Therapy Actual

Primal.

The word had been dogging me since starting therapist-training school. Dogging my mind, anyway. My body simply slept through it. In class, in therapy sessions, it was appearing everywhere, like synchronicity in action, but I didn’t really know what it meant. I mean, I knew there was this approach called “primal therapy,” and I knew it had its hayday in the 70s, or maybe it was the 80s, but it had either passed out of fashion or was currently hidden and only practiced by the old guard or in secret therapy societies. I didn’t bother to look it up. 

For weeks we’d been studying Western Mysticism. During our weekend classes, we were introduced to traditions outside of psychotherapy’s more accepted paradigms – we took journeys through forests, many of us meeting spirit-animal guides in meadows, others of us mediating on loving kindness. We built a variety of altars and reconsidered existence through the lens of quantum science, learning that photons fired in opposite directions will mirror each other’s actions instantly – when one changes direction, the other changes in the same manner, despite their being in different locations – suggesting that there’s some other dimension undetectable by our current science in which communication occurs at faster-than-light speed.

But it didn’t matter because I had stopped absorbing. My feelings came slowly, as if from under water, never breaking the surface. The usual insecurities were pulling me under – am I good enough? Will I be loved enough? Will I be loved at all . . . ever . . . WHEN? These questions came in the midst of being loved in the way I’d always dreamed, yet I still had to ask. Nothing was penetrating. Everything had a "but." But it’s probably not real. But it won’t last for long. But nothing ever works out.

And then there were the questions about my life’s purpose: what the hell am I doing with my precious life – not painting, not writing, what and, again, WHEN?! When will my life proper begin, the one where I have a fulfilling and solid career, a sense of purpose? It didn’t matter that I was writing blog posts, or editing my book (that will never see the light of day), or learning a new day job, or studying for my “vocation” (was I really going to be a therapist?!) These things didn’t seem to count. Nothing counted.

Every week I went to therapy and talked, and sometimes mustered a tear or two, but left feeling that while my mind got it, my body was failing the class. It was not therapy’s fault. Something was corked in a deep part of me. I couldn't seem to dislodge the blockage, so I did what I always do when faced with what I perceive as an immovable obstacle: I decided to quit. Quit school, quit therapy, quit dreaming about my future. 

At the end of one particular therapy session in the midst of my doubt, we heard a shattering cry through the wall. 

“Oh. That’s just an emotional release,” said Karen, my therapist, as if she were describing someone’s digestive gurgles. But it was too late. A door had slammed. And it was mine. “I can’t do this,” my mind said, using her inside voice. My body had already slipped into a coma. “I can’t bring people to that place,” I insisted to my interior audience. I was already thinking about popcorn and movies. I was already somewhere else.

“Have you ever been to that place yourself?” A fifth-year student asked me in the waiting room the following week. I was waiting to see Karen. She was waiting to go into Group (which I’ll write about once I’ve done it.) I told the student therapist I was thinking of quitting the program. She told me she'd been seeing patients for two years already and couldn't imagine doing anything else. She loved it. "Have you ever had a primal in therapy?" she asked again.

Had I ever been to a place of total emotional abandonment? I’d come undone before, spent years crying to and from class, to and from work, to and from the grocery store. But letting out a soul-wrenching scream from the depths of my wrenched soul? 

“No,” I admitted.

“Well, that’s why you’re scared,” the student therapist concluded. And she was not wrong. “It’s hard to describe the transformative quality of primal work,” she explained “unless you’ve done it.”

“It’s pretty great!” She added, like describing a ride at the Ex.

 

Half way through therapy that day, I ventured off the path. “I wonder if what I need is a primal,” I suggested. I had no idea what I was saying. I didn’t even know if that’s how you said it. Was ‘a primal’ a noun?

“We could do that,” Karen said, gamely. My eyes flicked over to the clock. “Well, there’s no time today, anyway. So, let’s do it next week,” I quickly backtracked. Surely a primal required at least an hour, if not longer. There was only half an hour left.

“We could do a dry run today,” Karen suggested, only she had already gotten up to prepare the matt on the floor while explaining what she was about to do. “I’ll be pressing down on your back along its length,” she said, making it sound like a massage. I started to relax, looking forward to releasing some tension in my shoulder blades.

I lay on my stomach and Karen pressed on my lower back. The pain shocked me. Since when do I have pain in my lower back? I had never noticed it before. How long had it been there? Then she moved up my spine to where my pain normally resides. All that pressing felt good, despite the pain. If this was a primal, I was loving it.

