[Verse 1]
A younger therapist walks through the door,
White coat and textbooks, age twenty-four,
The client is eighty, has buried three wives,
And something unsettling begins to arise—
Who holds the wisdom, who earns the chair?
Credibility cracks when assumptions lay bare.
The elder sees parents in faces they trust,
And countertransference corrodes if we must
Pretend that the mirror reflects only them—
It bends back toward us, again and again.
[Chorus]
Conhece a ti mesmo — know yourself first,
Before you can quench another soul's thirst,
The parental transference, the rescuing hand,
The fear of your own death you don't understand—
O espelho do cliente te mostra também,
What lives in the clinician lives in the room as well.
Conhece a ti mesmo — the work begins there,
In the sediment of your own unexamined fear.
[Verse 2]
She sat with her grandmother, watching decline,
The incontinence, silence, the slow dissolve of time,
Now a client presents with the very same gait,
And the therapist rescues — too early, too late.
Over-identifying with the burdened adult child,
She softens the session, keeps everything mild,
Dismissing the elder as fragile, as done,
Mistaking her grief for objective reason.
Family ghosts inhabit the therapy room,
They occupy chairs and they alter the bloom.
[Chorus]
Conhece a ti mesmo — know yourself first,
Before you can quench another soul's thirst,
The parental transference, the rescuing hand,
The fear of your own death you don't understand—
O espelho do cliente te mostra também,
What lives in the clinician lives in the room as well.
Conhece a ti mesmo — the work begins there,
In the sediment of your own unexamined fear.
[Bridge]
Dependency triggers the clinician's dread,
Cognitive fading — is that what lies ahead?
We flinch from the body that leaks, that forgets,
We flinch from the future our own calendar sets.
Supervision is lantern, not luxury — see
How avoidance dressed neatly looks just like therapy.
A velha sabedoria não é um fardo —
The elder's endurance is not to be bartered
For pity, for rescue, for managed despair —
Authentic encounter means you, fully there.
[Verse 3]
The rescuing therapist lengthens each stay,
Arranges the pillows, won't name what's at play,
While dismissiveness hides in efficiency's cloak —
"What's there to process? The chapter's near closed."
Both errors erase the full human before you,
Both errors confess what you haven't worked through.
Name the reaction — don't bury the weight,
Supervision, reflection, consultation — create
A practice that holds both the elder's full arc
And the therapist's own unlit, navigable dark.