A human being, not a human doing

Somehow, I have never presented, in twenty-two years, the following choice or directive to a client, until this afternoon*:

We understand now where your chronic stomach pain, distress, dysfunction comes from. It’s anxiety that became embodied in the repressive, topsy-turvy, frustrating, strange atmosphere of your childhood home. You remember your father being angry every day. You remember your mother’s bizarre, dissociative, escapist happy whistling and inane singing, every day. Your sister, with her suicidal depression, recently returned to you the memory of your mother’s sudden flipping to rage, cruelty and violence. She would push you away in revulsion, shove you. And then the next second, switching compartments, sweet smiles and nonsense tunes again.

In that setting, you had to go a little crazy by smiling, too, shoving all your feelings beneath a fake happiness. Lack of cheeriness would unleash your mother’s fury. Everything you couldn’t live or scream went into your gut.

If you decide you want to care about yourself, do something to stop being the stomach prison of anxiety, you will have to know consistently that your body symptoms are really emotions, feelings. You will have to know that that’s what you are and you’ll see that picturing these feelings is picturing your family that made them. You will have to become someone dedicated to your emotional healing. This would have to become your predominant way of living – not one hour a week, but your new purpose in life. You’d carry therapy outside of this office. At home you might write in private. At work, you already aren’t bothered by coworkers’ anxious solicitations to you to return to your smiling personality. To get better, you would have to become a different, darker person, and watch your family shake, be alarmed, storm around you. All of this would have to happen.

While readers might think this is an absurd intervention, what puzzles me is that most clients should be informed that healing requires a nearly preternatural commitment to it, to living from the new feelings and knowledge arrived at, until the old self mostly fades away – and that somehow I’ve never stated it this clearly to any of them before. And yet I’d heard about it, or something like it, in the past: Yalom once said (source forgotten) that therapy should be ‘the most important crisis in the client’s life.’

Barring unforeseen circumstances, this will be my next development.

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* Or if I have, I don’t remember.

“The world slipped bright over the glassy round of his eyeballs like images sparked in a crystal sphere. Flowers were suns and fiery spots of sky strewn through the woodland. Birds flickered like skipped stones across the vast inverted pond of heaven. His breath raked over his teeth, going in ice, coming out fire. Insects shocked the air with electric clearness. Ten thousand individual hairs grew a millionth of an inch on his head. He heard the twin hearts beating in each ear, the third heart beating in his throat, the two hearts throbbing his wrists, the real heart pounding his chest. The million pores on his body opened.

“I’m really alive! he thought. I never knew it before, or if I did I don’t remember!”

Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine, 1957, pages 9 and 10.