Then Karen told me to make some statements as she pressed the pain points. She gave examples like, “I hate my job” or “My mother never let me eat between meals” or whatever else came to mind. Except my mind had gone blank. Shit. I’m going to fail the primal, I panicked. Then Karen pressed really hard on my lower back and a voice broke the surface with the force of the scream from the week before, “I’M TIRED OF WAITING!”

“That sounded pretty true,” Karen said. “Let’s try something else.” She told me to get on my knees, my torso upright, my arms raised above my head, my hands clasped. She placed a tower of pillows in front of me. Then she assumed the same position adjacent to me and came down on the pillow tower, hitting  it with her outstretched arms, yelling, “I’m tired of waiting!”

I giggled uncontrollably. Karen got up and moved behind me. I started to explain that I would not be able to do that because I felt self conscious, "Karen, I don't think I can do . . ." when she pushed me! I fell forward, flooded with anger, and screamed I’M FUCKING TIRED OF WAITING. I’M TIRED OF FUCKING WAITING. I’M TIRED OF ALL THIS FUCKING FUCKING WAITING!!!!! 

Images flooded me. Waiting hours for my mother to pick me up at school. Waiting for dinner to be ready. Waiting for her to be happy so that I could stop trying to do the impossible. Waiting for my fatigue/resistance to ease up so that I could paint. Waiting to feel qualified at . . . well . . . ANYTHING. Waiting for my asshole neighbour to give in on the right-of-way issue to my front door so that I would not lose the value of my home. Waiting to be able to live alone. And yet tired of living alone. Tired of waiting to one day live with a partner again, waiting to possibly get married, waiting for a family of my own (and really tired of feeling ashamed to want these things) –  

And then I stopped. I stopped feeling. Because I knew I would never have a family. That piece of my life has passed me by (and, truthfully, I'm not sure I want children. But is that because of circumstances or because of an inner truth? I'll never know). The people I have loved in the last decade already had families, ones they built with their ex’s. And those children, those roots, those physical and emotional edifices did not include me. I was tired of waiting for inclusion (and, again, tired of feeling ashamed for wanting it). I was tired of waiting on the fringes of other people’s schedules and priorities and pasts. I was tired of waiting for my own will to live.

When the feelings of loss are too great, I shift out of waiting mode and into resignation, which looks an awful lot like quitting.

Andy’s death is the perfect example. For years, I couldn’t wait for the day when both my brothers would stand up for me at my future wedding the way they had done for each other. But that waiting is futile. It will never deliver Andy to my aisle. I guess it’s one less thing I have to wait for. And suddenly I am flooded with fatigue. Who cares? I just want to go to sleep.

Karen held me as I cried. I didn’t cry a lot, but the wave came from somewhere deeper than usual. “Your face looks so much softer,” she said. But the truth was, my time was up. We had come to the end of the half hour. 

On the two following nights, I dreamt about two women from my past, women who had endured family traumas on the level of Andy’s death and greater. In the dreams, they each came to me for comfort. I have always found both these women somehow remote -- able to describe their trauma but not necessarily express it, or maybe not even feel it. It occurred to me when I awoke that feeling is healing. And that I, myself, had become remote. In the dreams, however, these two women had softened through their pain, through their new ability to be vulnerable, to ask for help. Both had snuggled up to me like children seeking comfort in their mother’s arms. I don’t know what that’s like, to find comfort in a mother's arms, but in the role of mother I felt right at home. I took them in and held them. And something from deep within me radiated a feeling I can only describe as love. I may not ever have children of my own, but perhaps I might still become a mother.

As I lay in bed feeling the deliciousness of being needed, even if only by dream "patients,"  the mantra from a Rolling Stones' song resonated its soulful, human-condition truth from the top of  my head down through my  body like an alarm clock without a snooze button: you can't always get what you want; but if you try some time, you just might find you get what you need.

As for this sense I have of always waiting, well, as one therapist told a friend of mine, my pathology may just be my destiny. Waiting may be the teacher I have been waiting for, pushing me to the point of such exasperation that I stop waiting and start doing. Or, even better, realize that I'm already being.

And here's where primal therapy might do a world of good. It's nothing if not about being. When you can feel the nature of your pain, it unfreezes things, lets lifeblood flow again. All the ways in which I believe I'm forced to wait are not actually the truth. They are just cover ups for a deeper pain -- my sense of deprivation, which goes back to ... well, that part is for me to know and sort out. Like cutting, which is an attempt to feel something other than the pain of a trauma, waiting has kept deprivation at bay. But when I finally got past the surface pain of waiting to the raw pain of deprivation, it loosened its grip. At least for a moment.

