Hot Seat
I'm starting a new newsletter where I can overshare in peace.
TLDR: Can’t be such a hot mess here anymore. Could get me in trouble with the mom and dad of therapists (the licensing board). I’m starting a different newsletter called God and Stuff Like That,1 where I will discuss God and stuff like that. In this one, I’ll be writing self-help articles about love, sex and relationships, with some understated nods to the nature of reality.
Hi Frens,
It has come to my attention that me oversharing all my problems on a therapy newsletter that I involuntarily signed up everyone and their mother for, is not a good idea. Not a good idea in whose brain you might ask? I would answer: The Oregon Board of Licensed Professional Counselors and Therapists’s brain.
I have recently spoken with a my supervisors and a lawyer, and they all mostly agree that I am using “self-disclosure” (ie oversharing) in an dangerously cavalier way. Therapists sometimes disclose stuff about themselves in session (though I will say I almost never do this because when other therapists do this to me, I’m like, “I don’t care! Can we please return to me and my problems?!” as I nod kindly). But according to our ethics and our training, we are only supposed to talk about our own lives if we are nearly certain it will be in service to the client.
As you can imagine, there’s no way for me to determine if me telling you about the time I denied my head was covered in chocolate though it was, my days as a depressed waitress, crying in my truck while listening to Swamp Ophelia by the Indigo Girls, and/ or my first wobbly steps in revealing my true self to a dating partner are stories that are helpful or harmful to your process, because I can’t tell who’s reading this!
So, I am starting another newsletter. It’s called God and Stuff Like That. In it, I plan to really let my hair down vis-a-vi being the unhinged clown witch that I am. Please sign up but remember: this one has NOTHING TO DO WITH BEING A THERAPIST AND IF YOU’RE MY CLIENT, PLEASE KEEP THAT IN MIND.2
Or just stick with this one, where I will continue to share my thoughts on sex, love, and dating. The lawyer advised me against identifying as a witch on my website and newsletter (and asked me not to cast any bad spells on him), but I’ll still be witch-twerking-out from time to time because baby, that’s how I dance.
It seems worth mentioning that I originally decided to spill my guts (I mean: include so much of my experience) because I don’t like the emperor’s-new-clothes-vibe of being a therapist. Most people feel that therapists are the “most fucked up of all of us” (ie the number one thing people said to me in 2017 when I was considering going to graduate school). As therapists, we know people feel this way (and agree?), but we still tend to walk around in our invisible threads like we didn’t come to this job through the sewer line. So I thought: how about I just go Full Monty on my sewer scars and hopefully it will help others. That was the idea.
At the same time, I have also begun to feel a bit uneasy just birthing all my slimy memories into your inbox when you actually may have signed up for this because you wanted help with your relationships. 🤡
So, I think the change will be a positive one. If you’d still like to get my slimy memory aliens, fresh from my writing birth canal, you know where to find them. But I’ll say it again for the Board and only the Board, I’ll be writing those essays as an artist and a weirdo, not as a therapist.
Thanks for being here.
XO,
Nora
P.S. All spilled tea from this newsletter will be moved to the new newsletter archive.
P.P.S. If you’re a paid subscriber to this newsletter, I’m comp-ing your subscription to God and Stuff Like That. :)
I just want to thank my friend and colleague, Sarah Edmonds, for introducing me to the vast possibilities contained within the phrase “and stuff like that.”
Please email me if you a translation of this complex legal-ease
Yes 👏 please 👏 ! I'll take any additional writing from Nora that I can get!
❤️