What Do I Learn?

I am beginning to see how the graduate program I am in is quite different and unique to many others. Even the idea of graduate school "as a place you go to learn and become more able to perform in your chosen career," is kinda put on its head. What if everything that you know, believe, and hold true is actually the source of most of your problems in your profession?

I want to learn to be effective in my career in helping others, however, I am learning that doing this is means I must unlearn, put into question, open my self to the fact that knowledge is self-serving and the other needs me not to be intelligent, not to be able to find the cause, answer the problem, solve the puzzle but to be open and genuinely relate to him or her. How do I unlearn it all? Question myself completely? Perfection is not possible and not the "goal" either (of helping the other). However, such self-directed questioning and awareness of my own feelings, motivations, and prejudices is the path that my professors suggest I take. Not it will not be easy, but I can hope to open myself to actually learn from the other this way.

The goal of being a helper is fraught with trap doors and innocent vipers. I thought I was so great to be trying to "help" other as a psychotherapist but then was struck by how frustrated I would become when the other did not want or seem to even need my "help." Suddenly I began to see how I am not only just interested in helping them but I was actually interested in giving myself a role to play! One that I could feel good about and be comfortable with. I am the "helper," the "nice guy" what is so bad about that?! Answer: I am not doing it for them!! Rather, for myself, my needs, my insecurities. And the really amazing thing of it is I denied this to be true for the longest time. I thought I was being responsible by focusing them on their problems. While this is partially true, they are the one's who lead me there when they are ready and I need to be wary of focusing on their problems for my own needs to be needed.
Yes, that is it. I need to be needed. I want to be wanted. I am helped to be helping. I needed them to have a problem for me to fix because being a fixer feels so GOOD. In it, I have a goal, I have a role, there is a productivity to this and a certainty. I accept this as who I am and do not look negatively upon myself for it. I am human and beautifully complex and at least I recognize how my own altruism is not totally that.

We are all blinded by our Power, Truth, Certainty. Yet we hold on to it because Weakness and Uncertainty breeds anxiety. To not be sure of the who the other is, of one's "good" intentions, one's place, one's knowledge or one's purpose is anxiety producing. However, to live with certainty of these things blinds a person and leads them astray as well as makes it hard for them to learn anything new.
...or so I learned in Grad School.