Therapist Teachers

Should teachers be therapists?

NO WAY.

I’m guessing most teachers would readily agree. But, especially in difficult times like COVID, how many teachers are veering into therapy territory? Becoming confidantes to their students? Giving advice on home life? Managing symptoms of mental illness?

(I don’t know the answers. Maybe there isn’t a teacher on the planet who is doing any of this. But maybe there is.)

When so many students are at best discombobulated by their COVID experience and at worst deeply traumatized by it, what are teachers supposed to do?

This question I can attempt a couple answers to. First answer: Strengthen your boundaries.

This might seem counterintuitive. After all, relating to your students, feeling empathy for them, requires a softening of boundaries, right?

Right.

As long as those boundaries are rock solid.

Great. Now I’m being confusing and contradictory. But here’s what I mean:

If you’re going to empathize, if you’re going to be truly helpful, you have to be very clear about where your garden ends and your students’ gardens begin. And you have to be very clear about the roles you get — and don’t get — to play with your students.

You’re a teacher. You’re an influential attachment figure for your students. They are going to idealize you, identify with you, need you, try to befriend you. They’re going to share their truths with you. They’re going to use you.

All totally normal.

What you as a teacher don’t get to do is use students back. You don’t get to puff up or feel special or deepen the relationship. You don’t get to merge and share. You don’t get to be their friend. Or their parent. Or their therapist.

You get to stand in your garden, look over your garden wall at your students’ gardens, gather the emotional and relational data many of them (not all!) are providing, and consider what the best thing to do with it is.

Which means you might need some support, since the data that’s coming in and the data that will continue to come in post-COVID might be a little intense.

Establishing and maintaining boundaries in the face of needy and alarming student behavior is not a trivial matter. So the support teachers need isn’t trivial either. I’m not talking a koffee klatsch or a browse through the internet for advice. I’m talking about support that evidence indicates helps prevent secondary trauma and, hence, burnout. I’m talking

peer support groups.

Like these.

Groups that take an

explicitly psychodynamic approach

to thinking through the data your suffering students are providing to you. Because the psychodynamic approach is the only approach that can make sense of emotional and relational data (which is the data your students are and will be providing to you).

Mantra: I can’t be a therapist. I can’t be a friend. I can be a good-enough developmental partner.

My second answer to the question What are teachers supposed to do? will appear next week. Stay tuned!