The Paradox of Becoming a Therapist

As the year draws to a close, as always, I find myself reflecting on the most important things I came to understand and learn over its course. While there are many insights and areas of exploration (always!), the one I keep returning to is the experience and the life of the therapist/analyst. So, here I want to share my thoughts about what I’ve come to see as the paradox of becoming a therapist. I believe that these insights can apply to those in other healing professions, as well.

One of the crucial elements of one’s education in becoming a therapist is the deep personal exploration of why she or he has chosen this profession. Helping people has so many different aspects to it and so many possible areas that can be addressed, even within the field of psychotherapy itself, let alone other fields (healing professions, teaching, and so on). But the work of someone who does long-term, deep work with clients to help them discover their patterns of relating to others and to themselves, requires a deep examination of what drives one to keep returning to the consulting room.

As I’ve worked with clients for a number of years now, I’ve been more and more aware of the fact that people who are drawn to the healing professions are, in part, driven by childhood experiences. (Alice Miller, in The Drama of the Gifted Child writes extensively on this.) Very often, while growing up, the child has had to learn to be immensely vigilant and aware of her or his parents’ feelings, expectations, and needs on a daily – or hourly! – basis. Knowing when their mother is angry, or when their father needs his coffee (or bottle, as the case may be), comes to be a matter of emotional survival, and the child develops a great skill for reading the family’s emotional states – even though he or she is not usually consciously aware that that’s happening. It simply becomes the fabric of one’s experience in the family. Finding opportunities to feel close and receive love and adoration can also take a fine-tuned skill that the child develops overtime when the situation requires it.

It is with this set of skills that later, the adult, arrives at the decision to become a therapist or healer of some sort. These skills are immensely useful in therapeutic work – and the person very readily reads her or his clients’ faces and body language in a very similar way to when this skill was being honed in on during childhood, intuitively. And as a result, clients often feel deeply seen and known by such a therapist for this reason – very rarely in their lives have they been paid such close attention to. (Sometimes they even struggle to really receive this much attention and might not trust it, experiencing it as someone looking for things to judge them for. But that’s a separate blog post!)

So where is the paradox? From the above it would seem that becoming a therapist after growing up in a tense, challenging, or neglectful environment is simply a positive development and allows one to use those skills in a constructive way. But given my own years of analysis and experience, I’ve discovered that there is indeed a major challenge that lies hidden within this – a challenge that might later become a life-long journey of working through for the therapist.

The key here lies in the fact that the skills of exquisite attunement and awareness of the other’s feelings and needs were formed because it was a matter of emotional (and sometimes literal) survival. The child learned not only how to read her or his parent(s) for what they feel, but they also learn what to do and say to elicit only positive reactions, and avoid triggering or upsetting them at all costs. Eliciting any “negative” feelings often comes to be feared at the very core as the child repeatedly learns that this causes their parents to retaliate and even punish them in response. Pointing to a parent’s weak spots, to their hypocritical statements, is rarely met with openness and reflection – more often than not, the child learns that doing so is wrong and gets one punished and rejected.

So, one’s childhood often teaches the child to observe, match the other’s experience closely, and avoid rocking the boat at all costs. Yet, one of the major jobs of a therapist is indeed eliciting challenging feelings, and pointing to those very issues that would have upset their parents. Even if consciously, the adult-therapist knows that this is necessary and potentially deeply therapeutic, some child part of them is likely to fear it nonetheless. Therefore, the now-adult is faced with the important task of undoing what was learned in childhood if one is to be an effective therapist. This can stir up inner conflict and possibly cause the therapist to merge with their clients, avoid important areas of exploration, be overly “social”, and even blur boundaries.

All these are important signals for deeper personal work – and can lead one to truly profound growth. In many ways, I see the choice of becoming a therapist as (in part) an unconscious desire to change this ingrained dynamic, to be able to talk about anything, to learn to freely express feelings and thoughts that in childhood would have been met with rejection or punishment. In this way, while helping others, the therapist can also experience deeply transformative growth as part of their work. I know I do.

The Ritual of Everyday Life

​Like most people, I tend to dislike cleaning. I do it because it needs to get done, but it’s not really fun. It is literally a chore, something people compare dull, repetitive, and annoying tasks to. However, I have recently discovered a surprising element to chores that made the process become fascinating for me. I will share this below, but first, I want to share a memory that sprung to mind when I made this discovery.

