We were talking about memory loss and aging in class today and it reminded me of this story about Gabe's Grandma, Genevra, who just died.
A doctor was testing her orientation and asked her who the President was.
First, she named all the Presidents in order from Washington to Eisenhower.
The doctor was impressed but asked again for the current President.
"Well," Genevra told him, "I don't know who he is but I know I don't like him."
Today in Human Development one of the things we covered was parenting styles, which for the purposes of the course are as follows:
1. Power assertion: punishment, shouting, physical restraint
2. Love withdrawal: expressing anger and disappointment, rejecting, walking away
3. Induction: explaining to child why behavior is wrong, pointing out consequences to others, appealing to child's capacity for self-control
We also talked about dichotomies of general parenting style:
1. cold/warm
2. permissive/restrictive
3. authoritative/authoritarian
4. attentive/neglectful
Greg asked us to get into small groups and talk about how we were parented. Of course "induction" is the "right" way to discipline, but when we talked about it further, many of us could see times and places for the other methods, "power assertion" (when a kid is about to burn himself on a hot stove you grab him!), "love withdrawal" (this sounds so sick!) when you are expressing anger at something your kid has done (this has got to be legitimate at times!).
In the small groups I heard a lot of pain from people about the way they were parented, especially the men. All in our group had had "authoritarian" fathers who hit them or were restrictive and punishing, as well as cold. But they also all said it has made them warm/permissive fathers to their own kids!
When we really got into the details of our childhoods, though, of course the broad categories fell apart and other ideas emerged. What do you call a parent who is warm but restrictive but neglectful? (A checked-out, absentminded Dad who was loving when he noticed the kid, and set down rules and punishments inconsistently modelled on his own authoritarian father, but mostly didn't notice what the kid did?).
One woman spoke about her frustration with her father for badgering her about financial security and other life issues. She was frustrated with him because she felt like he wasn't respecting her but I felt jealous. I wish my Dad tried to take care of me in any way.
So much emerges in these little moments of talk. Greg is asking us to be really vulnerable, which I like. But it is still hard to face the past, the family, the feelings that come.
Today we worked with a technique that I realized I have been using more in our counseling sessions in Therapeutic Communication class: stopping people from talking on "autopilot" and inviting them to speak more vulnerably. Philip calls it "empathetic confrontation". It makes me feel scared when I do it, like I will interrupt them too harshly, or they will feel coerced to feel something...but in several cases it seems to have worked beautifully, and the "client" has used the invitation to make a sharp turn into deep feeling or stronger presence in the here and now. Wow. And I realize that if a shrink did it to me, I would probably like it. Philip said that people generally do, because they feel, "Someone cared enough to confront me." Feeling happy about this right now.
Another technique I like, and that we practiced, is asking about the identified problem: "is this solvable?"
When I read about this technique and used it on myself, I found a really rich experience waiting for me. I was thinking about my obsessive relationship to treats and when I asked myself, "is this solvable?" I realized that I don't really believe that it is. The cravings for sweets are a part of me that feels permanent, and I have nothing to replace its comfort right now. And, when I used this technique on someone I was counseling she moved into a really amazing description of how she wanted to be with someone she loved who is grieving. Completely original and instructive!
I feel so excited about actually doing something that seems to help people! And myself.
Studying different types of thinking that young children go through: egocentrism, when children do not understand that other people may have different perspectives on the world ("the sun shines to keep me warm!"); artificialism, when environmental events are assumed to be human inventions ("the sky is blue because a man painted it") but my favorite is animism (attributing life and consciousness to physical objects).
Animism reminds me of a story about my nephew, Max. He used to do this thing where he'd make my sister Kate tell him what everything was "saying". They'd pass a tiger in the zoo and Max would ask, "What's that tiger saying, Mom?" Kate, being a very nice Mom, always tried to make up something true and amusing, "Oh! I'm so tired I think I'll just stretch out here in my cage and take a nap."
He asked for this a lot, and about inanimate objects too, if I remember right. It was a real thing between them. "What's that truck saying?" "What's this playdoh guy saying?"
Then once they were watching a line of ants walk across the sidewalk and Max asked Kate what the ants were saying. "We're in a big hurry to get this food back to our nest. Let's go everybody! It's time to go home! Don't get lost!"
