I spent nearly two decades as a clinician in psychology, and the truth of the matter is I never would have gotten there had it not been for a couple of people in particular who saw in me what I could not see in myself.
I was an abysmal failure in my high school days and academics were not something I excelled in during my high school years.
I had begun to believe a narrative that because I was not excelling in high school, I had ditched the notion of a post-secondary education altogether.
So I apprenticed to be a carpenter. That was good work for me to do, and I did love it. But there was something deeper in me that was not being met in the work, and it showed up in the number of times. One of my fellow workmates would come to me with a problem in their lives, and they didn't go to Henry on the job site.
They came to Pete and there was a reason for that. They saw something that could benefit them in that exchange, and they trusted something in me that hadn't yet been formed in my mind about myself, but it was their need that summoned me into the awareness of this thing. The more men that came to me on the job site in the carpentry work that I was doing, the more the awareness emerged.
Hey, if you got a problem, you go talk to this guy. And then finally one of my buddies on the job site one day said, “Pete, what are you doing here?” And I asked him what he meant by that. And he said, “you are meant to do what happens every lunch hour. You're meant to help people. Why aren't you in university?”
That proved in that moment that I had been living under a false understanding, a false narrative about who I was. I was a good carpenter, but I was a better latent therapist and a caregiver and a provider of need to the human soul. They saw that in me. I didn't. I only had the longing and they gave me the permission to go and pursue that.
So I went and I got a university education and I finished my undergraduate degree, and then I thought I would stop there because I didn't have the capacity to go to graduate school. And it was a professor who called me into his office and he said, “Pete, I think you should go to graduate school, but I know why you're not thinking of it. You are terrible at math.” (And I am.) And he said, “Look at all of these grades here.” And he pointed out a contrast that I had a leading grade point average in every subject except research methods, statistics, and other aspects of research that have to be done in psychology. He said, “Pete, I think you have a learning disability and I think we should get you an assessment.”
Again, I didn't see this. I had already written a story about myself, and situations defined as real become real in their consequences.
I was living according to a false narrative about my capacities that I needed to be unshackled from, and these men did that for me. Had I not been in the community, I would not have gone on to the beautiful career that I was able to have.
I would not therefore have been able to serve the thousands of people over the years that were served by a proper alignment between my calling and their needs. And it was not me who discerned that on my own. It was these beautiful people around me who loved me well enough to say there's some truer version of you that we would benefit from experiencing, and then comes a risk of actually stepping in that direction.
None of us are an island and none of us is able to see the whole of ourselves in isolation. If you are isolated, pursue community. Find people who are oriented well enough to love to be able to look properly at a person and see what's in them. It is always worth the pursuit.