When I was 9 or 10 years old, my family and I were expecting company — a family friend and his son were visiting us​, which was a rather rare occurrence. The son (I’ll call him Sam) and I were good friends, and I was thrilled to see him because he lived on the other side of town and we went to different schools, so I got to see him very, very rarely. In preparation for their visit, we all got busy cleaning the house top to bottom. And part of the reason this memory stands out for me as much as it does is that I noticed that I felt quite differently toward these same chores that I normally hated doing. I found myself thrilled to clean my room and wash the kitchen counters. Suddenly, dusting the bookshelves was kind of exciting. This was such a powerful experience, that decades later I remember it more vividly than I remember seeing Sam and spending time together during that particular visit.

What was it that shifted my perspective so powerfully? One could say that the excitement of the goal ahead (the special occasion of seeing my friend) is what motivated me to be more engaged with the tasks at hand. This is how I saw it too, until very recently, when I was reflecting on the topic of ritual. When most people think of rituals, they usually think about daily routines, religious practices, or perhaps the obsessive-compulsive rituals that someone can’t seem to stop repeating. But there’s an entire world to ritual that happens literally every day, something we are not often taught to look for. Once I began noticing this, the idea of ritual has created immense meaning in my life.

What happened for me in preparing for Sam’s visit was that I was so thrilled to see him, that to savor the anticipation, cleaning the house became part of the ritual of preparing to see him. This is why it stands out in my memory this much – not because I did a particularly stellar job or because I overcame laziness to do the tasks I normally avoided at all costs (what 9-year-old wouldn’t?). It stands out because this time, the cleaning had a different feeling to it, almost something sacred. It bonded us as a family, as we all worked to create the space in which to welcome cherished guests. We weren’t merely doing chores – we were creating something special.

The more I reflect on the idea of ritual, the more I see it at play on a daily basis. For example, when I put my makeup on in the morning, it’s not just a routine, although that’s a part of it. There is a ritual quality to it because putting on my makeup means I am going to the office to see clients – and during those 10 minutes or so, I start to enter into a different self-state in order to prepare for the day. Similarly, so many other routines in our daily life can be seen as rituals that create a shift in our self-states, a different kind of energy. Washing dishes, rather than a chore that eats up 20 minutes of the evening, can be experienced as a ritual that creates clean dishes and a clean kitchen – with the many deeper implications for an uncluttered mind. Other household or work tasks can gain a similarly rich meaning as well.

The many teachings on mindfulness talk about something very similar, but I see an added element to it – that what I am talking about is not just about being in the moment without trying to escape “boring” or painful reality, but about the conscious creation of something new within one’s life, a shift in awareness and in internal experience. Finding the ritual in everything – taking a shower, getting dressed, cooking, eating, and so on – is what shifts one’s life from a series of routines and chores to a deeper, possibly even spiritual, experience.

But Other People Have Had it Worse than Me

I hear this phrase so much in my work that I realize that it needs to be addressed more. Rather than writing about it, I decided to record a video that is now on YouTube. You can watch the video below or go to my YouTube channel.

 

There is much to be said about this topic, so please leave comments — either below, or on YouTube below the video.

No Money, No Problem: Part 2 – Now What?

In Part 1 of this post, I talked about how it happens that people continually recreate the situation where they have no money, despite possibly earning enough (or how it might be a struggle to create a situation where they do earn enough). I talked about some of the unconscious forces that might be at work that perpetuate the situation of deprivation and lack that one experienced during childhood – whether that was a literal deprivation (poverty, hunger, lack of resources), or an emotional one (neglect, abuse).

 

First, I’d like to address the fact that Part 1 of the blog received some very powerful responses, both on the blog itself and on social media. The most powerful responses came from people who immigrated to the US from other countries where they lived in poverty and have had to teach themselves how to save money, how to go beyond surviving and begin to thrive financially. Some of my own family members have done just that, either rising through the corporate hierarchies or bettering themselves through education in order to get better-paying jobs. For these people, the experience of poverty and oppression was so dreadful, that they courageously fought to change their circumstances and their financial situations. So, for them, the unconscious forces were quite different than what I described in my post. One dynamic at work there is the fear of reliving those dreadful conditions – to the point where one is compelled to do whatever it takes to avoid them in the future. There is much more to this, and I want to be sure to emphasize that everyone is different and I cannot hope to describe every possible unconscious constellation here. However, I do welcome responses to this post to share your own experiences and insights.

