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I am a mother of three daughters, and a fifth-year distance psychoanalytic candidate in the Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis, now engaged in private practice and in training psychotherapists in China.
I have been lucky to attend the China American Psychoanalytic Alliance (CAPA) training that has changed me and my life.
Before that, with three months' training, I obtained a psychological counsellor certificate in March, 2008. Three months later, I graduated with a master's degree, majoring in developmental psychology from East China Normal University. At that time, I was thirty-six years old and a mother of a two-year-old daughter. That is when I was seeking direction and meaning in my life. I knew I was talented, yet I did not know where to start exactly. And there were no good trainings in China. Right then I heard about CAPA training. That was the first year CAPA began training Chinese psychotherapists. I became one of the group A students, ten students in one class, attending classes via Skype—which made the impossible possible. I could attend psychodynamic training programmes given by American psychoanalysts via the internet, which was quite controversial at that time. But that is when everything started to make sense to me.
I undertook psychoanalysis with an American psychoanalyst via Skype beginning in November, 2008. The work with him lasted for five years. I had never been listened to and understood so deeply before. That helped me understand myself and awakened my deeply repressed ambitions and dreams. Another thing that helped me a lot is the community in CAPA. Dr Elise Snyder, the founder of CAPA, helped me and other CAPA graduate colleagues understand the importance of building up a community of psychotherapists. With her encouragement and support, we built up CAPA-in-China (CIC) in 2015, for CAPA graduates to support each other both professionally and in daily life. I was elected as the president of CIC.
I finished attending all the CAPA trainings in six