Whether you’ve turned to therapeutic or spiritual mentors for support, it can be troubling to see signs of their unexplored shadow. We all need other people to offer us needed inspiration and guidance and will seek out those who seem a little further along the healing path.
But over time, eventually our mentors will show signs of their humanness. Therapists will misunderstand something important that has been shared in treatment, or remain too passive when a response is needed. Spiritual mentors will fail to listen with compassion, instead offering unneeded moral lessons that may exacerbate feelings of aloneness. These are examples of impactful but also relatively manageable disappointments.
It’s more troubling when a mentor behaves in some way that seems seriously mal-attuned or obviously self-serving. Efforts to seek power over a patient or student can reinforce negative beliefs that people are fundamentally untrustworthy, or that a particular patient/student is undeserving of compassion and sensitive care.
Whatever disappointment you might have experienced with a mentor, I invite you to give yourself time to assess whether or not the experience could be worked through, perhaps even leading to increased trust and needed boundaries, or if the disappointment requires careful consideration about a given mentor’s capacity to be a “good enough,” ethically grounded, and caring presence in your life.
How to Approach Disappointment in a Mentor