 

And now I will return to the task at hand – addressing the situation where one recreates the deprivation and lack in her or his life through lack of money. While consciously one might be constantly wishing to make more money, dreaming about hitting the lottery, or even being magically rescued by someone with a lot of cash to spare, unconsciously, something altogether different is playing out. Getting to the understanding of unconscious forces at work is the stuff of psychoanalysis and a challenging task indeed. It took me years to recognize it for myself, to piece together the many facets of my life and childhood experience before I could see, clear as day, that for a long time I was unconsciously literally trying to avoid having money. Realizing that on some level money has been tainted with the deprivation, neglect, or abuse of power is an enormous step in the direction of shifting one’s relationship with money. It’s a process that takes time and is very much worth that time.

 

Now what? When am I going to get to the way out of this mess already? Isn’t that why you’ve made it this far into the article? In terms of solutions, lots and lots has been written about it. I’ve listed the tiniest selection below. But while as an analyst, I might suggest a resource I think could be useful, my work with clients is not about prescribing solutions – my work is to help empower and support the person to find their own way through self-knowledge. And what I’ve experienced, both in my own analysis and in my work with clients, is that that empowerment emerges naturally as these unconscious dynamics are recognized and worked through on an emotional level.

Some questions that might come up around working through money issues are:

• What is it that might feel dangerous (on an emotional level) about having money (or having anything else, for that matter)? This may seem like a silly question, but it might have some very, very serious answers.
• Conversely, how might staying broke keep things “simple” (i.e., No Money, No Problem! Again, this is a question that sounds silly on the surface but is actually quite challenging.)
• How is money tied up in important relationships?
• How might having money disrupt those relationships, and why might that feel too dangerous to do?
• Conversely, how might staying poor/broke maintain some important, needed relationships?
• How might doing better than your family be somehow dangerous as well?
• What might you have to lose – or fear you might lose – if you were to change your financial situation?

 

I could keep going, but I think this is a good-enough sampling of what might need to be worked through, and also illustrative of how deeply money issues go.

 

Money itself is both literal and symbolic on many levels, representing as well as intertwining with other means of support, nourishment, connection, and so much more. If these experiences are tainted, money can become tainted as well, with manipulation, sadism, control, and other toxic ways of relating. Therefore, in my experience and opinion, to truly work through one’s relationship with money is to work on all of these issues simultaneously – and this is why that work is so challenging and at the same time truly, truly worth the effort (pun intended!).

 

Additional resources:

The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist

I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi

Secrets of the Millionaire Mind: Mastering the Inner Game of Wealth by T. Harv Eker

… and literally thousands of others.

No Money, No Problem: A Deeper Look at Having No Money

I’ve worked with a number of clients for whom this scenario is very familiar: they live paycheck to paycheck, and no matter how much or how little they earn in a month, they wind up with nothing in the bank. Somehow, they cover their basics, but there’s nothing left over. They feel ashamed, they tell themselves they should be saving up, they fear the future without any kind of financial cushion to fall back on, and yet month after month, the bank balance goes back to $12. In fact, for a long time, I’ve lived this pattern myself, so I know it inside and out.

So, what is going on here? There can be so many different things at play here, but I am going to describe one very common unconscious dynamic that could be driving this particular pattern.

So, it’s a typical month, and you are making a relatively predictable income. Then, suddenly, something breaks your way and you have some extra money coming your way. It feels amazing, something in you relaxes, you might start thinking about putting away some of that money for the future, fantasizing about how amazing life would be if this “extra” was a regular thing, how you might now be able to afford that trip to see your friend upstate, and so on. Then, this new pocket of ease compels you to go on Amazon and order something extra – something you don’t actually “need” per se, but that makes life a little easier. Or, you order takeout and get something fancy. Maybe you treat yourself to a trip to the clothing store. This new sense of having a bit more in the bank feels so wonderful that you want to commemorate it with a new pair of jeans. You’ve been working so hard, that you do need some treat, something to validate how much you have to hustle and juggle every month. After all, you’ve had so little for so long, you’ve had to deny yourself most luxuries and make do with basics. Maybe none of this is consciously thought – you just make the order and try to enjoy the bounty while it lasts, because you know it won’t.

