In-house #8: The Socratic two-step

Sometimes, in an expansive mood, I will set aside the diagnostic interview and ask a client: ‘What do you think therapy does? How do you think therapy helps?’ I always expect the question to jazz him or her: to urge discovery, to shine a light into an unknown cave. It’s a good question because some people have no clue and come for magic, and now they have to get real about themselves. Or they speak the clichés and memes du jour – “sounding board,” “receive guidance,” “learn coping skills,” “cognitive therapy,” “neuroscience,” “get my feelings out,” or more rarely, “learn about myself.” If so, the next question would be: ‘Do you think that changes a person?’ Silence ensues. I want to put them on the spot. Why shouldn’t they be able to figure out the answer? These questions nearly compel a deeper reality than anything the client’s mind has brought to the room, or that the mainstream of psych or Dr. Phil offers. They will realize their answers aren’t good enough. That “coping” or guidance or talking isn’t dislodging depression; learning psycho-facts and even insights doesn’t whisk away the sludge of identity mal-ease. “Expressing feelings,” as they understand it, can indeed seem helpful. But they’re not talking about anything outside of their adult life. They don’t know that –

“We scream before we cry, cry before we speak, and speak before we can organize conceptions about what we have and don’t have. Each of these stages of expression forms part of the skill of communication. Crying is a language – a primitive one, but nevertheless a very human one. The history of neurosis is the history of misery and the need to cry out this misery. Crying is not only an expression of general hurt; it is also a vehicle that carries us back through time to those specific traumas that were buried long ago by the processes of repression. It is tears that break down those barriers and help us on that voyage through time when we were hurt and could not cry. Tears wash away our pain and unmask the unconscious. This is not a metaphor but a biological fact.

“Tears of early loss are the solution that dissolves the walls of the unconscious and liberates encapsulated pain. . . . .

“Deep weeping as we see in our therapy is not hysteria but a unique new category that involves healing. It is the first convulsive phenomenon to be related to the healing process. Here, the adult brain gives way to the child’s brain, travelling back to an exact feeling, an exact moment and scene where crying should have taken place but did not – tears suspended in time by the agony of the experience. The regression from the adult brain to the emotional brain and then to the ‘pretear’ perinatal brain is the exact reverse of cerebral development.

“Tears, by and large, are uniquely human. We differ from animals in our ability to cry and tear. Crying is a curative process. I do not believe that one can cure either mental illness or a host of serious physical ailments without it. For some reason, however, this natural function has become opprobrious. We shush our children and deride them as “crybabies,” consider it grown-up not to cry, and believe it is a sign of weakness to give in to tears. So we block out this innate, biological process and then pay the price, because along with that blockage goes a host of other suppressions and dislocations. It is not just wispy tears that are blocked, but basic biological functioning.”*

When a serious or exceptional client asks herself the question, she will feel the ominous question mark of her life. She will feel that there must be some form of help, because pain moves like a slow river, like osmosis, beneath the hard crust of personality. She will feel that something has to change deep within her. This understanding may put her in a place to feel the core feelings of her formation. That’s her childhood meaning.

She is ready for depth therapy.

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* Arthur Janov, PhD, The New Primal Scream, Chapter 15, “The Role of Weeping in Psychotherapy,” pg. 318.