When she was done Max said gently, "Ants can't talk, Mom."
Today in Human Development class we did a great exercise. It's going to sound strange but it was really fun.
First we lay on the floor in the fetal position, and then Greg took us through this guided experiential process where we gradually rolled onto our stomachs, then onto our backs, then we started using our limbs, then we pretended to try to grasp things and bring them to our mouths, then we were creeping, crawling, pulling ourselves up on furniture, then trying to walk. It was amazing to have such a physical experience of what infants are trying to do in their first year or so. What Rye is doing. What strong little beings!
The Drama Therapy students were incredible at it—I kept peeking. One woman rushed around the whole huge room exactly like a grinning, headlong toddler just learning that tippytoes walk. We clapped for her she was so good.
Mahler calls the stage after early infancy the stage of "elation".
That seems like Rye.
Our assignment for Therapeutic Communication this week was to read an excerpt from Shunryu Suzuki's "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind": "If you discriminate too much, you limit yourself. If you are too demanding or too greedy, your mind is not rich and self-sufficient. If we lose our original self-sufficient mind, we will lose all precepts. When your mind becomes demanding, when you long for something, you will end up violating your own precepts: not to tell lies, not to steal, not to kill, not to be immoral, and so forth."
Hmmmm. I have fought in my life to learn to be discriminating, to have limits. And I have worked hard to feel a right to be demanding. I really don't aspire to have a "self-sufficient" mind. I think there are lessons to learn from Zen, the goal of remaining open appeals, so why can't I appreciate this piece? Here is a poem I love about the dark emotions that Zen seems to spurn. (Lots of other religions don't like these feelings either, Quakers, as Olds notes, and Catholics—I happen to know!)
Greed And Aggression
Someone in Quaker meeting talks about greed and aggression
and I think of the way I lay the massive
weight of my body down on you
like a tiger lying down in gluttony and pleasure on the
elegant heavy body of the eland it eats,
the spiral horn pointing to the sky like heaven.
Ecstasy has been given to the tiger,
forced into its nature the way the
forcemeat is cranked down the throat of the held goose,
it cannot help it, hunger and the glory of
eating packed at the center of each
tiger cell, for the life of the tiger and the
making of new tigers, so there will
always be tigers on the earth, their stripes like
stripes of night and stripes of fire-light––
so if they had a God it would be striped,
burnt-gold and black, the way if
I had a God it would renew itself the
way you live and live while I take you as if
consuming you while you take me as if
consuming me, it would be a God of
love as complete satiety,
greed and fullness, aggression and fullness, the
way we once drank at the body of an animal
until we were so happy we could only
faint, our mouths running, into sleep.
—Sharon Olds
I love the passion for people and creatures, in this poem. She is not afraid of her excitement, her aggression—it is her love! She is not afraid of a tiger—she IS is tiger, devouring, drinking blood. It is almost frightening to read! But her project is to name it all aloud—everything human—without holding back. I love this project.
The way I was raised, as a young Catholic girl in a conservative, body-hating culture, was that any strong emotion I had was unwelcome. If I felt angry, proud, sexual, jealous, demanding, I was to be silent about it and hide it. It has been a long process for me, and for many women and people I know, to uncover and welcome back all my feelings. Because when you repress some feelings, many others also begin to seem too uncomfortable (of course, others might grow and begin to stand in for what is unfelt).
Poets know how to feel their feelings. Here are a few haiku I love, and some of the emotions I think may be said to be associated with them:
1. longing
January—
in other provinces,
plums blooming.
Issa
2. sexual desire (aggression?)
I do not care if
Our love making is exposed
As the rainbow over
The Yakasaka dam at Ikaho
If only I can suck and suck you.
Anonymous
3. anger/disgust
Writing shit about new snow
for the rich
is not art.
Issa
I honestly hate the way the Zen goal is to turn away from longing, from being demanding, from all greed and aggression. And I feel that often they are not able to make fine distinctions between all the different kinds of emotions—the massive range of ways that people can feel. In fact, I think many Zen practitioners and promoters are actually afraid of emotion. This way of dispensing with the emotions reminds me of depression, strangely.