I know this will feel familiar to many readers. What’s at play here revolves around the experience of deprivation or a sense of lack, often stemming from the far reaches of our childhoods. We get so used to that state, that it’s hard to imagine anything else.  Those of us who came from poverty will have this state ingrained very deeply – but even those who grew up with financial comforts may feel ashamed or guilty about it (or about something else within the primary relationships) and unconsciously punish themselves by living a life of deprivation to make up for it. Whichever way it comes about, it’s the air we breathe, it’s the way we experience equilibrium in life – the life of husting and juggling just feels “normal” even though it certainly doesn’t feel good.

So, what gets created – and recreated over and over – is a similar state of deprivation, even as consciously you might be wishing for a very different kind of life. And then there are all kinds of issues around the fact that if we grew up in poverty, then we also know that our parents struggled as well. My own mother tells me how when I was 3-4 years old, she would often go hungry in order to feed me. The layers of guilt and shame around having things (including money!) might build even more. Having more money would mean living a life that’s different from (i.e. better than) our parents’, and not wanting to disturb these relationships in our minds, we simply stay where we’ve always been. It’s a kind of equilibrium: no money, no problem…-ish…

Then, what happens when someone like this gets a bit more income in a given month (or week, or even day!) is that unconsciously there is some signal going off, saying that the familiar equilibrium has been disrupted. Consciously it’s a sense of “well I deserve the treat because I’ve worked so hard to get it!” or even “I’ve had to put off buying this because I couldn’t afford it until now!” – and that’s absolutely undeniable, which makes it hard to get underneath that. But what’s underneath is the “compulsion to repeat” (as Freud called it), which drives us to recreate familiar situations, even if they are painful – because there is much in them that needs to be experienced and “worked through.”

When I work with clients and we arrive at this realization, they often ask, “So what do I do to change this?” Seeing how deeply this goes, there might be a kind of despair as to whether it’s even possible to really change anything – or perhaps anger that we’re getting mired in old stuff that keeps us from addressing it in the present. I will explore this in part 2 of this blog post. And as I write this, I very much feel like the analyst who says, “Let’s talk about it next week” – but there’s a reason for that. This is deep stuff that takes time to integrate. But I will say that making these dynamics conscious is an enormous step in itself – where you recognize that on some level you do believe that “no money, no problem” is true. That’s where space opens up for real change.

What’s Behind Laziness?

Almost all of my clients talk about being “too lazy” or “just lazy” as their reason for not doing things they want to do or believe they should do. In the past, I, too, have used this term to describe myself, and my analyst gave me the enormous gift of asking me, “What’s behind that?”

This Doesn’t Remind Me of Anything

The other day, I was walking down the street and noticed a really happy, joyful feeling. The weather was perfect, it wasn’t humid, the air smelled fresh and light. I was walking to my office, looking forward to seeing all of that day’s – and that week’s – clients. Given the intensity of New York City and my particular office location right in the center of it all, this joyful feeling took me a bit by surprise.

As I took in another chest-ful of that fresh air, I caught it had a particular scent – and our olfactory sense, as most of us know, is strongly associated with emotion. This is why the scent of vanilla in the air can bring up fond memories of your grandma baking in the kitchen, or the scent of a particular cologne or perfume can evoke vivid memories of your ex.

Often, when there is a crisp, cool breeze like the first cool day of autumn, I get a very sweet, nostalgic feeling of being a young school-girl in Russia, heading to the first day of school in September, wearing my freshly-pressed uniform, excited to start the clean slate that is the new school year. Or, the scent of a warm summer day, with perhaps some freshly-cut grass or warm fruit somewhere, reminds me of my family garden where we would all work during the summer to grow fruits, vegetables, berries, and the like. It was such a special time that when those memories get evoked, I usually tear up. These are both positive memories, but of course, I have many other associations and memories that come up at different times.

But that day, walking to my office, when I noticed that the air smelled wonderful, I found myself searching my mind and coming up with a blank.

Huh. “This doesn’t remind me of anything,” I thought, with a tinge of disappointment and even unease. It was a subtle feeling, but it was there. And just like that, I was in my head, having lost the joyful feeling, as well as the awareness of that crisp, fresh air.

In that moment, I suddenly realized the truth of all those mindfulness teachings – about just how strongly we cling to the past and how hard we work to define our current experience based on something we have already experienced before. It creates a sense of safety and control: I know what is happening now because I’ve been through it before and I know how this goes. It’s instinctual, in a way – we want to protect ourselves from predators, terrible things happening to us, embarrassing ourselves, and so on.

