Therapy by Proxy: Grave

As you many of you know, and for those of you who don't, I have recently gone back to school to study psychotherapy. After a lifetime of searching for meaning and purpose to my existence, this just might be it. Healing myself in order to be of service to others.

There are many paths to becoming a helper/healer and just as many reasons why people choose particular paths. In this section of my blog -- Therapy by Proxy -- I will be exploring what I'm doing and why I'm doing it as I . . . well . . . do it. I will look at which type of psychotherapy I chose to study and why. I will share my own therapeutic process, too. My program expects all we would-be healers to undergo our own healing process -- after all, how can we help anyone drive their own lives with more self awareness and care if we are asleep at our own wheel?

There is still much mystification and stigma around therapy, which, sadly, prevents people from accessing emotional support that can ease their pain and change the course of their lives for higher-quality being.

I want to help remove the stigma (which is not to say I want to demystify therapy because, truthfully, it's a mystical process. And that's because it's dealing with mysterious forces -- our psyches and our souls. But mystery is not the same thing as confusion or denial . . . more on that in posts to come).

Therapy by Proxy will explore various therapeutic schools of thought and practice as applied to my own experiences of becoming. This column is where I will grapple with history, philosophy, and modalities, testing them out on the only subject I feel comfortable using at this point -- me. To set the stage for future columns, I have done a kind of free-association piece as a way to enter into the mystery and let you know where I've been and where I hope to go.

Grave

I am a digger. And this is the hole I have been digging ever since I can remember. And because I abhor a hole as much as nature abhors a vacuum, I filled the hole with my tears. One of the best things my mother did for me when I was a child was teach me how to swim. We lived in a house in Jamaica where the previous owners never cleaned their pool, and it was at the bottom of this murky liquid where they found their two-year old daughter, missing for days. I was also two. My mother didn’t want me to drown. At least not in that particular pool.

Coming from trouble, I have always sought trouble. But always the wrong kind. Trouble fueled my muscles, kept my arms pumping as I dug underwater, hoping for buried treasure like hoping for gills. I looked for love in all the wrong places, and manufactured what I thought love was in even more wrong places I created out of thin air.

Michael Meade, a mind-blowing anthropologist/storyteller, speaks of "the right kind of trouble" that we should get into, the trouble we should be inviting as we take the necessary risks that life requires of us. He tells of the old woman who knits all day long while the black dog at her heels unravels everything she has accomplished at the moment she turns her back to attend to her cauldron of soup. That's life. The black dogs nipping at our heels, destroying what we have built, which is exactly the kind of trouble that being alive is about -- the destruction that leads to creation, forcing us to let go of what we've done and believe so that we can keep creating, keep growing, keep complexifying.

But I didn't know the difference between good trouble and bad trouble for a long time . . .

Eventually, I grew tired. Digging underwater was not the problem. Digging for the wrong kind of gold was. All my efforts only yielded more grief. Eventually, I put down my shovel and sought help. For years, I saw a variety of therapists (there are many kinds), but their brand of help only ever amounted to a story – theirs. And, worse, my own. I don't mean healing storytelling. I mean a very compelling story, with a beginning, middle, and end, that explained my pain. But it never really addressed it. It was not a rope or a net. It was not dry land. Nor was it the salty fluid in which I might find nourishment and rest.

I only learned about "good trouble" when I finally met Freyda, my trouble-maker therapist.

When I found her, I found the ocean. She told me that the choice to sink or swim was mine. She told me that there was no land in sight. She bobbed in the water with me. She went right underneath and looked me in the eye. When we resurfaced, she asked me what shape I was – I said, “black and heavy,” or “flat and leaflike, floating away” or “porous and filling up.” When I said, “jellyfish,” – translucent, stealthy, searching for something fleshy to sting –I knew that there was more swimming upstream to go.

I did make it to land eventually. More like crawled. I couldn’t breathe, much less stand up. But I was no different from a painter before she learns to paint. Or a baby before she learns to walk. I was a beginner again.

I believe it was Richard Tarnas who said, “Trying to create the future without knowing the past is like trying to plant cut flowers.” Self-knowledge comes from deep roots. To know who we are, we must have the experience of having grown, and to remember it.

We must remember how we learned to swim, and in what circumstances, to understand why our furious dog paddle is an act of survival. We need to start with the elements -- with water, with earth -- before we can flower.

We need to start at the beginning of time. The Big Bang. Bigger than trouble. Crisis.