To be alive, to be fully human, you must not merely "observe" your feelings—you have to feel them. And it is painful and humiliating to feel jealousy. It is frightening and shaming to feel greedy. BUT, there are so many ways of feeling romantic, alive that we must not detach from: to long for your lover as you speed away on a train through a country you've never been in before; to feel greedy for delicious food when you feast with your friends on a holiday; to feel anger when your country's President takes your nation into an illegal war. This is especially true for people who have been inhibited. Like me.
It is going to sound funny, as I am studying at the freaky shrink school and I am myself a freaky anti-establishment therapy participant, but I love Freud right now. We are reading him closely in Psychodynamics and a little in Human Development and I am learning so much about the original ideas, which are lucid, poetic, and playful. The poet H.D. had analysis with Freud, and she called him "midwife to the soul."
He is just so intimidating without someone to carefully explain him. Mildred Dubitsky asked us to try to let go of the irritant of Freud's seeming arrogance in quickly "curing" the patients in his stories, or in his seeming certainty about what symptoms mean; to focus instead on his ability to look skeptically at everything the patient brings. He has a particularly astute way of looking for secret meaning, digging for the individual person's world beneath the symptoms. Bettelheim does a great job of explaining Freud too.
Here is a little something from him:
"In his work and in his writings, Freud often spoke of the soul [...]. Unfortunately, nobody who reads him in English could guess this, because nearly all his many references to the soul [...] have been excised in translation."
—Bruno Bettelheim "Freud and the Soul"
and Freud himself:
"I want to protect analysis from physicians, [...] and from priests. I want to entrust it to a profession that doesn't yet exist, a profession of secular ministers of souls, who don't have to be physicians and must not be priests."
—"The Future of an Illusion"
I volunteered to bring the content for Thursdays warm-up exercise in Therapeutic Communication. Last week was my first class. The leader, Phillip Brooks was vulnerable while still being a great leader and keeping things moving and interesting. All my professors are this way, actually. It's kind of amazing. During the check in, Brooks spoke about how much he loved hiking and camping in the granite of the Sierras, and Gabe feels exactly like him, so it made me warm to him immediately.
Therapeutic Communication is going to be kind of like a "homeroom". We are going to spend a little more time than in other classes getting to know one another and making a kind of home base. I am grateful that CIIS has thought about this. It seems like a good idea.
We did a few practice listening exercises. One where you had to trade listening/speaking with another person and the listener had to say absolutely nothing the entire time. It was hard! I think it made the person I listened to speak more freely. As for me, it was hard at times because my listener was a bit distracted. It made me falter and lose confidence in my train of thought. Even though that kind of sucked, it made me aware of how subtle eye movements can effect the speaker. Interesting to think about.
Anyway, I was thinking we could do an exquisite corpse for the warm up. Do you that game? You write a line and pass it to next person and they write the next line working off of your line (without being able to see the rest of the poem because you fold the paper over). And in the end you have a poem. I don't know if we have enough time. In case we don't, I'm just bringing in a poem I love to read aloud.
First Memory
Long ago, I was wounded. I lived
to revenge myself
against my father, not
for what he was—
for what I was: from the beginning of time,
in childhood, I thought
that pain meant
I was not loved.
It meant I loved.
Louise Gluck
The Myth of Psyche and Eros
[G's Grandma Barbara's hands, and lilies. Durango, Colorado 2006.]
My Psychodynamics professor, Mildred Dubitsky, told us this story on the first day of class. It is the myth of Psyche, and her curiosity and pursuit of love, which is a kind of creation myth of psychoanalysis. I really like how brave and active Psyche is in this story. This female representation of "soul" (which is one meaning of "Psyche" in Greek, another one is "breath" or "spirit" according to Mildred) is such an adventurer! Like all people undertaking therapy...
We are to read Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis this week for her class. I have heard so many people say Freud is easy to read and understand in his own words, and there is no reason to be intimidated. This is to get people to try reading him in his own words, and to make him less forbidding, I suppose. But I really struggle every time I attempt to read him. More soon on these lectures, I hope. Meanwhile, here is the myth of the wonderful Psyche:
Psyche is the daughter of a queen and king—the youngest of their three beautiful daughters. Psyche is so beautiful, however, that people in her city dare to compare her to the Goddess Aphrodite. Although Psyche is a modest person, Aphrodite is offended. How dare a mortal woman be compared to a goddess? Aphrodite asks her son Eros to prick Psyche with an arrow and make her fall in love with the ugliest man on earth. But when Eros sees her, he falls in love with her himself.
