Dora Lite

Therapy.  It has been an important strand in my life for many years.  I’m not currently in therapy.  Perhaps I should say that I’m not currently seeing a therapist. But I do hear my former therapist’s voice in my head every day.  It’s my voice, but I needed his help to find it. That voice represents a view of my life from a higher place; and at times that voice provides detachment from the crusted ruts and self-constructed ruthlessly enforced agendas that have inevitably grown from my past.

We live, we learn, we remember, we construct stories that make sense of our experience. That ability is our greatest strength and our most powerful curse. We are bombarded by sensory input.  We use our brains to make survival sense of it.  We do a pretty good job, for the most part, but sometimes in the long run those stories sell us short because the narrator’s point of view is too localized, too restricted, too personalized.  If only there were a generic human psychological handbook that we could reference so that we would not draw conclusions based only on a personalized and narrow slice of evidence.

My guess is that literature is one of our attempts to produce such a handbook.  We read the narratives of others, stories told from others’ points of view, and then we filter them through our own internal stories. Sometimes when we read fiction a new streak of light enters the semi-darkness of our consciousness; sometimes we are able to see something truly new, and we are forced to reconstruct our own narrative in ways that take into account the new data.  It’s still our own personal survival handbook, but the point of view is ever so slightly broadened.

Stephen Grosz is a psychotherapist with many years of experience.  His book, The Examined Life, is a non-fiction collection of 31 short chapters. In each he  summarizes the therapeutic experience for one patient.  The chapters are short and contain no technical medical or psychoanalytical jargon.  Just stories told in human terms.  In each of these short chapters Grosz attempts to explain a patient’s patterns and to some degree the newly discovered paths that offer escape from those ruts.  In some stories the gains are huge, in others quite modest.  In some the jump from reported experience/feelings to insight is difficult to follow (and for me virtually incomprehensible), and in others the connections are clear and convincing.  I suspect the distinction lies solely in my own ability to truly empathize with each patient’s situation.

If nothing else the book offers hope that we can all grow beyond the seemingly ironbound limitations of our everyday lives.  Our own view is so limited, and we must constantly work to broaden it.  Grosz makes the point that the therapist’s most important job is to be truly present.  That means setting aside all preconceived notions and truly listening, being open, patient, and accepting.  It’s a lesson we can all stand to revisit from time to time.  Be truly present for ourselves as well as for others.

I don’t have all the answers, not even for myself.  And when I interact with others I need to set aside myself and be truly open to what others might offer.  I can choose to accept those offerings or reject them; I can embrace or construct healthy boundaries.  But if I don’t truly listen, I’ll never know what an appropriate reaction might be.

And listening to ourselves may be the most important skill of all (along with that essential sidekick self-deception). We can’t deal with all the complexity at once.  We need to artificially simplify in order to survive, but we also need to be open to what is beyond the walls that we have constructed for ourselves and that we reinforce every day.

Is it time for me to go back to therapy?  There’s never a bad time for therapy.  It doesn’t hurt (except the bills), and for the most part it can only help.  For the time being the internal therapeutic voice seems to be serving me well enough.  Or is that just self-deception talking?