Life is a Highway

In this short piece, I describe a pivotal clinical moment informed by my heightened vulnerability after the traumatic death of my father. Engaging in honest self-scrutiny, I recognized the limits of my capacity to tolerate risk in the context of a personal crisis. In requesting the patient to experiment with sobriety, I strove to respond to the patient’s less conscious wish for containment, an emergent need that intersected with my vulnerability and wishes to create protective limits for her. The patient’s agreement to experiment with sobriety catalyzed therapeutic movement as she became aware of her dissociated history of sexual trauma.