Cloe Madanes

“So what does it take to be a good therapist? First of all, you must love doing therapy. You must believe in your own creative power to put things together with vision and insight. You must have confidence in your understanding of people involved. You must love the drama and be fascinated with the sudden revelations that bring enormous changes. You must stand for truth and be able to question everything, down to everyone’s secret motives. You must love humanity and be willing to empathise with all those who suffer, to get inside their skin and see the world through their eyes. You must dream and follow your imagination wherever it leads. You must love humour for it restores balance. You must delight in language and all it’s nuances. You must be sensitive to life’s contradictions and always suspicious that things aren’t always what they seem. You must be brave and audacious, and tolerate ridicule. And most of all, you must be brave enough to provide the spark that bridges the gap between limitations and possibilities, knowing that there’s a great deal to human beings, so a great deal can be made out of them. They don’t have to stay the way they are now and we don’t have to see them only as they are now, but also, as they might become.”
― Cloe Madanes, The Therapist as Humanist, Social Activist, and Systemic Thinker... and other Selected Papers