I might need another primal or two for a full-body release ...

Songs to the gods of my soul

As promised, but more belatedly than I had hoped, allow me to humbly offer you the next installment of Therapy by Proxy.

The reason it has taken me a while to update you is simply because I am onboarding so much information it's like drinking from a fire hose. As a result, I have been in the throes of processing, as well as trying to figure out what to share because I want to share all of it. But where to begin! For instance, I wanted to explain that therapy comes in many forms and to try to explain a little about them because how the hell is a lay person supposed know to which model of therapy to choose when many, many, MANY exist . . . The kind where you sit on a couch and free associate in the presence of a silent, inscrutable therapist (which I think causes more damage than good, IMHO), or the kind where the therapist is engaged, offering not only an empathetic ear, but asking challenging questions, holding the space for your emotional tsunamis, and generally helping you learn to feel comfortable with life's paradoxes, tragedies, and learning curves (which, of course, is where I'm at)?

Since I don't know where to begin, I'm going to jump right into the middle since the middle is generally where we find ourselves -- in the middle of a crisis, in the middle of work, in the middle of love, in the middle of a thought, etc. We are always in it. "It" being life as a lived experience. And therapy is not something outside of being in it but another angle from which we can bring awareness and compassion to our experiences while we are in the middle of them (or after, it doesn't really matter).

After Andy died, Dawn, his wife, gave up anxiety. Or, rather, she made a distinction between what can be helped and what can’t. Far too early in life, she’d had plenty of reasons to become anxious, not the least of which was her mother’s death from a car accident when Dawn was twelve. Death didn’t end there. Dawn’s high-school boyfriend, Dan Eldon, was machetted to death on a tour in Somalia as a young photojournalist. By this time, Dawn was already dating Andy. She got the news of Dan’s horrific death from his mother, who later published his stunning photo journals, which Dawn could not bring herself open and look at. That is, until after Andy died.

To distract herself from worry before Andy died, Dawn cleaned and organized her house. Everything had to be perfect. It never occurred to me to ask her what perfect meant because I had my own anxiety-distracting version of perfection, which I never bothered to define because that would mean unpacking it. It was a felt thing – I would know I’d reached perfection by a feeling of safety, which, of course never happened, which, of course, was the point. I kept myself in a constant state of striving because somewhere I knew that if I stopped, my idle hands might come into contact with icky-sticky things just underneath my psyche's tidy surface, like other people's chewed gum or, worse, their boogers, or, far worse, my own. So, I did what Dawn did. I cleaned and organized. What I cleaned, however, was not kitchens or houses or even desks. Instead, I sanitized relationships.

In my twenties and thirties, what I looked for in my relationships and – surprise! – found were flaws in the person I claimed to love – itty bitty idiosyncrasies I just knew I could fix, if only I could convince my boy of the error of his ways and the benefits of the Liz Plan. To me, love was something I had to mold in my image. It never occurred to me that it was something I could behold (in their own image). In those days, I wouldn’t have recognized the infinite shape of love even had it taken up permanent residence in my bed, which is where I thought it should lie, like a pet. But we'll get back to this later . . .

A few weeks after Andy died, Dawn anxiously confided in me that her son, my nephew, was worried that he was going to die, too. I paused for just a moment before I said, “He will." There was simply no other answer. Dawn’s face suddenly relaxed because she understood the truth of this truth. In the aftermath of Andy's death, Dawn and I had both puzzled over two inexplicable crying jags she'd had in the week leading up to the crash, one on the night before. Both times she had come to bed hysterical for no reason she could fathom, imploring Andy, "What will I do if you die?" The strangeness of this coincidence is something I cannot fathom, so I leave it to the world of mystery. What I do understand, however, is that her worry didn’t stop what became Andy's destiny. All too clarifying in its utter isness, Andy’s death showed Dawn just how powerless she is to alter what the Existentialists call “givens” – i.e. the inescapables of life, such as death.

 Accepting life's givens is not the dark, scary thing we have come to expect from the Existentialists (a misreading, I believe). Givens are one of life's most affirming gifts.

Thank you grnly for this perfect metaphor

My own time working with a Buddhist, existentialist therapist (for five years) helped me accept anxiety as something as necessary as a limb, or my heart. Because what the Existentialists understood about anxiety is that it's an important alarm system that can tell you something in the world or inside you needs attention. Anxiety is the reminder that we are alive and that we are the sole owners of our lives, and that we have to make a thousand and one decisions every moment about how we want to live this inexplicable life  . . . with meaning.