No one proposes marriage to Psyche because her beauty intimidates people and because Aphrodite is displeased with her. So Psyche's parents go to the Oracle of Delphi for counsel. The Oracle tells the horrified parents that Psyche must be sacrificed to a monster. The parents must follow the advice of the Oracle or their entire kingdom will suffer. Psyche herself accepts this judgment and agrees to be sacrificed. She is clothed in a wedding gown and brought to the mountain. Then, distraught, her parents leave her alone to face death.
After many hours, Psyche falls asleep and dreams she has been taken to a beautiful valley of flowers. Before her stands a magnificent castle that is clearly the home of a God. When she enters the castle, a pleasant voice says: "All this is yours, sit down at the table and eat". And then a exquisite banquet appears. She finds she is not dreaming, and eats.
When night comes, Psyche settles in a bed of ivory and the light is blown out. A warm breeze arrives and Psyche finds herself in the arms of her lover. She cannot see him, she can only hear his loving voice and feel his warm embrace. This occurs several times and Psyche is quite content with her situation – being waited on in this enchanted place during the day and savoring the warm embrace of her lover at night. Soon she becomes pregnant.
After a while, however, because Psyche has no one to talk to during the day, she becomes lonely. She especially misses the company of her sisters and desires to see them and share her pregnancy with them. Her invisible lover warns her against seeing her sisters. He says that they will try and force Psyche into finding out what he looks like, thus ruining their situation. But Psyche sneaks away to see her sisters.
Instead of congratulating Psyche on her fortunate marriage, the sisters sow a seed of doubt in her mind. They tell Psyche, now pregnant with Eros's child, that rumor is that she is married to a great and terrible serpent who is fattening her up and will soon devour her and her unborn child. They advise her to sneak a look at him while he sleeps, using the dim light of an oil lamp.
That very night once her lover has fallen asleep, Psyche, deeply curious, ignites the lamp to finally lay her eyes on him. She sees that he is a handsome young man with milky white skin and dark curly hair. She sees wings, arrows and a bow beside the bed. He is the god of love, Eros himself. Overcome with the beauty of her beloved, Psyche spills a drop of hot oil on Eros which wakes him up. When he sees that she has broken her promise, he immediately flies away, but she catches his ankle and is carried with him until her muscles give out, then she falls to the ground, sick with remorse.
Psyche seeks her beloved everywhere. She prays at all the temples, begging for the help of the gods. All the immortals refuse to help her because they do not wish to attract the wrath of Eros’ mother Aphrodite. Eros, brokenhearted, has sought the consoling shelter of his mother's house and does not know of Psyche’s desperate search. At last Psyche is forced to confront the goddess herself.
Aphrodite receives her coldly, but offers her a chance to win back her beloved. She puts Psyche to several tests. "Let us see if you are a suitable woman. Sort out these seeds and put them into order." Psyche receives a mountainous pile of poppy, wheat, peas, beans and many other seeds to separate from each other.
She is devastated when she realizes how difficult the task will be. But an ant comes to her and decides to help her because she is so beautiful and sad. He calls on the help of his friends and they sort the out the piles for her. When Aphrodite returns that evening she is extremely vexed at Psyche's accomplishment. So she sets her a second task. Psyche is to collect the wool of some golden rams.
The next morning Psyche sets out to collect the wool. The Naiads warns her of their wildness and tells her to come to the pond in the afternoon and take the wool that they shed instead. Psyche does as advised and returns with the golden wool.
Aphrodite is still not satisfied and demands water from a special spring at the top of a cliff. Psyche starts a long climb and hears whispers that say: "Turn back, turn back" and the sound of a dragon spitting flames. She becomes frightened and stops to rest. An eagle soars through the sky, takes her container and fetches water from the spring high above her.
Aphrodite is astonished. She then demands that Psyche must go to the Underworld and fetch a box of beauty from the goddess Persephone, for Aphrodite was growing tired in tending her son. Psyche realizes how impossible this request is and decides that she will end her life to get to the Underworld. Psyche ascends a tall tower but when she gets ready to jump, she hears Eros' voice, which says "Don’t jump! I know of a way you can return alive. Descend to Hades at Tainaron in Southern Greece with a cookie in each hand and two coins in your mouth."