Apparently, the Chinese character for “crisis” also means “opportunity.” At the moment of crisis, a door opens. The opportunity, however, is not a given. It’s more like two doors on The Price is Right. Which door will you choose: growth or stasis? Digging in or shoveling over?

Both growth and stasis hurt, and both are a struggle, and both come at a cost. But the cost of stasis is way higher in my books because it amounts to anxiety without analysis, which leads to unrelenting darkness. The cost of growth is pain but with a light at the end of the tunnel. Transformation.

I’ve known people who have chosen stasis over growth and I don’t blame them. Stasis is the comfort of the familiar while growth appears as a terrifying careening into the unknown. But the truth is, just because something feels familiar, even if it’s scary (like having an angry, demanding parent) we might feel at home with scary. But scarier than scary is when our stasis-y familiar morphs from minor demon to Tokyo-destroying Godzilla in the space of our conscious mind’s sleep apnia. What I mean is, our wish for stasis is no less than denial. We might wish to fall asleep and dream a beautiful dream, but that won’t prepare us for the devil at our door when we wake up. Stasis is an illusion. Change is inevitable. The question is, which will we choose?

My mother. I cried in my crib until I finally absorbed that no one would come. My mother, child of Dr. Spock, believing six weeks or a specified weight was the recipe for a baby’s coming of age. Hearing it helps me to understand, but feeling it is why I learned to cut through water with desperate hands, knowing my cries of distress would bring no lifeboat.

Freyda listened to the same cries because they had not really changed. She would ask, “how old are you now?” I never got past age five. For Christmas, Freyda brought me Chaos theory: dissymmetry and equilibrium – “the goal is not to control it,” she said. “The goal is to live with it.” She also brought me mindful meditation. I sat with a group of women once a week and focused on my breath. The tears fell, as always, but for the first time in my life, I allowed them. And the women floated with me on my tears. No one seemed afraid. I allowed it. I allowed for the mess, the weaving and bobbing. I allowed the retching and the rolling. I allowed the days on my bed, sobbing, and also the running. And allowing became the key. I became. I became my own birth, and my own mother. More than my own parent, I became my own healer. After growing up in a house where spilling milk at the dinner table was a capital crime, I allowed myself to make every mistake there was to make. It was like waking to Christmas morning every day. A Christmas mess most would not wish on their worst enemy, but that was the thing. It was my Christmas mess. It was my day of birth. My christ. My mass.

In the movie “Junebug,” a pregnant and neglected young wife who finds naïve solace in the love of Jesus Christ endures day after day of her young husband’s abuse but maintains her good nature because she knows how to love. It is because of her ability to love that she says to her no-good, unemployed, couch-potato husband, “god loves you as you are but he loves you too much to let you stay that way.” With those words, she validates his unconditional worthiness, but also indicates that he owes it to himself to step into his life with more purpose and love, and to love those around him who love him now and always have, despite his distaste for himself and the world. Take yourself as you are but don’t leave yourself that way. This is the motto of the particular type of therapy I am studying -- Holistic Experiential Psychology. How do we accept ourselves as we are but aim to become more self aware, more self loving, more compassionate to others? By stepping backwards . . .

Backwards is the fastest way to move forwards, toward our soul’s healing, toward our maturity. The road that takes us back is circuitous, leading us into the heart of our former homelands to relocate the selves we left behind, then circling back towards the present and future, where we can take rest by the camp fire, while we integrate our lost selves into a more accepting, complex whole. The journey is not easy. But the good news is, we don’t have to do it alone. Older and other cultures have their own versions of spiritual/emotional/soul healers who guide an individual toward their maturity – usually through an initiation of some sort. Initiation being the ritual that opens the initiant up to the truths of the world, such as the inevitability of pain, the crucibles in which our characters and souls are forged.

In the west, we have psychotherapists. And our initiation comes from the bus that broadsides us – divorce, addiction, job loss, death – life’s tragedies for which we are not prepared because we have anesthetized ourselves with shopping. We do anything not to feel pain – we eat out so we don’t have to do the “work” of making a meal. We seek and consume all manner of entertainment, turning relationships into TV shows, hoping it will bring us what we want, but mostly to help us forget what we don’t want: reality.

There is help. I call it good therapy. Good therapy is the midwife to emergence. At the point of crisis, when you can’t take another heartbreak, or you’re tired of acting out, a therapist can help you unfold, one sticky wing at a time, releasing past hurts stored in our cells that are not serving us anymore. A good therapist understands that life is a paradox but that paradox is not a problem. It’s better than a ride at Canada’s Wonderland.

