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.