Psychotherapy Blogbriefs is about my experiences, learnings, discoveries, thoughts and suggestions as a therapist in Santa Fe over the past 18 years, and as a human during the course of my life.
There is a felt terror that underlies many common efforts to avoid contact with the deeper dimensions of the self. This can be called the existential terror surrounding death - or, more descriptively, I think, the sense that one will disappear, and cease to exist - or the terror which attends early experiences of neglect or abandonment by primary caregivers (which is, after all, the reflection of the very real possibility, known by the body in its wisdom, of its own demise). However one wishes to name it, this terror is a primal experience which requires a certain direct attention, and even some significant degree of conscious surrender or acceptance, on the way to re-establishing the total commitment to and reconnection to oneself that will be the basis for psychological integrity.
It is terrifying to approach this core, and the prospect is often associated with a belief that one will be swallowed up by the immensity of the experience. This fear is an exaggeration. One does not disappear, but one is transformed, which may be tantamount to the same thing in one sense at least. Who one has experienced oneself to be may indeed change very significantly.
In other words, with the proper understanding and the proper commitment, and, I will add, with the proper guidance and support, it is possible to approach this terror safely, and to not only survive this approach, but to learn to experience a depth of psychological freedom and wholeness that perhaps no other process will offer.
And yes, this does enter into the realm of the "spiritual", but let's not be too quick to define that realm in simple terms.
The structures of personality are strongly built. They do not tend to be very flexible, or subject to easy change. Instead, they provide a concentrated base upon which a life can be established, developed, grown and understood. This is not to say that these structures are altogether desirable, or altogether admirable. They have their purpose.
When it is determined that these structures are not serving one as happily as one might wish, questions arise as to how they might best be approached, worked with, influenced, transformed or shifted. A typical response that one sees in therapy is the expectation, the hope, the desire, that they will be amenable to being discarded, and that this strategy will be, or ought to be, relatively easy, if only it is conceptualized properly, and the right intention is set into motion. This response is not usually explicit, or even conscious. It can be surmised though without too much difficulty, and brought into awareness so that it can itself be examined and reassessed for its relationship to reality.
Here's how that reality tends to look: in line with the first paragraph, the typical response, with its attendant expectations and hopes and desires, will need to be abandoned, and in its place what will be needed is a set of more appropriate and realistic expectations. Central to this new set of expectations will be the willingness to cultivate and develop a new kind of relationship with the offending personality structures. This new relationship will be one of friendliness and acceptance, forgiveness and humility, with regard to all of one's imperfections and flaws, all of those aspects of oneself that one instinctively wishes to discard out of hand.
This new relationship is actually motivated by very pragmatic considerations in the therapeutic context. It embodies the wonderful paradox that the kinds of changes one might wish to make will in fact be facilitated by an attitude of acceptance, rather than by hostility and aggression toward oneself. Indeed, the very act of acceptance and forgiveness loosens the inflexible structures of personality and renders them more amenable to the kinds of reshaping one might desire, while a strategy of aggressive self criticism elicits an internal and rather automatic response of defensiveness and tightness, thereby further strengthening the very structures one wishes to alter.
This is a surprisingly radical concept at first, and so is not as easily undertaken as you might imagine it would be.
I had a client recently talk to me about how he is re-claiming an essential aspect of who he is, an aspect that he has been ashamed of, and that he has tried, for many years, to bury, or deny, or cover up with an assumed persona. The shame he has felt regarding this foundational dimension of his personality is in part the result of a rather abusive fundamentalist religious upbringing, the hell fire and brimstone variety, which although he could never truly accept it, still it had a profoundly formative effect on his relationship with himself. He has felt, all of his life, in some inescapable and horrifying way, BAD, or perhaps even evil - the orthodox terminology is, of course, sinful. Hopelessly sinful.
Now that he is in the process of learning to truly appreciate and even love himself - not egotistically, but with a genuine caring and kindness toward himself - he is becoming able to re-view his past, his family, his culture, and to begin to appreciate some of the qualities of this culture that are indeed central to who is really is, while at the same time, he is becoming able to separate out those aspects of his past that have been injurious, and to not, as it were, throw out the baby with the bath water.
Re-integration. Discernment. Healthy psychological and emotional - and, yes, even spiritual - boundaries.
