the author writes that self-awareness alone doesn't necessarily produce change, and that's something that I think we all know as therapists really well.
Insight matters, of course, but change takes practice and effort. Book number four, another fiction, so veering back into the fiction world, Two Nights in Lisbon by Chris Pavone. Quote really jumped out to me, "Sometimes what looks like panic is actually rational self-preservation." And this is a reminder, especially for those of us who work with trauma survivors, sometimes we label someone's response as anxiety or panic, but maybe their nervous system has accurately identified danger before everyone else has, and context matters.
And it takes art of a therapist, right? The art of being a therapist is helping clients understand their body's responses to situations, and that response can depend on the context and it should depend on the context, in fact. Book number five, Gifted and Talented. This is also a fiction book, and the author has a, a kind of a, I don't know if I interpreted it as sarcastic, but it was...
It might have been a little sassy. Definitely thought-provoking, I would say. But the author talks about things that society treats as unquestionable truths, like the American dream, diet culture, fairness. And the author very quickly, in that same paragraph, basically says, "Those aren't universal truths." And it made me think about how often culture or a group of people collectively agree on stories that aren't universally true, because therapists spend a lot of time helping people ask themselves, "Whose story am I living?
Who taught me this? Does this belief or goal still serve me?" And the part about the American dream really struck me too, that it was, you know, real, I would say decades ago or a generation or two ago for a lot of people, and now it's, it's quite unattainable for most. Okay, I'm almost done. Six, Half Dead.
Another fiction. Not through this one yet, but there's a line in the first 30-ish pages that essentially goes, "We tend to think life and death are opposites." And the author inspires you to think, but maybe they're not as separate as we imagine. And it made me think about how humans love binaries or categorizing something right away.
Good, bad, healthy, unhealthy, success, failure. And reality is usually or always more nuanced than that, and the art of being a therapist means that we have to understand those nuances Okay, last one is a trilogy, but books seven, eight, nine, The Red Rising trilogy. This one was on my list for a long time. It was recommended by several clients and colleagues.
And for those of you who haven't heard of it or read it, a huge piece of the plot is that the main character comes from the lowest class, the Reds, and he lives in a society divided by class, and certain classes are named certain colors. And I was reading this while we were in London, and on one of the tours, I learned that neighborhoods in London were once literally identified by color, and different colors represented, like different colors of the neighborhood or different sections of the neighborhood of London in around, like, the 1800s, 1880s represented different social classes.
And whether in fiction or history, we as humans have always found ways to categorize one another, to create hierarchies, assign value, separate people. The details change, from book to book or history lesson to history lesson or culture to culture, but this pattern persists. And I think part of the art of being a therapist is understanding your client's perspective and experience of those categories and patterns and the impact that category or categories has had on your client.
Perspective Wrap Up
Okay, so that's all I have for today. Thanks for sticking with me through talking about how we never stop being ourselves, even on vacation, how more jobs are similar than we think, and especially sticking with me through some thoughts on the recent books I've read Theme of, of this episode, I would say, is about perspective.
Perspective can change anything or everything. The same radio, for example, can belong to a safari guide or a therapist in a jail. The same symptom can be panic or self-protection. The same memory can be painful today but become something meaningful years later. The same event in history can look completely different depending on whether you're examining leaders, vaccines, microbes, disease, infrastructure, or individuals or communities.
And to wrap it all up, this is one of my favorite things about vacation therapy and reading as I kinda link my, my themes of this episode all together. Vacation therapy and reading all invite us to consider another perspective. So rarely is there ever one right answer, and the more perspectives we're willing to hold, the more compassion, curiosity, and understanding we bring to ourselves and to other people, including our clients.
Thank you for joining me on another vacation reflection. I'd love to hear what you've been reading lately or what ideas have been sticking with you or what you've learned on your vacations. And Morgan and I will see you next time on The Art of Being a Therapist.
