The time machine

 

In old age, I often find myself distilling insights and psychoeducational ideas down to a high-gravity sound bite. What had always been long, overly complex (and often boring) explana­tions of prob­lems and progressive dynamics may now be a few words, an author­itative maxim without appeal. Maybe this is not always good. But I believe it works.

I may say this to a client: The past can actually be changed. There is one and only one way to change it. The past is the chemistry of your childhood injuries, the “neuro­juices” (A. Janov) of pain that have remained locked in your brain, in your cells, that have toxified, changed, frozen the rest of your life. This chemistry can be roused, shaken and expelled from brain and body by expressing it fully. It can come out of your mouth, your eyes, your rage and need sounds, your desperate-and-hopeful pleas to blind parents.

It is true. A person becomes a different person when she returns to her past – where her child remains stillborn in injustice and unlove – and gives her long-delayed justice. She speaks to those parents. She weeps, she rages and rips the closed eyelids off them and the world that passed her by. She stands up, never to take it anymore.

The past inside her is changed. She feels different, permanently. The euthymic fake-happy smile is gone. The umbilical cord is severed. Her old behaviors are gone and a new spectrum of behaviors comes in. She is real, lost but found, and formidable.