A good therapist can show us that trying to control everything is as impossible as stopping a tsunami with our had. A good therapist helps us see the wave, accept the wave, and boogie board all the way to shore. But to do that, we have to develop the skills to see the wave, accept the wave, and, of course, transform ourselves into a smokin’ boogie board.

Switching metaphors here, I’m hoping that as I traipse through the underbrush of my own psyche over the next three years of training to become a psychotherapist, pushing aside the thickets of my own neurotic thoughts and past pains, I might find that every forest has a clearing. A good therapist might help me get to that clearing because a good therapist is a flashlight. And a compass. And maybe even a bottle of water.

Love is a strong swimmer

Recently on Facebook, a friend posted a mini review of his book that appeared in the New York Times. In the review, he’s quoted on his definition of a few things, one of which is (romantic) love. Of love, he says, more or less, it does not correspond to the image you have in your head of the beloved. Rather, it’s something completely unexpected that “comes from the world.”

Which means you’re bound to be disappointed (because it does not match your fantasy) or elated (because it exceeds your hopes and dreams). Luckily for him, he’s elated.

A day earlier, one of my brother’s friends, a man I have not seen since I had a teen crush, wrote me an email saying that I think about relationships “too much.” He was responding to my email in which I bemoaned my unhappy entanglements with love. He was not wrong; I think almost exclusively about relationships (although, could someone please quantify “too much” for me?). I look around and wonder how others do it – love each other through adversity, stay together, have children, have fights and still find a way to be tender, respectful, and compassionate through it all.

For a year now, I have hesitated writing this blog because the themes seemed to always lean towards my sadness, mostly about the death of my brother, Andy. Which is why my blog posts mostly dried up. There was a layer of sadness to everything and it felt like too much exposure.

What does this have to do with romantic relationships and, perhaps more importantly, with love of all stripes? Well, in my case, I worried that my sadness was keeping me from love. When a happy person entered my realm, I feared my mourning would be too much for them, so I would try to hide it at first. But sadness is like a pool, splashing over the edges as soon as someone jumps in. Nevertheless, it's absurd to believe that ALL the water will leave the pool when someone cannonballs into your world; and just as absurd to believe that love will drown in the face of sadness. Love, in fact, is a gold-medal swimmer.

The problem was not love, it was happiness. Other people’s.

I love it when my rickety theories are supported by award-winning radio shows like, say, Ideas, one of my favourite CBC programs. I encourage all my dear readers to give “Say no to happiness” a listen. In it, various guest speakers – writers, thinkers, and other intrepid explorers of the human condition – offer such provocative and profound insights into why happiness should not be your life’s pursuit that it makes you never want to be happy again – at least not in a saccharine-y, Dr. Phil-y, or any other unconscious way of defining happiness.

These CBC thinkers discuss what I call “the mistake of happiness” in no uncertain terms. (For those of you who need happiness defined, the CBC folks do take a few stabs at definitions, but I don’t have space here, so insert whatever definition you have and then see how it measures up to my theories).

What the CBC speakers say, in short, is that happiness is not necessarily a state that can deepen you.

They go on to say that many happy people are not necessarily spiritual, mindful, creative, or even nice. In fact, insist the CBC speakers, the pursuit of happiness is … wait for it . . . “shallow”! The whole notion of “be positive” not only trivializes how complicated our world is, but also how complicated the full range of human emotions is. Having a full spectrum of emotions is what makes us able to react and adapt appropriately to life’s myriad circumstances. Happiness can be the wrong response in many cases, while sadness can be the right psychological state vis-a-vis a particular situation, like, say, death.

The Buddha himself identified suffering as intrinsic to human existence, not happiness. But the point of recognizing that life is suffering is not to curl up into a ball and give up. As one of the CBC speakers points out, the suffering we experience is something we can use. How? Well, it opens us up to pain, a state we should honour because it enables us to nurture compassion for our fellow humans who also struggle. Everyone struggles, even happy people, even if it’s over a decision about what to eat for lunch.

The CBCers go on to say that the trouble with happiness is that it does not propel us forward in our development. If we are constantly in a state of placidity due to happiness, nothing will affect us deeply – not the horrors in the world, or our friend’s scraped knee, or, worse, not even our own (buried) suffering – and, as a result, we will not deepen ourselves.

