Was she in love with him? 15th November 2021
Paradoxical and confusing.
He opens the door to me and right away he begins with, chit-chat.
Years away from this - and I have many hours' experience of finding people who have arrived to talk with me, lost outside the building; in the rain, the sun, the wind. Some are anxious, some are smiling anticipating telling their story and needing to feel better, many people are confused - all just people, and hopes and fears.
 |
And then into the peace of the therapy room...
But I never begin with chit-chat about me.
Ever.
So what is happening?
Of course I enjoy it, he's talking to me about him. Like I'm being let in, just a tiny, tiny bit. And then he sits down and we are back to my research proposal, hooray! And he is very clear in his mind that a trauma in the present, confirms the trauma of the past. A reanimation, that occurs not to resolve it - but to confirm it - because it feels normal.
Observing his way of thinking is like watching someone trying to assemble something from IKEA. Bits are being put together - but in the wrong order.
I want to yell - of course the present feels like the past! The present is understood in terms of the past because all perceptions are constructed from and around memory. But we don't feel overwhelmed and powerless only because we weren't loved enough as children. Loss and grief occur because we exist in relationship with people, and with the symbolic and actual reality of everything!
Now he is talking about events being interpreted as trauma. He is stating that trauma is an individual event, and in Kit's view events are 'meaningless in themselves'. Kit does not seem to believe in inevitably traumatic events, so anything you have ever read about restrained animals suffering so much more than animals who are free to run away from say, electric shocks, can be discarded. Trauma is caused by what then - only bad parenting?
So the only cure is the reparative relationship?
Except high levels of adrenaline and cortisol, and other neuromodulators amplify the interpretation and significance of events, and this excitingly crazy mode of perception will crystalize new meanings. Not always better ones, but usually the person's interpretation is symbolically true.
The interesting bit is the theory that meanings can be understood and changed only when there is a resonance.
But he is not interested in this and I've given up explaining.
He is talking about reaffirming the dynamic of being a child...
Of a child deciding by the age of five that they are powerless, compared to another child, who had different experiences, and believes that there is a solution...
OK - so is this about us?
I genuinely prefer to enact 'surely we can sort this out' - whilst I think that he holds a world view closer to 'the world's a shit place which I knew from the age of five'? I certainly wasn't given a positive version of reality when I was small. By the age of five. I'd learnt that people die, and that the nightmares preceding this, and then the fear, pain and loss that will follow, will be overwhelming.
It also occurs to me that in his view there is only - only what? - the filter and the phantasy?
Clearly I disagree that this is all there is.
But I don't engage, not here and now, and so we are moving on, joking and laughing and getting along fine. But I want to say 'it's becoming a theme Kit' and ask why he believes his much repeated statement, dogma almost, that 'trauma' is an affirmation of how the world works'?
Allowing yourself to be biased towards that belief, you will of course hear it all the time from clients!
In this room I'm not arguing. I don't even disagree, I have already said that there is so much more to it. Have I not explained already that that the mind can weave from apparently random experiences something transformational, and understanding how this happens seems core to creating therapy.
Eventually I say - "What is important is, we can all change at any point."
And he tells me that when there is a developmental deficit, we adapt to the deficit and therefore we prevent ourselves from receiving what heals...."
Oh, that statement strikes so deeply into my heart! The shock, like hearing a door slam, comes from his tone of voice. I hear conviction. And that is the right word, a prison sentence enforced through repetition, recitation of words and feelings radiating from numinous beliefs. I step back and out, away from the barbed wire net of meanings that trap and hurt.
He continues to explain, that we filter out what is needed even when it is right in front of us...
'We' or he? This sounds like a direct statement related to his experience - his experience of me, here and now? I wish I knew. But it strikes me now, that his belief that we block out what heals is 180 degrees in opposition to my view that transformational experiences are co-produced from the randomness of the world, and the healing process of the mind. The sad part is, I also understand the importance of being able to explore the madness of a situation with a trusted companion.
