Finding the Center

It was an amazing process. I know my T felt good about how it turned out in the end but I don't know how much of a shock it was to him when I wanted him to share his feelings. It really worked, though--I needed a role model for my feelings, a trellis against which they could unfold (I had needed that as a child and hadn't gotten it). I knew that it was appropriate and necessary to keep my feelings in the center, though I had some twinges of worry that I was cruel to use his raw feelings for my process. At the end I gave him a little plastic salamander (red with black spots) and asked him to carry it to the funeral in his pocket so that I could be with him that way.

The next week I spent in Washington DC working very hard on a professional project. The pain inside built up to a dangerous level, and I wasn't able to start to let it out when I got home. On the way to my next T appointment I had images of cutting myself during the session. I was serious about that--it felt like an important symbolic gesture in which I needed my T to accept and share my pain in that physical a way. It also felt safe enough because it felt clear and symbolic and because I imagined being able to bring it inside the process of the session instead of it being something excluded and trying to get attention.

I wrote something about that impulse before the session, and with great fear I started to give what I had written to my T at the beginning of the session. But he interrupted me. He needed to say that the previous week he had had a medical problem that had disturbed his balance and this was his first day back and he couldn't turn his head or move around as he usually does. I was devastated--that seemed to make impossible everything that I needed to do. He initially said he couldn't sit on the floor, but he saw my reaction and changed his mind quickly on that. But it was still very hard, particularly when I had been away and desperately imagining that everything would be the same when I got back and everything was not the same. He also said that he had had some pre-cancerous spots removed from his face so his face might look distorted.

I had to deal with my reactions so I talked about the feelings that came up, even the small child feelings that it must be somehow my fault. I struggled to deal with those feelings and never got as far as the content of the pain that had built up inside me to a dangerous level. But we did touch that pain symbolically. My T said that as he struggled with his disorientation and the pain of the procedure on his face that he had felt he was symbolically participating in my pain and confusion. I reached out to touch one of the spots on his face and felt that I was completing the circle and the pain was shared. That was similar to and therefore validated what had happened two weeks before about grief.

My next session I asked my T if he could feel how what I had wanted to do with the cutting would have been a powerful symbol in the session, and he said yes, with feeling. But then that session went in different directions. I was still struggling with pain, in fact struggling to give shape to the pain, but cutting never felt like the right shape. I asked my T for something from his feelings about the shape of pain and he said Gethsemane. We sat with that, and it was very powerful. I went back to it even more powerfully early the next morning when I watched at the cross at Church, and thanked God for giving me the pain so that my child self didn't have to suffer it (see Gethsemane).

I felt very good about that experience for a couple of days. Then the following Tuesday I made a mistake and was late for a special presentation my son was doing at school, and I felt so bad about that it triggered me into a terrible crash. I felt I had ruined everything, proved that all the good things that had happened were not real, by crashing so badly. I talked to my T on the phone and he tried to reassure me, but it wasn't getting through at all. I was just too locked into hopelessness.

My next appointment with my T was two days later. He tried again to speak to and reach out to my despair and it still didn't get through. I looked a while for other directions that might lead me back to hope and being able to connect with him, but nothing opened up. I finally said that the only thing I knew to do was to up the intensity level and hope that something would happen that would break down the barrier. That is risky, but it almost always works. So I went back to the idea of cutting myself in the session. I felt that if I was going to make it a powerful and productive symbol I had to talk about what it meant and to go slowly (for one thing to be alert to other possible paths--sometimes if I make the commitment to do something that is enough and at the last minute I don't have to follow through). Because I was in so much despair what cutting meant to me at that moment was partly punishing myself, but it also was a powerful way of saying that the pain is real and honoring it and reaching out to it.

When I moved towards action my T said: "please don't cut yourself." I was horrified--here was what looked like the only way out and he was blocking it. He said he didn't want me hurt more (which isn't the way it feels to me, of course) and he cried. That broke through to me. I reached up and touched his tears and marked my arm with them where I had wanted to cut. And then I was able to feel close to him, finally getting out of the isolation of my despair.

We ended that session on a symbol of hope. The previous session, when I was trying to find a shape for the pain, I talked about it as a lump for a while, and at one point that imaginary lump was a lump of bread dough. I had the idea that that was a symbol that ought to be acted out, so despite my despair, I had baked Russian Easter bread. I had carried a loaf to the session even though I didn't consciously feel the hope that the bread symbolized, and at the end of the session I gave it to my T.