But, as I discovered, this happens not only with scary things – and certainly not only related to scents! – but with everything. Even on that totally relaxed, wonderful Monday morning when I was feeling joyful and inspired, I had a hard time just taking that in, and letting it be a new moment, a new experience. I was glad I recognized this, because in another instance, I might have just “approximated” that experience to something it did remind me of, perhaps the September air I remember as a little girl.

This is about presence and recognizing that we are so primed to categorize and label every experience, that it’s often a challenge to be present even with situations that feel good. But those that don’t – if there’s a disappointment, anger, sadness, a disaster, or something else that’s truly upsetting – we tend to close up even quicker and more firmly.

There is no easy fix – and if you’ve made it this far into this post, you probably already know this. I am sharing this moment and my realizations with you because this is something that connects us as human beings. We all try to escape the present, in obvious or subtle ways. Perhaps we can remind each other of this (over and over!!) and discover not just that this present moment is worth experiencing (regardless of how it may feel) – but that for the rest of your (finite!!) life each next moment can be a new moment to explore.

Money Shame

This is a post on that subject that people have a harder time talking about than sex. But as soon as I started exploring it, I became completely fascinated by how rich and complex it actually is. So I’d like to share with you some of my enormous discoveries here.

When I started working on growing my private practice, I quickly came upon a huge issue:

My relationship with money was tied up with all kinds of internal conflict.

I have been learning an immense amount from the work and writings of Tiffany McLain about money in private practice, but in this blog I want to share some thoughts and feelings about money as a whole. Of course, entire books are written on this subject, and I cannot encompass everything that runs through this issue, but I do want to focus on one important element: shame.

Most people would say they want more money, and it seems so simple. Who wouldn’t be elated if an unexpected $1000 check suddenly showed up in the mail or the boss decided to give you a $10,000 raise in salary? And I am not here to contest that. But those are passive ways of money “showing up”.

What about situations where you are asking for money?

Such as, oh I don’t know – setting a fee for services you offer.

There are certainly people do so without hesitation (and if you are one of them, please share your experience in the comments!). However, many are actually struggling with unconscious shame and conflict around asking for, having, and even wanting money in their lives.

Shame was the last emotion I ever expected to encounter when dealing with money. Discomfort – sure. Feeling unskilled at managing a practice at first? Naturally. And yet, there it was – shame, in all its pervasive, unconscious glory.

No one taught us this stuff in school – not only how to manage money, but about our feelings and attitudes around money, the deep, unconscious stuff. But the minute it was time to set my fee as a therapist – despite the fact that office rent in Manhattan is astronomical, and there are quite a few other overhead expenses to account for – I felt anxious.

Who would pay me my full fee? Would they think I’m a fraud? Would they think I’m too young to charge the fees that older, more seasoned analysts charge? And if those are not enough, here’s a doozy: did I deserve to get paid this much?

Instantly, the question becomes that of self-worth. Many rationalizations and fearful defenses showed up immediately: well, the economy sucks. People want to use their insurance and wouldn’t want to pay out of pocket. I’m too inexperienced to charge that much. I’d be making people uncomfortable and strained by asking for so much money per session. Are there even people who make enough to pay so much? I mean, who makes that much money? I certainly never did…

Bingo.

Those pesky years growing up in poverty or close to it, and all kinds of unconscious feelings, are all at work nonetheless. And the feelings are in multitude – anything from the familiarity with (and thus feeling most comfortable with) the scarcity experience to feeling guilty for doing better than my family did at my age.

And there is a lot in between. For example, as a woman, and in my particular life experience, I have often been the emotional caretaker (as have most therapists I know!). Thus, the familiar stance is to put the needs of others before my own – which accounts for a lot of those rationalizations above. How dare I ask to be taken care of (and money in this case is exactly that!), when my job implies that I’m “supposed to” do otherwise? This is where the shame comes in.

So it is not as simple as it may seem. And while I encountered this issue as a therapist trying to build my private practice, many others encounter it in other realms and professions.

Looking at these feelings and issues is crucially important, and the actual reality comes down to 2 points:

1. Self-care – in order to truly be able to show up and do good work with clients (or whatever your work happens to be), one needs to have her or his needs met well. When it comes to deeply emotional work, this is even more crucial. Sleep, diet, vacations, time with family, and other things need to be in place. And getting paid enough so that one does not need to worry about any of the above expenses (along with all the practical ones like rent, insurance, and so on), is what allows those to be in place. Self-care is not a luxury. 
   

