TRANSCRIPT
How hitchhiking helped me to become a better therapist
I started hitchhiking when I was 20. I hitchhiked quite a lot between the ages of 20 and 23. I think I hitchhiked, I don’t know, I really don’t know how many thousand miles. 10,000 miles, let’s say, in a bunch of different countries. I had a lot of experiences—99% good experiences—but a lot of sad experiences. You know, one time in Australia, I got a ride with some native Australians, some Aboriginal people, and a kid was drunk. He started trying to beat me up in the back of a pickup truck with his family. But it ended up the family defended me. I didn’t fight back. I mean, he did punch me a few times, but mostly I defended myself. But they, um, the family came to my aid when they realized that I wasn’t going to fight this kid, and they pulled him off me. They were very kind to me, and they actually ended up inviting me back to their community. But I was too scared to go, and maybe that was a good call, ’cause there was a lot of alcohol that day with these people. But that was the only time anyone ever put their hands on me.
But I think what happened with hitchhiking is it changed my mindset. I realized a lot of the rules that life taught me and university taught me and my conservative school taught me were that you can’t do things like hitchhiking. And by me realizing not only that you can do those things, but it can be a profoundly life-changing experience, that made me a lot of who I am and really thrust my growth forward. It allowed me to think outside the box because hitchhiking, especially in the modern era, even from the early 90s when nobody was hitchhiking or very few people were, is thinking and living outside the box.
So when I became a therapist, I really hadn’t been in therapy much. I’d been in therapy a little bit, and my experiences were mostly pretty bad because I didn’t like my therapists. I didn’t feel like they were particularly radical human beings. They weren’t super honest, and I thought the best training I had to be a therapist, aside from having done a huge amount of inner work and grieving, was hitchhiking.
And what was it about hitchhiking that connected with therapy? Well, one thing is most of the people who picked me up hitchhiking were people who were alone in the car. So I got in a car with an individual person, and then we started having conversations, and it was private, and nobody was listening. Another thing, rarely, especially 20 years ago before the modern era of the internet, when I got picked up hitchhiking, rarely did I even get somebody’s last name, and rarely did they get mine. And so by the very nature of the experience, it was confidential. I learned that it’s like, wow, it’s a lot like therapy. It’s actually more confidential than therapy.
And I’ve had people tell me things about their lives while hitchhiking that are as personal as people have told me in therapy. And I’ve also known I’ve talked much, much more personally about my own life in hitchhiking than I have in most places in the world. The kind of stuff that I would tell a client in therapy when I was a therapist—stuff like really about how I felt about things and about my history. Though actually, when I was hitchhiking, I probably talked a lot more about myself. And I think if I went back and became a therapist again, I probably would share a lot more about my personal life. I think I was a little too scared, and the schooling messed my head and brainwashed me to not share so much. And I think it’s good at times for therapists to be very, very honest about their personal lives with their clients.
But another thing that happened for me when I became a therapist that I really credited hitchhiking for is I was willing to work with people who were really out there. I noticed a lot of therapists were not willing to work with people who were diagnosed with schizophrenia and severe bipolar, people who were called psychotic, people who were off medication and really thought in strange ways and talked in strange ways and did bizarre actions. And I think the main reason is that they’re scared of them. Therapists are scared of them. The whole mental health field is scared of these people. They want to medicate them. They want to put them on mood stabilizers. They don’t want them to be so high. They want to put them on antipsychotics so their feelings are pushed down. And okay, they say it’s for those people’s sakes because we need to help them, but I think a huge part of it, really, to be honest, is to make the therapist feel more comfortable. They don’t want to work with someone who’s too out there. They don’t know what this person is going to do.
Well, what I found for myself is when I was sitting in a room with people—and for six years I worked just out of my apartment in the West Village in New York—I saw a lot of people who were called psychotic, who were supposed to be in the hospital, who were not taking medication, but they came into my home, and we sat down and we talked. And I think if I hadn’t hitchhiked, I wouldn’t have been so comfortable doing it because when I sat with them, it was like there was just something in me that’s like, I’ve done this before. I’ve done something a lot that’s a lot more scary than this. Yeah, sometimes I would have clients who were really out there, and sometimes they carried weapons and stuff like that. But I think one thing that hitchhiking allowed me to do is it allowed me to be really present in myself, connected with my deeper self while I was in an interaction with someone else. So it wasn’t so easy to throw me, basically, to make me nervous and make me lose my connection with myself.
So what could happen is even if someone was saying some really crazy stuff and talking about, like, you know, maybe even talking about violence or harming themselves or stuff like that, I could keep my connection with myself and not get scared. And I think that’s the worst thing that can happen to a therapist is when they get really spooked, get really, really scared. Now, I think there may be times when it is valid to get scared. Okay, let’s say somebody had pulled a knife on me in therapy and wanted to hurt me. I would be scared. Any therapist would. That’s natural. It actually never happened to me. I had clients talk about wanting to hurt me, talk about having fantasies of wanting to hurt me, but I didn’t really—I somehow, I think hitchhiking helped me have a more solid, secure base in myself where I didn’t feel so threatened by it. And I felt like, well, they’re in therapy. They’re supposed to be able to talk about whatever they want to talk about. And if they’re really angry and they have no one else to be angry about, maybe they’re going to be angry with me. I’m the most intimate person in their life. Why shouldn’t some of their ancient feelings come out on me?
So I think it made me more comfortable and more respectful. Also, it’s like hitchhiking naturally is a very, even though it’s a very wonderful and connecting thing and a way to really see the world and to study people, it also can be quite an alienating experience and a very lonely kind of experience. Sitting on the side of the road for hours can be lonely. Sleeping on the side of the road at night is lonely. Getting into a car with a complete stranger who might have a completely different perspective or a different language or a totally different personality, or there’s so many unknowns about this person, that’s kind of alienating. It’s a little scary. And so I felt like all those experiences I had hitchhiking in my early 20s, that 10,000 or however many miles, it just made me stronger. It made me more present. And I think the people I sat with felt it. They felt, oh my God, I’m sitting with someone who’s not scared of me, who’s willing to…
Listen to me. Who wants to interact with me? Who’s genuinely C? And also, what I realized with hitchhiking is it’s a lot of fun. And so is therapy, even therapy with really like out there people. I, in a way, loved it. I loved the humor of it. And I realize people who are really out there can also be a lot of fun. Even people who are really scary. I mean, sometimes people would talk about really like unpleasant and scary and threatening things, and in the middle of it, we could laugh. Sometimes it’s just like, who would ever expect this? But life is a humorous and kind of an ironic thing a lot. And so, I never got a chance to talk about this, about like the connection between hitchhiking and therapy. I remember when I first became a therapist, I talked about this a bit with some of my supervisors and other therapists that I met. But none of them had ever really hitchhiked, so they looked at me like, um, hitchhiking prepared you for this? And they didn’t really get it. So, or didn’t really get it in a way that really helped me much. So basically, I never shared it again until now, but I always kept it in my mind.