And I remember when I stopped seeing him that way.
Now he is talking about Richard Erskin and juxtaposition. How the response to the thing I've always wanted and needed has to be, how dare you offer me what I've always wanted! His words and view, certainly not mine!
Bless him - of course I know this feeling but I don't listen to it because it is life denying, life destroying. So what if a partner (like mine) turns out to be 'no good'? I've got over my husband's infidelity and leaving much faster than getting over Kit (clearly I have not got over Kit!). I kind of knew my marriage would end as it did - possibly heightened neuromodulators give insight! And I know that I'd have been so wrong to have given into fear, to have been sensible, to refuse all that joy and love! Oh certainly he was a Prince Charming - and a Bluebeard. The choice is simple, do you want love, then be brave, open and vulnerable - or no - then stay safe, shut up, and shut down, and demand that others do the same to keep you safe.
And then he is talking about the Gloria films, where Gloria is talking to Carl Rogers about her difficult relationship with her father - and Carl replies that she would make a lovely daughter. Kit explains that Gloria can't accept this love from Carl, because what she experiences is the emotional reaction Erskin calls juxtaposition...I think she is seeing an old man actually, and her instinct is saying that he is way out of order!
And then Kit is telling me.. that she sat where I am sitting. She is a client who came to see him for three years! He interpreted her body language as saying 'I'm not going to accept any love from anyone at all least of all you. And then he says - 'after three years she reached a point where she 'completely transformed.'
OK?
Seriously, what actually happened.
Remind me, whose interpretation am I hearing?
What if she felt as I do?
I think she gave up!
Played the expected role and left.
How would you interpret what I've just heard?
Kit interpreted her response to him as developmental fear.
By not responding...
But she kept coming back..
I can never know exactly what she went through.
The word ordeal comes to mind!
Three years is a long time and a lot of money to sit here and feel what?
What made her come back, week after week? Kit interpreted her body language as saying that she wasn't going to accept anything from him. Well, this is Kit's interpretation, here and now. So I'm frantically asking myself is this about me? Or put it another way, am I going mad by hearing this as I'm hearing it?
In my head I'm asking myself, was she in love with him?
Was the session where she 'completely transformed' the moment when she realized that whatever is going on here in this therapy thing, it is just too messed up and plain too weird to fight against?
I like to believe that then her sanity intervened, flipped the switch and she left! Saying to herself, 'it is time to leave, but do it gracefully and do not under any circumstances let him know what's happening!
Because this is safest way out of the client-in-love-with-the-therapist dilemma.
As he related this tale to me I was thinking, but she probably needed your arms around her and the promise of a future in which she could tell you how much she loved you! Three years! What did she want? What made it worth her while to sit where I now sit? The reasons why I'm not sitting here tense is only Wim Hof method, that I practice controlling my autonomic responses, and that I've been educated by my counselling training to stay in touch with whatever I feel and, more importantly I don't beat myself up.
But if she felt as I feel?
Poor woman - just tension and silence, if she was too scared to reveal her need for this charade to end and reality to begin.
In this room pain is gloved and delivered softly.
I expect that if they had met in a bar every week - she would not have greeted him with the clenched fists and tension, he describes.
The therapy situation can feel inhumane, restrictive and wrong.
But perhaps this situation wasn't as I imagine - who knows!
I'm clearly seeing her as a sister!
And now he's telling me that for years, Gloria and Rogers would write letters to each other, and she would address him as my therapeutic father. I think her daughter Pammy said that Gloria called him 'my ghost father'. His problematic body only words, Air and Aethyr. No masculine intrusions, even of the ectoplasmic kind!
Kit begins telling me...Heinz Kohut Self-psychology, and the question of who am I to the client which he called transference needs.....And yes, we have been here before...And if we had ended with an invitation from Kit for me to keep writing to him? Well gentle reader, you wouldn't be reading about my sessions. I would have felt respected and valued, instead of SPOILER ALERT!
Demonized as a Toad Queen, l33t hacker!
Comments