Our mentors, by definition, are a great influence on us. Some of us have a natural mentor in a parent or a relative. If we’re additionally lucky, we can follow the teachings of these elders for many years.
As life treads on, we more actively discern who it is that we want to emulate.
 
Recently I sat in a circle with three of my mentors and another therapist, all clinicians like myself.  We met with the goal of receiving clinical supervision from a clinician with whom we had a standing monthly meeting.
 
The supervision tradition in counselling psychology is an old one. Jeffrey K. Edwards locates the origins of clinical supervision in the field of medicine, and later the progenitor of all psychological therapy: psychoanalysis (2013). A truth in our field is that all things are worthy of exploration, including, and of great ethical importance, the practitioner’s work.
 
Counsellors creatively provide care, respect, and guidance to our clients, and what this looks like varies widely. We all benefit from another person’s impression of how we can improve or continue to do what we’re doing. To this end, bound by the stringent guidelines for privacy and confidentiality, therapists meet with an elder in the field and we talk.
 
Sitting together, the topic of fantasy arose. A fellow therapist voiced confusion about how to support her client, knowing that there was a facet of this client’s life which he was unable to acknowledge. The practitioner felt challenged; she had brought up what she thought was an important point that would benefit him; he didn’t see it. So should she just ‘let it go’? Isn’t it important to see our clients’ lives through their eyes alone? Why should she feel the need to convince this man of anything? But she was unsure of how to proceed, having the intuition that her client, for whom she cared deeply, could be postponing the wellness he desperately craved.
 
Our supervisor’s feedback on this quandary was so simple it makes me chuckle.
‘It is a fantasy. He’s living in a fantasy, and this fantasy is what will keep him unhappy and hurting. You must pop the bubble!’ Do it nicely, she added.
 
I thought about all the clients I have met over the years, some of the pieces of their lives which were very hard to identify, to name, and to face. How diligent my attempts to create an environment of safety to encourage these revelations. And it landed on me like a pile of bricks: we all do this! That day alone I had probably retreated into incorrect ‘fantasies’ about my life four or five times! Oh my.
 
Let me clarify that fantasies are negative and positive and anything in-between. They are simply a divergence from reality. Speaking for myself, I have a huge range of fantasies; from getting everything I want from life to possible catastrophes. The less-familiar position of this binary, the negative fantasy, can have such a great impact on our behaviour that practitioners of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT) work with these beliefs almost exclusively. For example, if I believe I am uninteresting and therefor will never have a close friend, this is a negative fantasy about who I am and what the future holds. If you have ever felt that way, or currently do, you know that the stakes are high when negative fantasies are concerned. If I believe this about myself I may retreat, or become unsure when I’m shown normal social behaviour.
 
Another fantasy that some of us may relate to is Melvin Lerner’s ‘Just World’ (1980). If I am good, do good things, and live correctly, good things will happen to me. Same as for others. This, however, is a fantasy. Bad things do happen to good people, the evidence for which is a click away, on the sidewalk, or in the mirror, you name it.
 
We all often think in fantasy, and we are completely unaware. It is not usually of our choosing, we think it is reality, that is arguably the reason our fantasies stubbornly persist. And yet, life can burst our bubbles, other people can point out our blind spots, and we can seek to know this part of ourselves through self-reflection or working with a counsellor.
 
I encourage you to take this for granted, rather than calling it an illness or pathologising it. The point is that we cannot ‘know’ everything, ever, life is not like this. However for my clinical practice and my own personal work, I have found a richness in this way of reflecting on what’s actually going on. I want to help my clients to burst bubbles that are keeping them in cycles that they ultimately want to exit. Or that make people other than themselves the authors of their lives. I want to burst my bubbles that have me preoccupied with living in the way I think I ‘should’ be living, instead of reveling in the reality of what is happening now.
 
A quote from John Kabat-Zinn: “This is it.” Right now is my life. This realization immediately gives rise to a number of vital questions: “What is my relationship to my own life going to be?”
 
So you see, a relatively short conversation with this clinical mentor has permeated my world-view and impacted me professionally and personally. I’m appreciative of how my mentors and I have found each other, and the sweetness of each of these relationships. As I write this I look forward to connecting with a new mentor in the coming weeks and beyond. I have begun learning from a Haida elder, and I wonder how I will reciprocate some of what she is gifting me.
 
Dropping out of fantasy and into reality doesn’t have to shatter us, although none of us can avoid pain (a good fantasy to demolish). Notice what is 100% factual about your experience, and then notice what else is left. Be gentle with yourself as you do this work; you can try something creative like joking or singing your fantasies away. Suerte!




Edwards, J. K, (2013). Strengths-Based Supervision in Clinical Practice. Sage: New York.
Lerner (1980). The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion. Plenum: New York.