Seeking Normal

I love amaryllises. Most years I order a new one. I watch as those from previous years bloom and re-bloom. One year when my new one arrived, I got distracted and didn’t plant it right away. When I finally remembered and rescued it from the paper bag it had been in, it had started to grow but clearly had suffered from my neglect.The stem and bud were almost white. And as you can see the stem was bent almost over on itself. It had done everything it could to realize itself within the confines of the small paper bag. 

I felt terrible about what had happened and decided to see if it could recover. So I potted it in some nice fresh soil. And put it on my plant shelf where it would be blessed by the morning sun, hoping that the sun and the plant’s tendency to bend toward it would help it recover at least a bit.

In the days after I potted it, the sun did done its work, or as much as it could. The stem and bud became green and the stem straightened some. The bud began to swell. And the flower appeared.

In Natalie Borero’s Killer Fat, she relates

“most of the people to whom I spoke talked about a desire to lose weight to be normal, to be able to wear a smaller size, to blend in, and to avoid the stigma and discrimination faced by fat people. This pattern held not only for people like Tina, who had undergone surgery in order to lose weight, but also for people engaged in less invasive weight-loss attempts.”

The multi-billion dollar diet industry is built on this desire to achieve the ever elusive “normal”, a size or weight or look that remains just out of reach.

In psychotherapy,

“Patients typically seek a “cure” for their wounds, their anxiety, their obsessions and addictions. Jung denies that “perfection” – which may be thought of as a synonym for “cure” – is possible. My own experience, on both sides of the couch, suggests that even “healing” may be a problematic word. In some sense, a person is her wounds. A sapling, planted beside a supportive stake that the gardener neglects to remove, will grow around the stake. The stake’s presence will injure the growing tree; the tree will adapt by distorting its “natural” shape to accommodate the stake. But the mature tree will be the shape it has taken; it cannot be “cured” of the injury, the injury is an intrinsic aspect of its nature.” Barbara Stevens Sullivan

I think of the futility in both instances. That amaryllis once deformed by neglect could not be as it might have been under ideal conditions. But that did not keep it from being an amaryllis. There is no way to become the person I might have been had the circumstances of my life not led to the wounds I carry. I can become freer of their negative effects. I can become conscious of the wounds, how they came to be and how I might respond differently going forward. But I cannot be “cured” because I am my wounds, just as the tree in Sullivan’s example cannot become other than the way it is. Normal for me is who and how I am. 

Now consider the fat person who wants to be “normal”. Her chances of reaching that mythic place are something like 5%. She may lose weight, lose a lot of weight even but she is quite likely to regain it and there goes that chance at “normal”. If the tree in Sullivan’s example is its own normal, because it is the shape it has taken and that shape reflects the conditions of its growth, then is that not also true of the fat person. There are so many causes for and reasons for being fat. But in essence do they not all come down to the conditions in which that fat body has grown and developed? A complex stew of genetic, biologic, emotional, social, familial factors that as the container in which that person develops shape that body. How is we cannot, collectively, acknowledge that there is no cure for this body, that the fat body is its own normal? 

The person with significant emotional wounds often does need help to come to terms with those wounds and the shape they have given to her life. What therapy can do for the fat person is help her come to terms with her normal, to find her way through the pain of stigma and being different. We all are our wounds, no matter the form they take or shape they give us. 

Really? Whatever Comes To Mind?

I have posted before about secrets in therapy and every time I have, questions arise. Often people conflate privacy with secrets. So today let’s revisit this somewhat difficult issue.

Privacy vs Secrecy

Privacy is the state of being unobserved; changing clothes for example — that which I keep private, I am merely withholding from public view. Private matters are those traits, truths, beliefs, and ideas about ourselves that we keep to ourselves. They might include our fantasies and daydreams, feelings about the way the world works, and spiritual beliefs. Private matters, when revealed either accidentally or purposefully, give another person some insight into the revealer.

Secrecy is the act of keeping things hidden — that which is secret goes beyond merely private into hidden. While secrecy spills  into privacy, not all privacy is secrecy. Secrecy stems from deliberately keeping something from others out of a fear. Secrets consist of information that has potentially negative impact on someone else-emotionally, physically, or financially. The keeper of secrets believes that if they are revealed either accidentally or purposefully,  the revelation may cause  harm to the secret-keeper and those around him or her.

So that which is secret often contains an element of shame that private does not. We may keep something private for all kinds of reasons, but most of the time, we keep something secret out of fear and shame of what others would think if they knew. We keep something secret because we believe the cost of telling is so high that it’s virtually not a choice at all. Privacy is voluntary; secrecy is not.

Private: I got terrible grades in high school.

Secret: I forged my degree.

Keeping something private is an act of choosing boundaries and staying comfortably within them.

Keeping something secret is an act of hiding from the pain of disclosing something shameful.

This difference centering around the feelings about the information which is withheld is the principle factor in the difference between what is held private and that which is secret. It is this element of shame or fear attached to the secret that makes it different from something private.