If our philosophy of life does not include life’s tragedies, it is, by definition, “shallow and meaningless,” and, as a shallow person, we are essentially a danger to ourselves and others. Why? Because when we fear someone else’s sadness will thwart our happiness, we become not only resentful, hostile, and critical, but also cruel (a CBC speaker really said this, I’m not making it up!). What does that look like? Well, anything from avoidance to sarcasm to platitudes such as, "be positive!" These responses are not about the sad person at all. They are about the happy person dissociating.

In my own experience, nothing increases one’s sense of isolation and sadness more than being with a person who is essentially incapable of seeing your pain. Whether it’s by choice or as a result of simply never having had experiences that deepened them enough to become sensitive, it’s you who will suffer . . . unless, of course, you decide to see the happy person through your own eyes of compassion because, after all, by distancing themselves from pain – theirs or yours – the happy person is losing out on an opportunity to connect more deeply with themselves and others, and, thus, is actually the person in a sad state of affairs . . . (more on that in a minute).

I’ve been having a debate with someone about the definition of romantic love. According to my debating partner, love is about getting your needs met. It’s about finding a partner with similar interests to your own so that you can do the same things, like lawn bowling. But, says opponent, if you find that over time you develop an affection for the slow, subtleties of curling while your partner has a sudden yen to dig for buried treasure, then your love will fail and it’s probably better to jettison the whole enterprise. Because, according to my debating partner, one’s own happiness – i.e. I want to do what I want and I want you to do what I want – is paramount (where love is in all this is a mystery to me.)

I argued back that love is not about meeting your needs so much as seeing the needs of others (and, if you can, meeting them), and that happiness defined as two people sweeping the same ice might be missing the point. You might find greater happiness putting your broom down and helping your partner dig deep for that treasure. Together, you might discover something new and terrifying and beautiful. Or you may just feel good having done something outside your comfort zone and inside someone else's.

Your partner may like that so much, they may offer to curl with you! Plus, you may actually see your partner for the first time instead of your own image mirrored in ice.

Early on in this love debate, my worthy opponent conceded to my definition of love, but only insofar as serving others is just another form having your own needs met if what turns your crank is serving others. I could not argue with that. But something about it felt off. I couldn’t really explain what until I remembered an experience that illuminated the difference for me.

In the ninth month of dating a man in Montreal a few years ago, there were two weeks in which he needed me. During the first week, he had laser-eye surgery, which left him incapacitated. It happened to be the same two-week period he had custody of his three-year-old son. So, I moved in to my guy’s apartment and took care of them both. In the second week, his son became sick with flu, upping the ante on the care giving. During those two weeks, I missed the window for the delivery of a stove, which may sound inconsequential, but I’d been without one for three months. I also was not able to go out for a run because I could not leave my boyfriend to care for his son alone. I had to take the boy with me on all my errands.

Was it convenient? No. It disrupted all my routines. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t long to go to a café or that I had Mother Theresa’s heart of selfless thought. I was annoyed aplenty. But my boyfriend didn’t have a choice. And that softened my annoyance. I had to stretch myself beyond my comfort zone, and, like any exercise, it was good for me. It made me less selfish. I believe I fell in love with my guy for the first time during those two weeks because I saw him rather than my own needs. As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince says in the self-titled book, you don’t love something because it’s beautiful or original or even because it loves you back, you love what you have cared for.

At the end of the two weeks I went home, and within a day I became so ill I could not get out of bed. When I phoned my boyfriend to tell him, he said, “Well, what do you want me to do?”

I don’t think there is a question I hate more, unless it’s “Well, what do you want me to say?” Talk about a total lack of good will, kindness, and compassion. I’d rather the person just say, “I’ve checked out, babe. Your need is cramping my style.” At least that would be honest and make them responsible for their own disability.

If it’s not evident that you should help a sick person even though you may have a curling match on TV or if you have fallen out of love, then you are not someone who knows how to love, because love does not ask, “what’s in it for me?” It simply goes to the grocery store, picks up ingredients for soup, makes the soup, and delivers it to the doorstep of the sick person -- friend or foe.

The reason my soon-to-be-ex boyfriend did not do the above is because he thought love should bring happiness, and that happiness did not involve caring for someone when he had shit to do. Whose definition of love that is, I don’t know, but a lot of people share it. And it’s lethal.

The CBC speakers have a great deal to say about how this kind of pursuit of happiness is anathema to love. They argue that valuing someone means opening yourself up to risk of deep hurt and sorrow (and probably a lot of inconvenience). You can’t really do that unless you extend yourself beyond you own needs. They go on to say that to make a relationship truly profound, you have to put it all on the line. And when you don’t, you essentially “shrink in cowardess” to the demands human existence place on us. (How many ex’s have you wanted to say that to?)

