THE MIRACLE OF ADAPTATION AND MR. WHITE EGRET

I was on a walk the other day.  The sun was out after many days of rain.  The creek along which I walk so often had become almost a river.  For the very first time, I noticed a white egret standing motionless  by a man-made waterfall on the creek.  The elegant bird looked as if she were trying to figure out how to navigate the cascade.  The creek had been but a trickle all summer.  But this fall had been unusually wet and stormy.  And the water was high and fast.

Strangely the bird was still there in the same spot, standing like a statue, unchanged, 30 minutes later when I passed on my return trip.  I raced home for my camera, sure he/she would be there when I returned.  In the meantime I had an elaborate fantasy (the kind of fantasy only a psychotherapist would have!) about that poor bird.  It went something like this:  The bird, probably young, had adapted to the stream at its lowest ebb during the summer.   Growing up beside a trickle, it was well adapted to those conditions.  When the stream swelled, her/his adaptation style no longer sufficed and he/she could not figure out what to do.

Of course, this reminded me of the essential human dilemma.  We adapt as children,  with brains, nimble and flexible,  to the conditions of our environment:  the family we are born into,  the emotional surround be it one of privation or abundance.  We are veritable geniuses of adaptation.  Problems arise latter when our brilliant adaptation styles no long suffice.  When the floods of later life come, we are often at a loss.  The tools of the earlier years are more than likely useless.

The child Holocaust survivor who starved and had to scrounge for whatever food was available in order to live,  may well have trouble at the dinner table as a middle aged adult now seated at the groaning board of American abundance: obesity and diabetes II ensue. The woman who has witnessed the suffering of older siblings who resisted a controlling parent only to be vilified, and rejected by that parent, learns submissiveness at home and fails to develop the assertiveness she needs to succeed in adult life.

I returned with my camera,  maybe 15 minutes later.  Mr. White Egret was gone.  There goes my theory.  Somehow he had navigated the falls.  Maybe he was just a patient fisherman all along.

Days passed,  no egret.  No egret, but another lesson came my way.

A week or two later, I had the good fortune to reconnect with a client I had known over many decades.  She was in her mid twenties (I in my mid thirties) when we met.  We worked together for many years and then just on and off thereafter.   She was in tough shape in those early years, nearly mute in our sessions for probably two years.  I did the talking, guessing at her pain, her shame, her fear.  She cancelled more often than not.   But often I could talk her into coming.  She had adapted well to an early environment in which it was dangerous to speak up,  it was dangerous to be noticed at all.  From a very large family, dominated by alcohol, violence, including sexual violence,  she was denigrated, humiliated, unprotected.   She felt insignificant, unsafe, and unworthy. 

Most significantly she was separated from herself—to survive  her childhood her essential self had gone into hiding.  What was left was a child hovering in fear, whatever strength there was seemingly defeated.   She was the only one among 17 children who had managed to finish high school,  but there was very little evidence of pride, and certainly no accolade from the family.  Any sign of independence, strength, intelligence was seen as a negative not a positive by her family.

Fast forward 20 years.  In the interim this woman went to college, gave birth and raised a child single handedly  and successfully without a father. She bought a home,  rose in her profession to a role of leadership,  survived a life threatening illness through sheer grit.  On and off she used therapy to help her navigate these crises, at times I was the second parent to her daughter, but for long stretches of time she did not call or come in to see me.

The one longing unfulfilled,  was the inability to sustain an intimate relationship with a man.

Now in her 50’s we are again back in touch and this time because she is in an intimate connection with a man, someone who sounds mature, loving, and accepting and who wants to marry her.  She knows she needs a little extra support until she decides what to do. 

The white egret has adapted to the falls.  A sustaining relationship with me over the years was certainly part of that critical adaptation.  But the real wonder here,  the awesome reality, is that she had the capacity to use that relationship and all other positives in her life, the terrific child she gave birth to,  her teachers in school,  friends, neighbors,  a few members of the extended family that did not put her down—whatever came her way she used to grow and change and reconnected with all that was positive in her. 

She herself has described it as the child within, the one I saw cowering in the early days mute and frightened, has grown up.

