Lesson: Changing the past

I’ve written about this teenager before. Her case is one of those where I’d been complacently thrilled to have discovered the cause of a client’s problem, only to find, a little later, that I was wrong. The session that followed that false prize did, in fact, reveal the essential truth. But by that point, my ego had run out. Here was the superseding epiphany:

She was sad, fragile and anxious around all potential friends and enemies at school, for the past nine years. We had settled on the fact of, situation of, her mother’s cancer. I had worked with her father on his distance from his children. She and I traced her life change, from robust to sad and fearful, to her mother’s removing her from her school and friends to a different “preferable” school. That was her tragedy. I finally felt it stunningly. My empathy, my success was the answer!

But it wasn’t. When we returned to her mother’s cancer – after noting that “most problems are multi-determined” – something happened. She cried deeply, the kind of tears that are pain and cleansing. Why hadn’t this happened before? Unknown, but I will attribute it to “time and place” and probably to the obstructing power of my personality, that is, having been too peremptory and knowing in the session. This time, I was small and quiet, maybe nonexistent: We were simply in her pain.

Now, the tears were not this powerful:

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 because she was a child, meaning that one piece was missing: She needed to finally return to the past with her mother and relive the cancer and her terror and loneliness. She and her mother needed to forget the intervening eight years, go straight to the stillborn trauma, to the loss of her self that comes when you can’t live your feelings. I am saying that literally, they needed to reverse time and sit in that place, maybe she in her mother’s lap, with all the clocks thrown away, and cry and talk and hold.

That was the cause and the cure that we found, so certain it was that I informed her mother, with the young lady’s bright encouragement, of what needed to happen when her daughter was ready.

(For my part, I learned, probably for the fiftieth time, that I seem to be most helpful when I’m least significant.)

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