“A psychologist is a person and, as such, is not exempt from suffering any problem that a human being may have,” explains Raimon Gaja Jaumeandreu, founder and general director of the Instituto Superior de Estudios Psicológicos to the Efe news agency.
After having trained thousands of professionals and treated tens of thousands of patients at ISEP Clínic, our director assures that “all psychologists have had patients with low motivation or depression, and we have given them solutions or tools to recover, and if we have solutions for our patients, we also have them for ourselves. We can be our own self-patients.” But he adds that “the use of psychological therapy depends on each person, and being a psychologist does not imply correct therapeutic use in their private life. There are doctors who smoke, but has any doctor advised someone to smoke?”.
He also talks during the interview about how a psychologist ‘detoxifies’ from the psycho-emotional load received from their patients so that it does not affect their own personal life, and points out: “at the beginning of their professional life, many psychologists empathize so much with their patients that they end up suffering for them but, if that happens, over time they become immune and learn to differentiate ‘yours from mine’.” He also assures that it is impossible to live many years surrounded by problems and assume them as one’s own: “There is no tool to detoxify, we simply learn to see everything from a certain distance. Furthermore, from a certain distance, one can help more and better,” he notes.
Read the full interview ‘Who takes care of the psychologist?’