Questions with poor answers #1: The leaf

How do therapists help people handle their life in the present, when their present, like mirror neurons, is the elaborate resonance of their past? Applying a combination psyche x-ray machine and Geiger counter, we’d see that our contemporary moments are just a different chemical spot on the road of infancy to old age, not some separate dimension. Our first body and its feelings are our template. Evidence? So much adult wisdom isn’t very wise, as we see in today’s political and moral culture.

But no one wants to, or should, return to living in their past. Our organism is like a tall, abundant tree and our conscious life, a leaf. Who wouldn’t want to be a leaf on the top branch, breathing the sun and undulating in a breeze in a blue or rainy day, even if the trunk were sickly and the roots weak? Indeed, we’d want to be that airy leaf even more with such a troubled body below us. So with the human psyche. We crave the sunny present, not the underground museum of the past.

In my earlier years of therapy, I made the error of asking my clients to return to their childhood as their primary home. Though regressive work can’t be done week after week after week, my paradigm was: This is who you really are. Your here-and-now life is revenge, or escape, or self-medication, or “return to the bad object,” or blind struggle-based accomplishment, or is deceptive because you are the inner child. I saw the actual person, but really just whitecaps always falling back to their ocean.

This error would, one would think, eventually cause me to run to the greater “unbearable lightness of being” of present-living, present-focus. That is what Albert Ellis of Rational Emotive Therapy did. Frustrated with his clients’ failure to change, he quit Freud and decided – probably on a Sunday morning at 11:03 o’clock – that we can improve our entire psychology by thinking different. But that is wrong. The leaf you are, after all, is alive by the sun and air and by its inner self and roots. If you are Ellis-like, you have severed that leaf to float off into the air. That is the brief moment when positive and “rational” thoughts feel bright and powerful. Then you land on the ground.

Is good help a matter of “balance,” addressing past and present in some judicious mix? I guarantee you the answer is not simple, because after countless hours in twenty-some years I am still asking the question. Paying homage to childhood loss leaves us with it, at best, in a strange form: We know that some people, expressing their anger or grief, feel better, while others just stir up poison and feel worse. The reminiscence and feeling-through, it seems, is not enough. That cosmic sludge is still there; our life comes down to how we think about it, and how we think about it comes down to other feeling roots.

Deep organismic feeling, actual psychic blood-letting, is purging, but how much can you do in a vast lifetime of molecular experience?

I enjoy doing therapy, but I know I’m not here to eliminate or help forget the past. And grieving is a little Pandora’s Box. I watch clients come in for months or half a year, miserable, with paralyzed situations they continue to gravitate to. Then one day, after a week or a month of not being in the therapy room, they come in feeling better. They’ve put an ex-lover in his place and themselves in their place. A woman who could hardly walk is now fluid and easy down the hallway. A man feels strong and right, no longer the family’s problem solver and whipping boy. There may be some gifts we give that can’t be quantified and that we can’t be certain of. My one certainty is that their improvement has something to do with our care, and some knowledge of the road.