At 71 (in a month), I'm seeing more clients than ever before: usually forty or more per week. But I've captured very few new insights (blog material) lately, and when I find one, I don't write it down. It just passes quietly into the time flow. I do remember an interesting one. A client told me that when he recently experienced joy – a once-in-decades rare mood that followed his reunion and weekend with an old girlfriend – he became scared to feel so happy, and "in that rare state, found himself 'wondering if I have a sense of self.'" Hearing this, I remembered once experiencing an incandescent lightning-shock emotion and finding that I'd lost my self. I discovered this explanation: Essentially, most of us lose our true, organic self – feeling – in childhood, from gradual repression, and then make an identity from our head. I am the strong one. I am the coin collector. I am the piano player. I am the smartest. My father is a policeman and can beat up your father. I am an attorney. We become a thought which we bend a positive feeling to, to feel solid, meaningful, "good," to be something. But when some time has passed and this new Self has become burnished and universal, then, if a child-rooted raw feeling floods us, it dissolves that thought-identity. In becoming solely body feeling for that moment, we become disembodied: light without its candle. We become for a moment what we should have been had our childhood survived. Loose in old age, I lobbed this personal tidbit to my client. And guess what? "Yes, that's me," he said.
There will be a few other insights, I'll wager, and yes, they are important to me. Knowing the self more is to, in some way, become the self which was, as I said, lost long ago.
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Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.