"When you arrive at the barge of the ferryman Charon, let him take a coin out of your mouth and you will be sailed to Hades. At the gate give one of the cookies to the guard dog Cerberus. When Persephone invites you to dinner, do not accept anything to eat and do not sit at her table but ask to sit on the floor. Ask for the box Aphrodite wants, return the same way you came, give Cerberus the other cookie and Charon the other coin. No matter what you do, do not look into the box."
Psyche does as the tower has said but when she reaches the light of the mortal world, she is tempted by curiosity to look in the box. She looks inside and out flies the Sleep of Death. Psyche falls asleep and her body stops breathing. But now Zeus has watched the hardship of Psyche from Olympus and has had enough. Zeus orders Aphrodite to leave poor Psyche alone, fetches Psyche and gives her a drink of ambrosia which makes her immortal. Zeus says to Psyche: "From now on, you are never to leave Eros’ side."
I start classes at the California Institute of Integral Studies next week: Human Development, Psychodynamics, and Therapeutic Communication. This blog is for thinking and writing about my training to become a therapist. It may also contain writing about hetero relationships, mothering boys (I have two!), family, friendship, San Francisco and Mission neighborhood city life, and poetry and other things I'm reading. Welcome!
"Between human caution, stubbornness, and our beloved theories, it is surprising we know anyone." — Leston Havens, Reflections on the Art of Psychotherapy.
I have a brilliant therapist, and my time with her has made me really interested in the way that intimacy can heal people. I think it's done that for me. Intimacy in other relationships has healed me too, from the parenting I received to the man I love. Allowing yourself to be seen and known, or seeing and trying to know another—it has some kind of transformative magic to it. Here is something my shrink wrote when she was running a school to train "master listeners" (I was in this school and it didn't survive, but more on this some other time):
"In this program we ask: How might we draw closer in our listening to the idiosyncratic individual who comes to speak with us? How can we be still, attentive, watchful enough, sufficiently unburdened by ourselves to catch that fleeting uniqueness before it enters our particular organizing system?"
I love how this highlights the grapsing after a person's "uniqueness" as one of the important goals of therapy. I have several friends who completed the program at CIIS and it made me hopeful that perhaps it might have a similar approach to training shrinks.
But I knew for sure I wanted to go to CIIS during the group interview. It was really fun!
With very little explanation we were each given an index card with a statement we were to read to the person next to us. The task was to respond to the statement you are read by saying how it makes you feel. The facilitator explained that much of our work at CIIS would be in groups, and this was a way of seeing how we reacted and worked in a group situation.
My card read, "I don't believe what you are saying and I don't trust you." I turned to the man beside me and read it aloud. He froze and was silent for several agonizing minutes. I resisted the strong urge to ask him questions to draw him out. Finally, he said, "this does not hurt my feelings, because I know this is only an exercise." It was just too hard for him in that moment to say what he was feeling. It seemed understandable, but it was also fascinating. Was he too nervous? Was the situation too false and pressured? Did he have absolutely no idea what he felt? Was he ashamed of what he felt and could not say?
The facilitator let him off the hook and he read aloud his card to the woman beside him, "I am attracted to you and I hope something can happen between us."
"Ok, uh, that makes me feel...curious. And, I want to know more about you..." She seemed to be feeling her feelings as if he were declaring his real attraction. Again, so interesting. Was the sentiment too overpowering to think about calmly—that someone would be attratcted to her and say so directly? (I think it would have been for me and was glad I hadn't had this one). Was it threatening? Was it true—was she picking up on how this guy really felt in those few minutes?
Then she read her card to me, "I am jealous of the power you have in this group." I was lucky to go third. I had had time to prepare and think about feelings, but it was easy for me to blurt out what occurred to me, "that makes me feel worried—like there will be retaliation against me for having power and causing jealousy. And it makes me feel pleased, because I sometimes like to be a leader in groups."
So strange, in a way, to be going to school to learn such ordinary things: how to know what I am feeling, how to be able to say what I'm feeling, how to listen with care, how to think about other people, how to watch for brilliance, uniqueness, and originality. A good society would have no need of this as a specialty, maybe. Maybe if we do it right, people will someday be capable of making a good society.