Secrets, like an affair or a gambling problem or some misdeed or money problems — the kind of thing we lie awake and worry about, worry about others discovering — are often a big part of what brings people into therapy and what patients find most difficult to talk about. Shame and fear of judgment fill the room. The carefully cultivated image of respectability or responsibility or moral superiority will surely shatter into a thousand pieces the moment anyone, even the trusted therapist, finds out what is concealed beneath the facade. Each patient with such a secret imagines herself to be alone in the world, unlike and apart from all the rest of humanity, unable to imagine that the therapist has heard similar tales many times before. 

When we carry secrets like this, they become barriers between us and everyone in our lives, cutting us off from real intimacy. Anything which threatens to reveal what we seek so to hide becomes a source of anxiety and must be avoided. Maintaining the facade, the persona which covers the shame of the secret becomes paramount. In Japan I am told there is a saying that first the man takes a drink, then the drink takes a drink then the drink takes the man. The same is true of secrets as the secret comes to own the life of the person carrying it.

Secrets in therapy

Psychotherapy, like the confessional, offers a unique opportunity to break the secret and its hold on the life of the carrier. First comes the mustering of courage to say it, to tell the therapist what has been held in shame, to brave the condemnation and the rejection, the fear of which maintains the grip of the secret. And once spoken, then the work of discerning the meaning of the secret and opening to the shadow. 

I hear from people about things they are afraid to discuss with their therapists, secrets they carry and feel shame about. I know how hard it is to open up the dark corners of our lives and let another see in. It feels like a huge risk. But what is the point of being in therapy if, at some point, the secret is not told? If it remains untold and unexplored, the therapy in a very real sense is a lie because it never gets to the truth of the patients life and feelings. So we say to patients that they should say whatever comes to mind and mean to include the secrets as well.

Here are some of Jung’s thoughts, all taken from Vol. 16, pp.55-60:

Anything concealed is a secret. The possession of secrets acts like a psychic poison that alienates their possessor from the community.

All personal secrets … have the effect of sin or guilt, whether or not they are, from the standpoint of popular morality, wrongful secrets.

…if this rediscovery of my wholeness remains private, it will only restore the earlier conditions from which the neurosis, i.e. the split off complex,  sprang.

All of us are somehow divided by our secrets but instead of  seeking to cross the gulf on the firm bridge of confession, we choose the treacherous makeshift of opinion and illusion.

Jung here underlines the corrosive effect secrets have because there is no way, so long as the secret is held, for its bearer to know that she is not worse than everyone else, that the secret does not make him unlovable. The revelation of the secret within the container of a secure psychotherapy relationship begins the  cleansing effect of exposing it.

Those things which a person decides to hold private, even in therapy, may in fact be secrets rather than merely private matters. Because if there is no shame attached, then why the need for keeping such a thing outside of the secure container of therapy? 

It is by no means easy to let go of our secrets, whether we feel,  that do so would be rude or because we fear being judged or rejected or abandoned. It is hard work and takes time. But it is important to keep at it.

Saying whatever comes to mind is a goal and one it takes work to reach. An important part of that work is exploring the difficulty we have in getting there.

Let’s Talk about Dreams

This painting by Edward Robert Hughes makes me think of the oddness of dream images. And so today I want to start to talk about dreams.

A few years ago I found  Yorem Kaufman’s The Way of the Image. It is a lovely little book of essays about dreams, images and therapy. The first 2 essays, “The Way of the Image Part 1” and part 2 are about his way of looking at dreams and about how he works with dreams in therapy, an actual technique essay, something a bit uncommon in Jungian writing.Then in the 3rd essay he writes about the analyst as he or she appears in dreams. These three essays are rich and deeply rewarding for anyone seriously interested in dreams and working with them. 

A few juicy bits from Kaufman:

“Everything that has ever been created was preceded by an image— streets, a blender, theory of relativity. Thus, we have the power of images for immense good or horrible destruction. All the history of mankind is, in essence, the unfolding of a series of images.”*

“…every individual has within themselves a unique set of images peculiarly their own. They speak ultimately to them. Although such images may be shared with others, and those others may be affected, they will not be affected equally, and they will not share in the transformative energy to the same degree. It is both the science and art of analysis to find this unique imaginal language for every analysand.”*

“I am saying that the images that an analysand brings to the analysis, in whatever form, be it dreams, his behavior, body language, etc., contain, in addition to whatever psychic messages that they bring, also a set of instructions to the analyst as to what is the best, and sometimes the only, way to conduct the analysis. Contrary to what may have emerged at the dawn of the psychoanalytic movement, there is no single technique that would be suitable for every analysand. It has been a source of continuous astonishment and awe for me that in more than 30 years of practice, I have found that I work with every analysand in different ways.”*

Over the next little while I’ll write the essays and add my thoughts. If you have a Kindle Unlimited account, this lovely book is available free. I hope some of you will read along with me and that we can talk about the book together. 

If you don’t record your dreams, consider starting. Keep paper and a pencil or pen by your bedside and as soon as you awaken, write whatever dream or bits of dream you can capture. 

 

*Kaufmann, Yoram  (2009-07-16). The Way of the Image  Zahav Books Inc.. Kindle Edition.