What is PsychoTherapy? Interview with Suzie Sherman

Dana Sitar: Is psychotherapy a common approach for dealing with grief and loss?

Suzie Sherman: Yes, absolutely. If we’re talking about straight on grief and loss issues, this is a very common way to address them. Deep-seated feelings come up around transitions, break-ups, loss of jobs, etc, and psychotherapy helps to analyze those feelings.

Dana: What are the benefits of approaching these issues that way?

Suzie: Psychotherapy at its heart is a relationship between one person and another, and that relationship helps us to analyze these issues to get to the heart of them. It creates kind of a microcosm of our lives to look at these issues about intimacy, to look at what scares us most about being in a relationship with another person. There is a lot of fear in anticipating that we are going to die; it arouses a certain basic human set of emotions, and working with a trained professional is a really powerful tool.

Dana: You talk about “drawing upon the therapy relationship”, and “digging in the dirt” with your clients. With such an intimate relationship, how do your own life experiences effect your work with your clients?

Suzie: When we train to be psychotherapists, we talk a lot about something called “transference”, and countertransference. Transference refers to the feelings that a client might develop toward a therapist, and countertransference refers to those feelings that a therapist can feel toward a client and what they’re going through. Sometimes our own feelings and experiences – sometimes even our own experiences regarding socioeconomic issues – can influence our read about what’s going on with our client. We just have to pick out what’s our stuff and separate it from what our client is dealing with.

These feelings can be beneficial. Specifically around death issues – we all deal with death, it’s a basic human and animal thing. There’s a certain self-awareness around the fact that we’re mortal, and every therapist deals with that, too.

Dana: Conversely, how does your practice affect your day-to-day existence?

Suzie: All of the hours I’ve sat with clients to help them process grief and loss helps me to reflect in a different way. Sometimes I have had parallel experiences to what the clients are going through. They help remind me of things like being kind to myself, that my sense of anxiety about loss is temporary and that it will lift. This work certainly makes my life richer.

Dana: That’s really refreshing to hear, actually! It seems like therapy can be such an emotionally heavy profession.

Suzie: It is, for sure, but we all have to make choices about how we hold our emotional experiences.

Dana: Among your specialties, what is the bulk of your practice?

Suzie: My clients are primarily LGBT folks, and I only work with adults. Death, grief, loss, and anxiety is another key specialty, and, you could say, particularly an interest of mine – especially death as it emerges in intimate relationships.

Dana: How do your other areas of specialization intersect with grief and loss?

Suzie: I work with a lot of transgender, transitioning, or gender-queer folks, and there is a lot of loss and grief attendant within that process. Your entire experience until a certain age is based on the gender assignment given you your whole life. There is definitely a freedom in deciding to make a change, but there is also a loss of your sense of identity, how people see you. A lot of people have a huge fear of losing those relationships with people who have seen them a certain way their entire lives.

Dana: Do you see any correlation between these other types of loss – loss of identity, ending a relationship, losing a job, etc. – and the loss associated with death?

Suzie: The clearest difference is that death is a permanent loss. But, there is a similar experience associated with that loss and the loss you experience after a breakup or even job loss. When we experience a loss, our sense of identity shifts, and these feelings certainly happen to the same degree with these different types of loss.

Dana: And, what about Authenticity and Creativity in Living?

Suzie: One of the most emotionally healthy things that we can do is to come clean and really confront the reality of death. This understanding helps us be authentic in so many other ways. It helps us be honest and talk honestly about the stuff that scares us the most.

We’ve got entire spiritual systems created to explain and to justify the unknowns of death. If we can confront that in a real way, rather than talk about it through euphemisms, we can lift that entire veil. It’s a really emotionally empowering process to be real about death and to really talk about it.

Death as a fundamental fear informs every aspect of our lives. That fear is something that drives all depression and anxiety and it’s what drives us to be afraid of putting ourselves out into the world.

Dana: And LGBT?

Suzie: There are a lot of connections – we could probably do a whole piece just on this one! But, most obvious, there is an intrinsic connection with respect to the impact of AIDS and HIV on the gay community. This has cast a long shadow over the LGBT community. We in the U.S. are now a lot more privileged to have medical advances that help people live with these infections, but, it was a very present part of the community back in the ’80s when it really became an issue.

There is also a more symbolic loss. When people come out, there is a major fear that they will lose their families – and some of these folks do, in fact, lose that connection to their families.

A lot of the guiding principle of my work involves confronting this symbolic or actual sense of anxiety about death and loss, that fear that is still very present.

Dana: Well, thank you so much for your work in the field, Suzie, and thank you for taking the time out of your day to join us as we, too, try to address this taboo of death.

For more information on overcoming fear and anxiety about death, Suzie recommends Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death by Irvin D. Yalom.

This interview does not constitute therapeutic counsel. Suzie Sherman holds a Master’s degree in Counseling Psychology, and is not currently practicing psychotherapy.