In-house #12: Numb silence

I don’t know that my ideas about good therapy are changing, but I am settling, after twenty years, into a certain approach that comes from a sort of terminal sense. I saw a client, almost 20 years old, who seemed one with his sadness and hurt. This made him a good candidate for feeling-centered work. Something about him brought me back to a time when I had tried therapy – I had turned 27 – and was clueless to do it. I embodied the kind of lostness and ignorance where it was impossible to identify a terrible feeling. I had depression, for the first clear time in my life. (I could say that every minute of the preceding twenty-six years was depressed, but now there was something extra, and an awareness.) I had moved in with my first real girlfriend, who had two young children. I was not ready to be an adult; was unable to be conscious in the world, and was feeling a future-lifelong prison sentence.

The therapist, who was a psychiatrist, didn’t grasp this lostness that I was, and did not know how to introduce me to what might be done to start things, to help. I quit after two sessions. Looking at my client, and remembering that experience, I realized that anything thought, felt or said in the present would be beside the point, that the only direction useful to go would be to sink inside with no hook in the present. Just sink in numb silence. As Gendlin noted, or as I’m remembering him, the body knows everything, all our time. It is still there, and our troubles come from the mind having to move on. Imagine having to leave the one loved person behind for no reason, a Kafkaesque non-reason, just because the clock says so. It will never feel right. Everything thereafter will feel wrong.

That’s our mental illness.

So I ask the client to sink, with eyes closed, in numb silence. He and I will both have infinite patience. And with a little luck he will become the whole past in the present. Other depth therapists, like Vereshack whom I quote quite a bit, talk about exquisitely perfect reflective statements that allow the client to hear himself more deeply, a cognizant echo chamber. Certainly that can be good, but I worry that there is too much talk. More silence would have been better. My client landed on the feeling-awareness that no one had ever cared about him (in that place, no one can say “I know my mother loved me” any longer), and therefore this one new young woman had given him his heart. And she didn’t feel it that way.

Another client, 17, who fell numb and silent reached a “foreshortened sense of future” (casually remembered DSM-IV symptom) without any specific trauma. Only the general trauma of being in her life. Her life can’t, won’t go on. She’d never get out of this despair because it felt the truth. Visiting her in that place, I suggested that this was her “chemistry,” and that chemistry changes.

There’s an aspect to this approach that says it’s too serious for people, maybe especially people who are 19 and 17. I’m sorry, but we’re not here to be candy givers, motivational speakers. I think we’re here for reality.