How Much of You Is in the Room?

A supervisor once asked me a question that irritated me immediately.“How much of you is actually in the room,” he said, “and how much is the clinical psychologist?”

At the time, I genuinely did not understand what he meant. The distinction felt artificial, even slightly insulting. I had worked enormously hard to become a clinical psychologist. Why would there be a separation? Wasn’t the whole point of training that it changed you? That you internalised something stable and trustworthy and professional?

I remember leaving the conversation vaguely defensive. But the question planted a seed in me. It got under my skin in the way certain questions do, before you have the capacity to consciously wrestle with them. Over time, I began noticing how often I used my professional identity not simply as a way of working, but as a way of existing. Particularly socially.

For quite some time, psychologising, though I would have insisted on calling it formulation, became almost compulsive. Someone would describe a relationship or an experience at work and I would immediately begin constructing hypotheses. Attachment dynamics. Family systems. Defences. Trauma patterns. I offered interpretations the way some people offer drinks.

I think I experienced this as generosity. My contribution to the world. My usefulness.

Oh dear.

I can feel tenderness toward that younger version of myself now, although I also cringe for her. She had worked so hard to acquire the language that she wanted to use it everywhere. Not maliciously. More like someone repeatedly trying on a new identity in public because they fear it might disappear if they stop performing it.

Looking back, I do not think I simply wanted to practise psychology. I wanted to become it.

And perhaps that is why certain stories continue to be so meaningful to me.

As a child, I loved In the Night Kitchen. I loved it with the intensity children sometimes love books before they fully understand why.

A little boy named Mickey falls out of bed into a surreal nighttime world of bakers and batter. The bakers scoop him up, chant over him, mix dough around him. They mistake him for milk. Or perhaps not mistake exactly. Perhaps they transform him into it.

Everything in the book feels warm and dangerous at the same time. The bakers are cheerful. Rounded. Soft. There is no obvious malice. And yet the child is being folded into something edible.

I think what fascinated me was not simply the threat, but the allure. The pull to join.

Even now, when I look at the illustrations, I feel something bodily in them. The huge bowls of milk. The floating whiteness. The plunging and dissolving. As a child, I experienced it simply as pleasure. Only recently have I begun wondering whether the book understands something frightening about longing itself. Maybe not only about fear of annihilation, but desire for it.

There were moments during training where I felt less as though I was learning something and more as though I was gradually becoming digestible for something. Easier to absorb. Easier to recognise. Easier to name.

This is difficult to describe because professional formation is not inherently sinister. We should be shaped by training. We need shared language, ethical structures, models of thought, ways of containing anxiety. But somewhere inside this process another fantasy can emerge. The fantasy of becoming that language, ethical structure, model of thought. The fantasy of merging.

I no longer wanted simply to be Libby, learning to practise as a psychologist. I wanted the uncertainty of being myself to disappear into something larger, more coherent, more legitimate.

I wanted to become “a Clinical Psychologist.” Entirely. Cleanly. Recognisably. I would be identifiable not only through my beads, cardigan, and tote bag. It would be in the head tilt. The use of words like interesting, wondering, curiosity. The calming presence and soothing tones. I would not simply bring a way to access the milk. I would become the milk.

Perhaps many professions carry some version of this fantasy. But caring professions seem particularly vulnerable to it because they organise themselves around ideas of containment, transformation, and emotional labour. The profession becomes not only a role but an identity structure. A moral shelter. A social language. A way of organising worth. And when that happens, care and consumption can start quietly resembling one another.

For me, it has taken time and analysis to separate these again. Perhaps you have to become separate from it in order to see it. But I can now think about moments where I took pleasure in being the competent one. The containing one. The one who could make meaning for others.

And of course that is part of the work. My motivation for writing these blogs even. I still very much enjoy being entrusted with those roles when they are genuinely needed. But beneath that, something else can begin flickering into life. The wish to be indispensable. To be the only one who really understands. To become central inside another person’s psychic life, not usually through domination, but through usefulness.

I think about times I replied too quickly to distressed messages because I wanted to feel necessary. Times I blurred boundaries slightly in the name of care. Times supervision became subtly less about helping someone become more themselves and more about the satisfaction of recognition, of seeing traces of myself reproduced in them.

None of this felt consciously predatory, which is partly why it troubles me. These impulses arrive wearing the language of goodness.

In In the Night Kitchen, Mickey eventually escapes by declaring, “I’m not the milk and the milk’s not me.” As a child I experienced that line triumphantly. Now it strikes me differently. As separation. As the difficult beginning of adulthood, perhaps. Not fusion, not incorporation, not becoming edible in order to belong, but the recognition that nourishment and merging are not the same thing.

I wonder whether some institutions struggle with this distinction too. Institutions often speak maternally. We care. We hold. We support. We protect. And yet protection can become possessive very quickly. Availability becomes virtue. Exhaustion becomes devotion. Boundaries become evidence of failure. The individual disappears into function.

Sometimes entire professions seem organised around an unconscious suspicion of separateness, as though autonomy itself were slightly hostile, slightly narcissistic, slightly disloyal. Leaving can then feel emotionally charged in ways that exceed the practical. Not merely movement, but repudiation. As though the kitchen cannot quite tolerate the child discovering he is not made of milk.

Another story keeps entering my mind alongside Sendak’s book. In the Grimm tale The Singing Bone, one brother murders another and buries him beneath a bridge. Later, a shepherd discovers one of the dead boy’s bones and carves it into a flute that sings the truth of what happened.

I cannot stop thinking about that image. About grit - like the seed from supervision that got under my skin. About the part not yet destroyed finding its way back. The part returning that refuses burial.

I think many people enter caring professions carrying buried things. Humiliations. Hungers. Longings to repair what was never repaired. Desires to transform suffering into usefulness.

Sometimes this creates depth and tenderness. Sometimes righteousness. And sometimes, if we are not careful, the wish to expose harm begins entangling itself with another wish entirely: the wish to annihilate what wounded us.

I notice this in myself at times. Times where moral clarity hardens into something colder, more preaching or cruel. Moments where the complexity of the situation becomes intolerable and I stop seeking understanding and start wanting eradication.

The frightening thing to me is how ethical this can feel internally.

Having said all this, I do not think the reparative task is to become pure or perfectly balanced. That fantasy causes enough trouble already. Nor do I think the answer is cynical self-condemnation.

People shape one another. Through teaching, therapy, supervision, parenting. All involve influence, dependency, asymmetry. These can be beautiful parts of relationship.

The question is what happens when nourishment becomes indistinguishable from possession. Or when our own injuries make dependence feel irresistible. Or when we begin confusing another person’s growth with our own continuation inside them.

Some days I can feel in myself a genuine wish to nourish, to help others think more freely, more independently, more alive. Other days I can feel how quickly nourishment can become hungry. How easily care starts wanting recognition in return. Sameness. Loyalty. Need.

Perhaps that is part of what adulthood asks of us. Not that we lose the wish to matter, but that we become less willing to consume others in order to feel real ourselves.

I think perhaps that was what my supervisor was trying to ask me all those years ago. Not whether the professional self was false, but whether there was still enough of me left outside it to enter the room as a person rather than only as a function.