Hope beyond despair.
And I have managed to avoid this book for over a year.
I bought it way back, it accompanied me when I did my training in conflict resolution, May 2024.
I tried to read it.
Simply couldn't do it.
A year and six months later here I am. Dinner time. Tesco sandwiches. Library. Fortunately only three cases this afternoon because yet again something I've seen, heard, read, to do with 'erotic transfer ' has filled my eyes with tears.
I am angry, saddened, I think the aim of true person centred therapy is awesome actually. But, it hurts me to read...
Brian Thorne describes an experience of therapy that echoes my experience of 'The man of stars'. That when both people are vitally present, vulnerable, open, there is access to an almost external dimension of healing.
I don't have much time to write. But in the final chapters Brian describes his therapeutic relationship with Emma, how he fearlessly allowed himself to be completely honest with her. They both had complex feelings of love for each other. And their love was navigated with compassion, kindness and mutual respect.
As a therapist Brian could have closed everything down - metaphorically cut the wings off the butterfly. But he made a different choice. It hurts to read this, the way Brian answered Emma's questions was so, so different to my experience (with the therapist, Kit).
So I have tears.
Brian writes:
"I have come to see this sense of being infinitely beloved (awareness of God's love for all beings) as the key to the integration of sexuality into one's total responsiveness to another person or, indeed, to the created order in general. Sexual energy can clearly be a formidable force, and its potential for destructiveness is inevitably heightened when it is fuelled by an overriding need to possess or control..."
Well, I must redirect my mind for now. I'm left with my recent encounters with the opposite state; my son is fighting with his memories of his dad, anger, despair, betrayal. He has nowhere to take it, no way to resolve it. It rolls around his mind like a thunderstorm.
Someone in a group I'm in - not a therapist! Tends to transfer her agonizing loss (of a child) to others under the guise of offering 'help'. Her pain makes her spiky, unkind, desperate. I've seen this before, but never in a client, or not yet anyway. It feels as if the person's core has been eaten out and they keep trying to fill it with other people's pain. So they make the other feel pain? Hard to understand, and I can't make sense of it, this is only my impression...My son did something similar when his psychosis was at its worst. He needed someone to take the terror from him, so he caused us to feel terror. It almost makes sense, but nothing about psychosis makes sense except to the sufferer.
Freud would call this transference, to create a situation that has a resonance with the sufferer's feeling.
See, I can't help but frame it in terms of the sufferer trying to get other people to truly feel it and understand, so they have compassion...
I don't think Freud saw it in such person centred terms.
And listening to a radio program about a Greek Orthodox church I suddenly understood that religion, far from being the opiate of the masses, created places of sanctuary for people suffering outrageous psychological pain. A monastery provided routine, detox, and spirituality. I suddenly understood because my son recognised it first, whilst saying that he'd probably have done better in a monastery than hospital (temporary stay only).
This explains the roots of therapy, whilst psychiatry has its origins in the hospital (which also began as the monastery no doubt)... anyway, tbc.
