Kudos

Talking to my psychiatrist today in a checkup on the strattera prescription, he told me that I shouldn't stop at an RN, but should become a nurse practitioner. I reminded him that that was my plan and he laughed, remembered, and asked if I was doing psych because he thought I'd be good at it. I told him no, I'm doing family and we talked a bit about it.

I'd thought a while about doing psych. For a time, I thought I might want to be a therapist. Finally I decided that I didn't because while I "get" a lot of things, I have trouble really getting some big issues that people come to therapy for. The judgemental side of me comes out and while listening about the troubles that a friend's roommate has with agoraphobia, I hear that little niggling whisper telling me that if she were to just try hard enough, just be with the anxiety when she went outside, it would get really bad and then start to decrease. If she just did that enough times, she'd "get over it."

This whisper knows that I know nothing about proper treatment of agoraphobia or its physiological basis. This whisper is also the same whisperer that that I hear when I think about cigarette addiction, drug abuse, alcoholism, etc. The judgemental side comes out. If I have personal knowledge of the struggle, I'm fine (no whisper). If I've observed really close friends struggling with it, then I'm fine. But without it, I judge and I hate it.

I don't know if I would judge if I were sitting in the room with someone. I don't think I would. In everyday life when I interact with people, I am almost not judgemental enough, too accepting.

There were a lot of other reasons why I chose not to become a psych np, I know I would have shut down the whisperer and been ok. But I'm glad I went with family.