Response to an acute reader

I am not flooded with inquiries, appreciations or expressions of interest from readers. So I was pleased to respond this week to a woman who emailed from outside the U.S. She composed a long and deeply thoughtful and poignant series of questions, concerns and grievances about feeling-centered therapy and my practice of it. Here is my response, which incorporates her questions.

Ms. ----

I thought of addressing your questions by a unified summary, but I know it would just come across as a ponderous pile of poetic mush. So at the risk of missing some overall essence, I’ll respond to some of your individual questions and concerns.

First – I’m a little like pianist Artur Rubinstein, who said that each concert he gave was merely preparation (practice) for the next one. That is, I do not assume I have thought-through to the ultimate superstring core of my ideas. This includes what I’m writing to you.

When the answers (i.e., your truths) are within and when feeling into them in silence brings them to the front, why do we need the presence and possibly the interpretations of another person?

I don’t believe that feeling our “within” feeling-truths in silence brings them to the front. A little closer to the surface is like a deeply embedded splinter that pushes its way closer to protruding through the skin but remains out of reach. Even more frustrating! Feelings not expressed “up and out of your mouth” (Paul Vereshack) just circulate around inside and reinforce the loneliness.

Here’s my basic idea of therapeutic help (as I’ve described in one or more of my little articles, somewhere): Professional therapy is just a formalization of the child’s natural process of expressing pain (holistically – with tears, words, sounds, facial expressions, body movements) to a deeply present, caring, accepting and believing parent-type person. (It’s another question whether the listener or receiver could be a child or adolescent or even someone younger than the sender.) Whatever the depth and dismal meaning of that pain – such as my very dismal notion that some of us may know and feel we “never left the starting gate” to become a person – that principle remains true. We need someone to hear and understand and – for that moment and maybe in memory forever – be our embracing parent. “Understand” is relative, of course, because perfect understanding would be absolute empathy, which would only be possible if the listener had lived the exact same disaster as the expresser. We can’t expect that, really.

Is ‘healing’ deep-seated problems about the presence of a ‘human container,’ about that mirroring?

Yes – that’s what I’m saying. Remember what Aletha Solter said – You should never leave a child to cry alone.

Where is the line drawn between therapeutic help and unhealthy dependency?

I don’t know. I don’t really know how to describe the nature of healthy dependency (“we need people”), or how much “codependent” (unhealthy dependency) is “too much.” I don’t know that Janov (The Primal Scream), the most radical traveler into human depth, ever addressed the question of the nature or “amount” of healthy dependency (then again, I’ve not read most of his many books). My personal view is that if our childhood needs for original symbiosis and healthy dependency were not met, the core of us will continue to “wait” for them. We may progress in meaningful ways but not in a fundamental way. Later in life we will be magnetized to someone or anyone who we feel will supply that earliest symbiosis. (Romantic partners: “You complete me.”) I recently encouraged a former client of mine to “partially kill” his codependent pulls while endeavoring to find the “right” person to fall off the cliff and land on (depend on).

I just feel it is impossible to be understood entirely, but that might as well be because it has never happened to me.

There is this contradiction / mingling in me, amid a need to be seen, the fear of being seen and the felt impossibility of being seen.

If someone (therapist, partner) does know the deepest “big bang” within you that has been uncovered, and you have poured it out, I think that would feel uniquely good. If you then sense there is more of an essential nature, or peripheral truths, to be found – well, then you’ll continue to investigate them through introspection, luck, therapy.

If, on the other hand, your question is expressing some fear that you, personally, are somehow unknowable, I’d suggest you either continue feeling silently into your “cellular memory” (I, for example, am fairly certain that I have felt into my Caesarian birth), or accept the fact that hardly anyone will ever know the information held within their pre-birth and birth trauma. We will all remain somewhat ignorant (just as the universe will remain radically unknowable). Then again, as you’ve suggested in another question, we might discover feeling information that we would not want to share with anyone, even a therapist, in which case we would accept some loneliness. I am in that place.

Showing your deep hurts has this tendency to rip your counterpart’s hidden hurts open, so it can feel like hurting them by being honest. They might act as professional as they come, but you therapists are just human (and quite frankly often hurt ones or so it seems).

Here is a paragraph from Vereshack’s on-line book:

“Place yourself for a moment, if you will, inside that dying child and you will begin to appreciate the forces with which I deal. Those of us who take our patients back in time to re-experience this pain directly are subject to the most unbelievable degree of feeling and therapeutic necessity. Our world in the depths of the mind is sometimes seemingly bizarre.”

The “primal”-type therapists – I include myself – are in fact prepared to accept the most unacceptable, painful, nightmarish.

You more than once questioned whether you (as therapist) should dig really deep, when you could only find, say, a soul abandoned at two years of age, now in an adult’s body.

It is the very rare client who will or can descend to her earliest – infant- or baby-stage – psychic abort. But I believe (at least at this moment) that it would be OK to do so. This is the area of compromise where we have to own that there is probably no perfect growth or birth, that we are all “molecular messes” and fusions of different layers of success and failure. In other words, here is where I endorse one strand of “cognitive therapy”-type process. That is, tying ourselves to the mast of knowledge and other more constructive feelings. It is obvious that we cannot not live significantly in our heads: Thinking is as essential to a child (and later) as feeling is to a baby. Just as I would be the devil if I were to ask a client to accentuate her birth trauma suicidal feeling over more vital feelings of happiness, so I’d be negligent to leave her to define a terrible feeling in a conclusion-forming way. An emotional state may “say”: I feel dead inside. It does not say: “Therefore I must die.”

It feels like the basic questions have not really been answered.

See if you still think so.

And get back with me, if you’d like.

– TPS