2. Clients’ Experience – Whatever work you do with people, whether it’s therapy, bodywork, consulting, or whatever else, it is an investment on their part. To one person that may be $50 per session, and to someone else it might be $200. But what counts is that if they are truly investing in themselves, they will then truly show up and take the work seriously. Even if you were a millionaire and money were not an issue, the client’s experience of investing in him- or herself is crucial.

I will end this with the below, and I am truly curious in your responses to this post, so please share them in the comments below.

Do whatever you need (Mentors! Therapy!! Podcasts! Books! Blogs!)

to find and get a firm hold on the fact that

you are already amazing.

(Yes, you. And I mean it, really feel it.)

You are not a fraud.

You are not a joke.

You worked hard as hell to get to where you are now.

Deep within you is a knowing that what you do has enormous value.

(Once more, with feeling. Yes, you!)

Live (and work) from that place, and others will see it too – but it has to come from you first. The world needs people like you.

Charge accordingly.

Why Psychoanalysis?

These days I am painfully aware that the field of psychotherapy is struggling under the weight of demands for quick fixes – demanded both by insurance companies and by the public in general. The truth is that we are culturally conditioned to expect the brightest, shiniest, most perfect-est products at half the price and delivered within 30 minutes or less. We all want the quick fix – this is why chocolate, alcohol, drugs, and binge-watching TV shows are so popular. When someone says she’s depressed (or complains that her co-worker is a bitch, her husband is a jerk, and so on), it’s very hard to explain – in a quick, convincing way, why doing deep emotional work is worth the trouble and the expense, why it’s worth it to look deeper into those feelings. We want to give that person a cookie, a drink, or a hug, and hope they “feel better”. Most of us really don’t learn that there is any other way.

Image source: Dreamstime

I do it myself at times – act on the wish to make some problem go away. It’s painful watching someone suffer, and the wish is to make it go away for both that person’s sake and my own. But beyond that, deeper than that, I wholeheartedly believe in the enormous potential of psychoanalytic work. It’s not just so that you can feel better, have someone to talk to, or even stop drinking – although these are indeed important. But in my heart of hearts, what psychoanalysis is really for is to find the connection to one’s own truth and to have the real possibility of owning it and living it in the world. That all sounds beautiful and poetic – so let me get more specific with an actual example.

I started psychoanalysis while in grad school (training as an acupuncturist), and it was a natural fit for me because I have always been introspective. My analyst was amazing – insightful, caring, real, and deeply available to me on an emotional level. After 3-4 sessions, I started realizing that no amount of self-help books would offer me what psychoanalysis did – the opportunity to learn how to relate in an authentic way. When I first started, I was extremely anxious and vigilant, watching my analyst’s face for the slightest signs of disapproval, and wanting to do whatever it took to show her how hard I was working. But here’s the thing: until I was in that particular situation with an analyst who was deeply emotionally attuned to me, I had no idea how anxious I was and how vigilant. These tendencies got named and worked through. My fear of judgment lessened. I began to learn how to actually interact and speak from my own center and not to fear authority – first with my analyst, and then also with the rest of my relationships. The difference was the lived experience with her. She wasn’t just “delivering” psychoanalytic nuggets for me to digest – she was living in the unique relationship with me. No matter how many self-help books I read (and I started reading them when I was 13!!), none could substitute for that lived experience. No amount of intellectually understanding my issues could substitute for the experience of looking my analyst in the eye and saying, “I’m mad at you” – something I wasn’t allowed to say to anyone as a child.

This had such a profound effect on me that I became an analyst myself, in the hopes of offering as many people as possible these experiences of a different relationship, one where they’re cared for and held, while having their erroneous beliefs gently shaken up and reworked. A quick-fix won’t do it – it took years for us to get our personalities wired the way they are, and it takes a long time for them to get rewired. But it is so worth the energy, sweat, tears, and money. All the research (including in neuropsychology), as well as countless people’s personal experience, points to the truth that there is no substitute for true, human connection at the level of the heart.

I won’t bother trying to convince the insurance companies of all this. I just hope to appeal to the people out there who are wondering why they keep picking partners who are wrong for them, who feel terrified whenever their boss comes around, who suffer with nightmares, who have shoved away their grief because their families implicitly demanded it, and who have lost all sight of ever having their own authentic life. To all of you I say: please, for the love of something deep within you, find an analyst who fits you (that’s important), and do the work. You won’t be alone at it (maybe for the first time in your life!), and you will get something you really and truly cannot get in any other way.

