Degrees of Separation

“Were you offended by anything I said today?” My client’s hand rested on the doorknob as they posed this casually asked question on their way out the door. 

“No, of course not,” I eagerly reassured her. 

I made a mental and literal note to address this inquiry with her next week, but this second session would turn out to be our last. I had a decent idea about the question’s origins, and the answer left me feeling familiarly uneasy. I learned early on as a therapist that we are all walking Rorschach tests, contending with the projections clients place on us. My particular inkblot, however, appears especially messy. 

Of the complex anxieties that can hound therapists, apprehension about displaying diplomas on the office wall is probably an uncommon one. But with both of my degrees hailing from Brigham Young University (the flagship school of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints;  i.e., “LDS” or “Mormon”), this anxiety is quite tenacious. Even with contemporary psychoanalysis acknowledging the inevitability and even usefulness of the therapist’s subjectivity in the room, this type of subjectivity on display feels unwieldy. 

Growing up in Maryland and now living and working in the DC metro area, I am attuned to the associations people can have with the Utah-based faith. When people hear “Mormon,” some think of a hit Broadway musical, Utah pioneers, proselytizing missionaries, or gosh-darn friendly, if not weird, people. The conservative practices of church members might also be familiar, including abstinence from alcohol and coffee, no premarital sex, and modest dress and language. Though sharing similarities with other conservative faiths, key doctrinal differences make this American-grown, restorationist religion distinct from many other denominations. Throw in more divisive issues—including a polygamist past, rigid patriarchy, and opposition toward gay marriage—and it’s easy to imagine the variety of projections clients might have.

Born and raised as a member of the LDS faith, I’m accustomed to contending with assumptions people might have about me and navigating feelings of difference. My sense of otherness felt relatively minimal as a child, consisting mostly of feeling embarrassed about explaining to my neighborhood friends why I wasn’t allowed to play outside on Sundays. (How do I explain “Sabbath day observance” to a fellow seven-year-old?) Adolescence would magnify feelings of difference. A shy temperament, few close friends, and an ache for more belonging did me no favors in feeling separate from peers. While none of these feelings are unique to my adolescent experience, the added complexity of being a religious minority (or religious at all) doubled down on these emotions. I was immersed in Mormonism’s idiosyncratic culture and shibboleths, which obviously my teenage classmates couldn’t relate to. Straddling the worlds of high school and church life, I found more belonging in the latter. Amongst my LDS friends, we embraced our differences and lightheartedly claimed the biblical descriptor of a “peculiar people.” An oft-repeated saying in my adolescence reminded me to be “in the world but not of the world.” This reinforced the notion that I would never actually fit in, and that it was wrong to even want to. Deciding to attend BYU, where 99 percent of the more than thirty thousand students are LDS, felt like an obvious choice. Going to a school where everyone was peculiar meant that no one was, including me. For my six years there, I was no longer split between two worlds, no longer consciously confronting the anxiety of my difference.

My path to becoming a therapist was paved by a desire to rub shoulders with emotional intimacy while never fully embracing it myself—“in the intimacy but not of the intimacy,” so to speak. As a newer therapist in Washington, DC, my responses to clients’ projections about my identity were either clumsy or dodgy. I felt apprehensive about knowing how and what to say, and had been trained in school and in life to not reveal too much of my personal self. Projections from clients were sometimes subtle—one too many clients asking if it was okay if they swore, an off-handed comment about drinking coffee in my presence, and numerous passing remarks about Mormon coworkers, extended family, dates, etc. I never knew if or how to address these comments because clients were never directly asking the questions I was afraid to answer, and I was happy to collude with their indirectness. Mormonism was in the air but never deliberately talked about in the context of our relationship. I wonder now whether I was accurately picking up on clients’ projections (that I assumed were all negative) or if my psychic wounds were leading me to be hypervigilant to possible rejection. As with many seeming dichotomies, I’m sure there is truth in both. It’s a tenacious struggle to hold all the possible projections while not allowing my countertransference to take up too much space. While anxiety was pervasive, shame rooted itself the deepest—shame for possibly being judged and rejected by clients, and shame for causing clients to doubt my ability to be with and understand them. Both possibilities felt like failure.

Some clients were more direct, and quite brave in giving voice to their projections and fears. During a now-memorable session, a queer woman whom I had been seeing for over a year cautiously asked me about my degrees and why I decided to go to BYU, expressing that all she really knew about church members came from the musical The Book of Mormon, and that “they don’t like gay people.” My heart winced thinking how long she’d carried the weight of that worry, wondering if her therapist secretly despised a fundamental part of her identity. 

My response to her was one of the first times I more directly addressed a client’s comments on the topic. I shared that I went to BYU because I was raised LDS, that my current relationship with the church was more complicated and nuanced, and that I disagreed with the church’s stance on LGBTQ issues. We then processed her anxieties that led to asking the question and her reaction to my response. Reflecting on the moment, this wasn’t simply the first time I was more honest with a client; it was the first time I was more honest with myself. These thoughts had been brewing for some time, but I had never spoken them aloud before. My dissent left me feeling uneasy and enlivened—uneasy because I feared abandoning my faith’s admonition to not be “of the world,” and enlivened because I was stepping into a truer version of myself.

My sensibility as a therapist and relationship to my faith continue to transform. Postgraduate education and personal therapy opened up a world of dynamic and relational approaches that somehow feel both new and comfortably familiar. These new ways of being helped me acknowledge that some projections were in fact clients correctly sensing my feelings, beliefs, and assumptions that I had not fully owned myself. Unexpectedly, deconstructing my faith has made me more grounded in addressing this part of my identity and history with clients, and more patient with myself when I occasionally fumble the response. Many influences inform my evolving spirituality—connecting with open-minded friends and therapists, endless hours consuming media by spiritual thought leaders, and deliberately spending more time with the words of wise women. A newly awakened feminism feels equally vitalizing and painful. Internalized misogyny ran so deep, I didn’t even know it was there; but once I did, I thought the weight of it would crush me. In many ways, this faith journey burdens my mind with more existential aches and pains than I care for; but if anything is worth the struggle for me, it’s the task of exploring where meaning and purpose reside.

Aware of my ongoing professional and spiritual journey, a colleague recently expressed curiosity about why I had previously decided to display my diplomas in the first place—if I was so burdened with anxiety, why not just tuck them away? Until that moment, it had never occurred to me that a choice existed. I wonder if a part of me, in spite of my anxiety and shame, wanted to out myself, to start the work of confronting this nuanced part of my identity. Because I now work remotely, my degrees have become nomadic—moving from my office wall to a couple of months in the trunk of my car and now leaning against a bookshelf on my bedroom floor. Their journey parallels that of my faith, where final destinations are uncertain.