To me, love looks like this:

A few weekss ago, a friend said: “Liz, you've had two major sucker punches in a short space of time. Instead of trying to fit yourself into someone else’s idea of how you should be right now, just let yourself mourn. It might take a week, it might take until you’re sixty. But loving yourself means not beating yourself up for how you feel or trying to rush the mourning process. You don’t owe anyone your happiness. And we who love you want you to be exactly where you are and will love you through it.”

And with this permission to be sad for as long as it takes me to heal, I instantly felt less sad. How simple.

It had the opposite effect of “be positive,” which only dismisses my immediate experience and deepens my sadness because it’s like telling a person’s broken leg to “be unbroken already!” Healing a leg (and a heart) takes time – and you are not unlovable during that healing process.

But in the same way you can’t hurry up the healing of a broken leg to meet your friend’s curling needs, you can’t make a “happy” person show compassion, especially if they fear sadness like a disease. Compassion cannot be demanded or manufactured. But you can show compassion towards this “happy” person who will likely only ever skip across the surface of relationships, never going deep enough to connect, because they are afraid to love all of what life is, all of what being human is, in themselves and others. What a tragic loss. Be sad for them.

One of the CBC speakers finished the program with this thought: as human beings, we are not islands. We are social creatures programmed to respond to others. As conscious beings, the purpose of life is not the pursuit of our own happiness, but to “transcend [our] mortal limitations,” in order to see and, hopefully, to help others (what I call extending oneself).

“As a goal that justifies suffering,” the speaker adds, “it’s unbeatable, because what it does is broaden and deepen your life in a manner that you might compare elevator music to a Beethoven symphony.”

And THAT, my friends, is the difference between meeting your needs vs. meeting the needs of others. The former, like elevator music, will not challenge you, and thus it will not change you. While the latter -- a veritable symphony of experiences -- will bring a kind of something-beyond-happiness that is intrinsic to the act of listening, engaging, and giving. It’s not about service for the sake of appearing as the good congregate repeating the right hymns on Sunday, because that’s still about you getting into your own heaven. It’s about being moved because you have opened your eyes to see someone else in all their glory -- their joys and their pains. Not just the bits and pieces that suit your needs.

When I ask my friends what makes their long-lived romantic relationships work, it’s never about their shared interests (which make up only 10% of their lives together, and which have, of course, changed over time). Rather, it’s about what my therapist used to call “getting interested.” Whenever I would come up against a problem in a relationship, she would say, “get interested,” meaning don’t see the problem as a reason to flee (because you think your partner is not the right fit, which is about shopping, not about relating and growing). See it as an opportunity to inquire into why your partner is doing what they are doing. Maybe you could learn something about them. Getting interested does not come with judgment. It's an open-ended question mark that seeks to learn something about the beloved instead of making assumptions because you long to be right and get on with your happiness. What is going on for them? My friends don’t expect their relationships to be about shared interests, unless by interests one means getting interested in getting to know the other person unconditionally.

One Buddhist therapist said the best way to love your partner is to look at them every day and ask, “who are you?” And to make space for who they actually are, rather than to demand they be an expert ice sweeper so that you can count on them for your game. When you can see them, you will find that you are moved. Being moved by someone is the very definition of love (even if you are not "in love"). And in the face of that kind of transcendent love, you won’t have the ability to be unkind, sarcastic, disinterested, or self serving. You will just feel compelled to be present, engaged, wondering how they feel, and jonesing to be of service – whether it’s to make the beloved a mocha, listen to their dreams without judgment, or to hug away their tears. That is love.

I used to warn new friends and lovers that I suffer from depression or chronic sadness. But now I’m starting to think that I suffer from being human. Sad spells can take years, but being loved through them can shorten the healing process considerably. Also, let's be honest here, even long sad spells do not mean the "sad" person is incapable of being joyful as well. No one is ever only one thing. Even the happy people, even if they don't know when they are sad.

Whether I learn to cultivate enough compassion for my own suffering, as well as for the suffering of my fellow humans – both those who suffer from sadness, as well as those who suffer from happiness – I am ready for the challenge. Given the choice, I will take Beethoven’s richly differentiated music – the major and minor chords – over the thin, vampire tones of elevator music, which, if you think about it, only plays in small, airless spaces during the most unscenic ride there is.