 

The Map Versus the Territory, Part II: Trial by Fever

(If you haven’t read the first part of this blog, you can do so here. It will help you to understand what I mean by “The Map versus the Territory”.)

As I learn more and more about working with the body and how it intersects with psychoanalytic work, it becomes more and more obvious that unless I “practice what I preach”, it won’t mean very much. It would be like having a conference on meditation with no experiential components. And, because this is actually more challenging than it might seem, I would like to share with you one of my own experiences of learning the difference between the Map and the Territory.

As Reginald (“Reggie”) Ray talks about, our culture has grown fearful of and thus discourages us from trusting our own bodies. The minute something goes “wrong” – we get a headache, heartburn, or whatever else – there is a myriad options available to “fix” it. We are not encouraged to listen to our bodies, let alone follow their cues. For example, a headache might signal fatigue or hunger, but rather than rest or eat, we might pop 2 Advil and keep on going. Heartburn might signal sensitivity to a particular food, but as long as we have antacids, that doesn’t matter. Furthermore, we give over the responsibility for our own bodies and lives to the “authorities” – doctors, pharmacists, spiritual leaders, and so on. You get the picture. There is a great deal more to be said about this, but I’ll stop here to share my own experience.

I had come down with the flu, for the first time in probably over 15 years. For nearly 3 days, I had a raging fever, and a bunch of other, fairly familiar symptoms I don’t need to list. My own background in bodywork (my acupuncture and Chinese Medicine training) has taught me that all of these symptoms are actually a natural manifestation of the body fighting a pathogen, and that, for the most part, all I needed to do was let it do that. Yes, there are the zinc lozenges, essential oil diffusions, and baking soda gargles to aid the process, but for the most part, I knew to drink fluids and rest.

Despite my extensive training in alternative medicine, my trust in the body’s processes lasted for about a day and a half. After a night and a full day with a fever of 101, I began to worry that it would never go down, that it was a sign of something worse, and on and on and on. (At some point, I was sure it must be a sign of cancer.) Anxiously, I bought Cold & Flu medicine with 1-day shipping, and Googled “how to reduce a fever” on my phone. And I checked my temperature incessantly to see if it had gone down.

At some point, it finally dawned on me to think about my training with Reggie Ray’s materials, and to ask myself what this experience is here to teach me. The answer was immediately obvious: this was a lesson in trusting my body and how difficult it is to actually practice. My panicked search for a “fix” is what happened when being in the territory of my body – which was quite uncomfortable and unfamiliar – became too challenging. I escaped into the “map” – into my thoughts about the symptoms, into my beliefs about the body and so on. The map was also uncomfortable (who here would voluntarily choose to be panicked?), but it gave me a sense of control and thus a hope for safety. There was a goal to be accomplished, to get myself back to a state I recognize. My fever was nowhere near any danger zones that I’m well aware of, and yet I felt very uneasy with the experience of letting things run their course.

I didn’t count on this experience to be so illuminating, but it was. I know I’m not alone in this, even though each person’s individual manifestations of not trusting their bodies are different from mine. It also feels like a very basic kind of experience, kind of like a “trust fall”, but encompasses in itself an enormously important lesson with very deep implications.

Given my personal work, my psychoanalytic training, and my study of this area of somatic awareness, I’ve discovered that most of us are disembodied and afraid to trust the cues and experiences of our bodies. For example, wherever you are right now, can you conscioulsy, and without moving your feet, feel your middle toe? It’s harder than it seems! And this is only one example of the many small disembodiments that we all live with, most of the time. As I noted above, a big part of it is cultural. Aboriginal and native people have and had a very different approach to life, paying close attention to the earth, the nature kingdom, and their own bodies. With the advent of our modern culture, we have disconnected from these truly vital sources of information and nourishment, and have grown to prefer the map (our intellectual understanding or image of how things are) to the territory, the raw experience. Our bodies have become slaves to our minds.

Let me move from this dark state to say that it is indeed very possible to reconnect to our bodies and to these other more subtle but vastly more powerful sources of energy and nourishment than our limited, cramped minds could ever be. To me, the work of analysis coupled with meditation, both of which bring in bodily awareness, helps one to recognize all the ways you might have dissociated from your body and why. This is the very process of making the unconscious conscious, which must necessarily include the work of learning to trust your body to deeper and deeper degrees. In other words, this is how you can begin to truly own your body and discover the deepest truth of who you are.