But the best explanation I have heard for why we – by which I mean anyone inculcated in the paradigms of western culture – should not eschew anxiety but embrace it is James Hillman’s discussion of polytheism (versus monotheism).

Hillman, a Jungian, and father of what's known as Archetypal Psychology, deconstructs the traditional Judeo-Christian framework through which psychological states have been pathologized. Hillman focuses instead on western mythology as a gateway to exploring, deepening, and understanding our many psychological states, which he did not judge as good or bad but as simply different modes of being and vital to the evolution of one's soul.

 

According to Hillman, we have internalized the drive to eradicate anxiety in western culture because we have internalized monotheistic thinking that strives for perfection in everything – from allopathic medicine that seeks to eradicate illness, to worshipping a single, all-powerful God who will forgive us all our sins, to the reduction of our very souls down to two states of being: good or evil.

The polytheistic model, by contrast, attends to a variety of states with no "preferred positions, no sure statements about positive and negative, and therefore no need to rule out some configurations ... as ‘pathological.’" Not only does "each complex deserve[] its respect in its own right,” with none being good or evil, there is no bad or "evil" state to be in. Hillman writes:

"The Greeks had no Devil; each form of consciousness had its specific component of wrong-doing and tragedy. Evil was not a separate component, but a strand so woven through everything that the ‘integration of shadow’ was already given in the patterns of life rather than the task for an ego to do."

Like a modern-day Yente, Hillman hooks up each psychological state with a mythological (archetypal) mate. "Each [mythological] God has his [and her] due," meaning the chosen god for a person's particular state would both mirror and challenge that state, like a good soul mate does, or a good therapist, to deepen that soul and help it become more of itself.

A polytheistic approach to psychology, therefore, is not about hitching a transcendent wagon to the star of self-improvement, but rather it "obliges consciousness to circulate among a field of powers," i.e. our states of being and their soul mates (our god guides) are multiple, relational, and contingent -- all the archetypal gods help us evolve as we live through our life's experiences.

 
This model is homeopathic, allowing each state full expression, which Hillman calls soulmaking. Repression, or attempts at excision, of these states only results in deleterious effects on the psyche, not to mention the body, leading to what I call sick-making.

 

Okay so what exactly does this look like on the ground in a therapist's office? Well, instead of a therapist trying to alleviate suffering, per se, a therapist might not approach depression as a pathology in the first place. Rather, it's just one of many states in which a person may find herself. And the question is not how to get rid of it, the question is how to go deeper into it, not only to potentially discover something more about the self, but to engage in soulmaking through acceptance of every aspect of the human condition. Depression, as it were, may have something to teach us. It may be alerting us to unfinished business, to places of deprivation, to buried anger, etc. A Cognitive Behavioural approach to depression (read: monotheistic), for instance, would likely furnish the patient with tools for managing those feelings without fully exploring those feelings, which does not actually honour depression's depth, power, and potential for a cure in working with instead of working against.

Polytheism’s magic lies in the way it “favours differentiating, elaboration, particularizing, complicating, affirming and preserving” emotional, psychological states. In a polytheistic therapeutic model, “The emphasis is less upon changing what is there into something better (transformation and improvement) and more on deepening what is there into itself (individualizing and soul-making).”

"When the idea of progress through hierarchical stages is suspended," argues Hillman, "there will be more tolerance for the non-growth, non-upward, and non-ordered components of the psyche." The psyche will be accepted as multiple, relational, and contingent, not something to be judged and cleansed.

Salting Hillman's account of polythesim is Thomas Moore's discussion of the Marquis de Sade’s provocative writing, which locates polytheism in a different set of archetypes, i.e. so-called sexual perversions. (A former monk and author of Care of the Soul, a book that shook my world views to their core, Moore's chapter devoted to the gifts of depression was game changing for me. Up to that point, I believed that depression was a disease requiring nothing short of a psychological root canal. But I digress . . .)

For those unfamiliar with de Sade's writing, lets just say it makes modern-day porn look like child's play. De Sade's novels, plays, essays, rants, and other sexually-soaked missives are considered so transgressive, they are often locked up in library basements. And that's no metaphor!

