Now, I want you to accept the following situation. You are lying on a bed in a hospital and you are dying. You are your present age. You are not in physical pain, but you are aware of the fact that in a few hours your life will end. Now, in your imagination, look up and see your mother standing at the side of the bed. Look at her face. There is so much unsaid between you. Feel the presence of all the unsaid between you – all the things you have never told her, all the thoughts and feelings you have never expressed. If ever you would be able to reach your mother, it is now. If ever she would hear you, it is now. Talk to her. Tell her.
The Death Bed Situation, conceived by psychologist Nathaniel Branden and introduced in his book, The Disowned Self, can evoke the most abyssal, most unearthing, most moment-of-truth feelings in a person's life. When I read it for the first time, I was instantly overcome in the way that I suspect a person is when at the moment of death, their entire life appears before their eyes. Childhood need as deep as time, ages of invisibility, and lifelong loss surged to pour out of me at once, an unstoppable nuclear bomb. But something did stop them: my repression, which I have come to see as one of the most powerful forces in the universe. The infinite juggernaut stopped, and disappeared. Though not the first or only means, this triggering exercise proved diagnostic of my nature in different ways. The first was: It was supposed to open me up to healing, but it couldn't: The repression was too strong. Another: The ephemeral feeling showed me how much fatal hurt was suppressed, a "quantity" that appears impossible at the thought of it.
I have used the Death Bed Situation sparsely, not with most clients, always with the hope that it will evoke a representative epiphany of their life. As it goes, it is mostly diagnostic.
Many clients are tearful, but I've rarely if ever witnessed the anguish that I know is "always there, whirring continuously just beneath the membrane of life."* One can see this deficit in Empty Chair process, too. If the person were really in communion with their father or mother, they would collapse to the floor, or possibly throw the chair through the wall. Death Bed is even more powerful. This is the one moment to be what you never could be, to name your need even before your identity formed.
Some clients prove, by their words, tone and affect, that they cannot really do therapy. These are the individuals who, in that very moment when they could be a person who matters, apologize to their mother for not having been a good enough daughter. Or they praise their terribly deficient parent for "doing the best you could." This is repression and self-sacrifice, alpha and omega, of their entire life, a badge of honor of no dignity, no value.
A woman who had already shown her complete immersion in what Virginia Axline (Play Therapy) called the "emotionalized attitude," a style of tainted consciousness, could feel nothing as she saw her mother standing at the side of the bed. After a long moment of silence: "When I picture the scenario . . ." Detached from self, the world, life.
It's understandable. People come to therapy as a system of defenses and flaws that predominately work. They are Freud's optimal state: "I do not doubt that it would be easier for fate to take away your suffering than it would be for me. But you will see for yourself that much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness." No one wants to be more undone than they already are; so undermined that they lose their ability to talk and reason and rationalize.
Arthur Janov: "Most of psychotherapy is talk therapy or insight therapy, or therapy with words. And Primal Therapy has found that it's not words necessarily that we need to go to. In other words, we need to talk to a brain that doesn't talk, that feels."**
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* Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner and other tales of psychotherapy, Basic Books, 1989. Prologue, p. xi.
** From a short video available at YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bcOO3JICgY
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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.