Change, part two, part two*

Therapy in the contemporary era is mostly counseling, and counseling is mostly conversation and tears with the adult artifice in the chair. Sweet dreams and a soft stroke on the cheek to clinicians who are “there” for the presenting client and his or her presenting problem. That is difficult work that is easy, with both parties taking a mineral bath or maybe walking together, contemplative, through a dusky and moody meadow. All of us, I am sure, have heard that our presence – the relationship – is the prime conduit of help; we with our wise words and silences.

But every once in a while the lucky therapist helps – or simply watches – a client crack his entire persona world and crash into his deepest death-like pain: the killed child, who lost love and could never move on after it, but to scream in a timeless void. When this happens, he is no longer in the room. The walls have disappeared; he has no therapist. Sometimes the therapist, so caught up in the client’s first-time understanding, also feels he is not in an office, is in a dimension of utter meaning. And the man or woman changes then and forever.

I can remember only three occasions of this. The first time was in Colorado, sixteen years ago, when a man paced my office like a cougar on the prowl, neck veins bulging, rage a time machine transporting him back to childhood. After the epiphany – his father transformed his identity by making him the younger siblings' role model – he said that he hadn’t been aware he was in an office, in a room.

And then: A retired lawyer who was irritable at his kind wife. He wanted to know why. With no preparation but the suggestion of an exercise and the provision to bow out, I asked him to sit back, close his eyes, and picture himself on his death bed with mere hours to live. “Now, in your imagination, look up and see your mother standing at the side of the bed. Look at her face. There is so much unsaid between you. Feel the presence of all the unsaid between you – all the things you have never told her, all the thoughts and feelings you have never expressed. If ever you would be able to reach your mother, it is now. If ever she would hear you, it is now. Talk to her. Tell her.”**

He immediately started talking to her. His voice seemed to fade. I contributed some of my most judicious silence. He continued to talk, fade. Another silence. The pattern repeated, though I’m sure that by the second or third crest he no longer knew of me. And then it happened that he voiced a word that meant every devastation of his childhood, of his life. Again and again, the word. If it’s possible for a therapist to feel non-existent, a glorious non-existence, in the presence of a client who is alone in the greatest truth of his life, that is what I felt.

I’ve described this only for the purpose of asking: What is better, to be with the client, our “gold standard,” or to be gone while alone, he finds himself?

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* See Change, part two – https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2013/11/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none.html.

** Excerpt from Nathaniel Branden’s “the Death Bed Situation,” The Disowned Self, 1972.