In his book Dark Eros, Moore explores de Sade's account of human nature in all its manifestations, especially the dark, the horrifying, the sickening. De Sade’s overarching principle, paraphrased by Moore, states: “If nature plants ‘sick’ fantasies in our imaginations, then perhaps nature is expressing an unfathomable and revolting truth.” This notion becomes an entry point for Moore in his role as a therapist, especially after he realized that a moralizing approach to his patients’ dark fantasies did not honour their inner world. Moore learned instead to approach that world on its own terms, opening up to the shadow as something with an important message to deliver.

Moore argues that de Sade’s sexually explicit and allegedly morally perverted themes, “which on the surface we find repugnant [,] from a deeper point of view have their place. It is up to us, therefore, not to moralize against them because they do not fit into our limited repertoire of acceptable human actions, but to contemplate their necessity.”

Moore's sensitive, intelligent unpacking of de Sade's "sick" fantasies as the locus of our deepest humanity and, potentially, "the cure" for our dis-ease, resonated with me like a prayer gong booming across a vast jungle. Probably because I'd just had a rude awakening in which my own monotheistic, morally outraged thinking was floodlit by a friend's protest to what turned out to be one of my famous self-improvement plans. In a moment of deep trust, this friend shared a few “dark” fantasies with me. But what he said so threatened my sense of emotional safety (one that I had built up through unquestioned cultural and social convention) that I boldly suggested his fantasies were a form of denial, an escape, a diversion from his blah, blah, blah – anything to remove his frightening fantasies from my squeaky-clean world view. In the name of accepting him, I pinned his dark butterflies behind glass and named them as if they were mine to capture and own. After many conversations, this friend finally broke through to me, quite emphatically: “Why can’t I be accepted, fantasies and all, Liz? Why must they be something I need to change in order to be accepted?”

Why indeed. The penny dropped like an anvil. This person’s inner life was not only none of my business, but it was as acceptable as my own mysterious, dark places, which, by the way, I had not bothered to share with him.

Moore reminds us that “One of the most important moves in psychotherapy is to take whatever is presented and simply hold it and give it a place.” We think of psychotherapy as the great fixer, the happy maker. I'm here to tell you to abandon that fantasy. Happiness is not the eradication of pain, it is the United Nations of inner worlds in all their Technicolour glory, including our conservatisms, radicalisms, extremisms, perversions, our great neediness, our dark secrets, especially the ones we don't even know we hold, as well as our democracies, our generosities, and our willingness to collaborate for the greater good.

When I  stopped trying to mold my friend in my image, I was left to buzz inside my own pain. And like the homeopathic cure it is, my anxiety was able to do its magic of  peeling back the layers to get underneath my insecurities, to air them out, to give them expression and love, and to let nature take its course in healing me. How? Full self acceptance. Including my insecure places, which actually diminished when I stopped trying to control my friend. Bonus: he simply got to be himself and I got the opportunity to behold him. When I listened to my own anxieties instead of focusing on his, I saw that we shared a desire to feel accepted unconditionally -- which made me feel closer to him.

Interestingly, this same friend would do anything to eradicate other anxieties that he judges as bad. When placed side by side, however, his loving protection for his "dark" fantasies versus his outright rejection of his "bad" anxieties revealed to me just how random and complex our self judgments are. Why should one thing be acceptable and the other rooted out like a dandelion infestation?

Getting back to wondering what kind of therapy to choose, perhaps the best approach is a polytheistic one. In other words, there is no one right model. You could engage with a number of therapies in your lifetime, whatever make sense at that point in your soul's evolution. It might even be possible that an inscrutable therapist is exactly what you need, even if it's to cut your teeth on understanding what is not good for you! I had a friend who spent two years on the couch with a traditional psychoanalyst who sat behind him and said nothing. So my friend shared nothing during each session and cried all the way home. But what he got out of that was a real, lived connection to his sadness, not to mention information about what kind of therapy he would avoid next time. That's good information to have! As Hillman says, “No one model would be ‘before’ another, since in polytheism the possibilities of existence are not jealous to the point of excluding each other. All are necessary in that they together serve one law only: necessity.” What do you need right now?

What I need now as a therapist-in-training is a new language. A way to talk about “depression” or “anxiety” that does not pathologize these soulmaking states. Hillman uses western mythological language to explore soul states. But as someone who has forgotten her myths (must I go back to school again?), I feel the need to look elsewhere for my terms of reference, or to start making up some of my own. The point, however, is instead of numbing it, fixing it, denying it, or moralizing it away, we could stop calling our various soul states names. Instead, we could just experience them. Let them be there. And not judge them or believe a particular state is THE TRUTH. An experience, and our interpretation of it, might be a truth in this moment. But it will pass. As everything does.

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.