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There are rules and regulations about these things now, privacy laws and confidentiality acts that can put a therapist or doctor in jail for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.
So, the caution is understandable. But it's also lamentable.
Because this past week I left the cloister and went to see a client walk to receive her master's degree. She invited me to do so and there was no doubt it meant the world to her. In my mind and heart it was the healing and loving thing to do. I could have said no, that the regulations strictly interpreted limited our interaction to the office and that leaving those four walls could pollute the therapeutic relationship. But I didn't. I went. And we both wept as she got her degree.
To be fair, there are some good reasons for people being careful about leaving a traditional and "safe" setting. Many "healers" have taken terrible advantage of people by forcing unprofessional relationships on them with highly improper dynamics. And I don't just mean sexual ones. I mean ones in which the therapist is the needy one. And people like that sincerely do need lines drawn around them that read: "so far and no farther." But I suspect that we may have gone too far in our carefulness and become fearful. In so doing we may be losing something truly precious--the healing relationship
When I think of doctors as part of a community, I once again think of my father and what being a healer means.
It was winter when I was an infant and one of his patients had contracted a bad flu which took a turn for the worse one night. As the story goes, they called in the wee hours of the morning. Without hesitating, my father went to their apartment on Decatur Avenue in the Bronx, where he sat with Harry as his wife, Irene, paced until the fever broke. He sat there all night. Harry lived. Irene never stopped pacing, but she was eternally grateful and thought my father walked on water.
First they came to major family events--birthdays, funerals, the like. But then they started coming over just to come over. He still took care of them medically. And they lived into their 90's, hale and happy.
It never occurred to anyone in my familyimmediate or extendedthat there was anything untoward or unethical about it. In fact, if that question had even been raised, they would have heard a resounding "Are you CRAZY?" from all of us.
Doctors, therapists, priests, rabbis, pastors--healers and helpers of all sorts--used to be part of the community and a part of the lives of the people whom they served. They were respected and they were compensated for their time and their help, but they weren't expected to be rich. That was the province of robber barons, railroad men, and mining companies. Doctors were expected to be like everyone else in the community. They were a part of it. They certainly weren't the emissaries of insurance companies and corporate boards.
Doctors didn't have to find different churches to attend because one of the congregants came to see them for a yeast infection. It was confidential, the relationship was sacred, yes. But there was other life to live, too. And people did.
In one of my talks on Verbal First Aid, I make a point of bringing up the stethoscope as one of the inventions that truly changed medicine and the art of healing. Because where once the physician had to lay his or her ear on the patient's chest to hear the heart beating, now there was over a foot of distance between them.
In our zealousness and fear, we have substituted machines for people, insurance forms and money for joy, and inflexible rules for sensible relationships. We have literally taken the heart out of healing.