This is not the only story I have of the awe-inspiring nature of our ongoing, life-long capacity for change.  It’s just the latest.

CONSULTING YOUR INNER WISDOM: PART 2

 Last October I wrote a post on listening to your inner wisdom (Oct. 1, 2010

http://postsfromtheunconscious.blogspot.com/2010/10/consult-your-inner-wisdom-it-has-all.html)

The post was based on experiences from my practice with a visualization technique that seemed helpful to people and furthered the ends of the psychotherapy treatment.  It often helped us cut through confusion, obfuscation, denial, and conditioned thinking and got us quickly to the heart of whatever matter we were wrestling with.

This work was especially helpful with and for individuals who relied heavily on “dissociation”  a coping mechanism we all resort to at times, but is particularly important for individuals who have experienced childhood trauma.  I have experimented with the inner wisdom technique with others whose “traumas” were less obvious or less extreme or even non-existent and found it useful in a lot of situations.  Inner wisdom is wise and I think universal.

I’m revisiting this issue, after reading an article by Martha Beck in this month’s Oprah Magazine,  (yes, Oprah) on a very similar topic which reminded me of some other issues related to implementing this practice which might be useful to comment on.

The existence of “inner wisdom” is based on the assumption that there is something in all of us that, unimpeded, will right us when we wobble.  Maybe “inner gyroscope” is more accurate.  A gyroscope will always get us back in balance if we just let it.

I think of inner wisdom as right-brained, body-based, nor necessarily verbal.  It’s that still small “voice” within which may not be a “voice” at all, but arrive in the form of images, kinesthetic sensation, or even sound. 

I sat with a client once on the same morning I had received some awful news about a dear friend.  I tried to set this aside and set to work with this client.  I thought I had. Very quickly, I got drawn into a confusing, chaotic, tumultuous session.  It wasn’t until she reported “hearing”  a loud bang that we began to get some clarity.  The bang, it turned out, was the dreadful memory of the sound of a car hitting and killing her best friend, an event that she had witnessed decades past.   Her “inner wisdom” was telling her something very similar was happening to me.  And it was.

We live in an extremely left-brained culture.  By this I mean we value words, logic, socially conditioned values.  We more often make choices based on “shoulds,” “oughts,” the evaluations of others, negative judgments.   We don’t let the gyroscope do its work.

We also live in a culture brimful of distraction. 

To “hear” your inner voice you have to get quiet, you have to learn to cultivate and tolerate silence.  The blackberry, iphone, NPR, gmail, twitter, facebook all have to go away for a little while everyday.  Processing experience comes more naturally when you are walking in the woods, taking rhythmic breaths in the pool, doing yoga without the radio on (my personal downfall).

Taking note of our dreams, by keeping a log of them,  sitting with them for at least a few minutes every day, increases clarity. There very well may be meaningful cues that are coming through our dreams that can be guiding us.  A patient reports that as she was sifting through old journals she found notes of a dream that almost exactly predicted the location and manner of detection of a malignancy in her breast, a malignancy that would be discovered many years later.

Meditating on a regular basis also increases the accessibility to cues, often within the body, that are signaling us as to which moves are prudent, and which imprudent.

Sometimes I have the experience of feeling upset without really know why.  I know my nervous system is buzzing, my body is sending signals of distress, but I haven’t a clue as to what this is about.  I have to get quiet to have any chance of getting a handle on what is really going on.  More than likely,  sitting quietly, patiently (for it may take awhile) with the question of what is it that is upsetting me,  what is calling for my attention, will yield some clarity.   The upset doesn’t disappear, but its power does diminish and I am less likely to be reactive to it, reactive in a way that will neither benefit me nor those around me.

Cultivating this inner voice yields great benefits.  I think we all instinctively know this.  I wonder what keeps us from actively listening.

EMBRACING MYSTERY

My friend Dr. D., a professor of social psychology at a very fine liberal arts college, told me that she quoted something to her class that I said a hundred years ago.   She was lecturing to her class on the subject of “cognitive dissonance.”  Wikipedia defines cognitive dissonance as “…an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance.”

Dr, D. recalled asking  me, way back then,  how I reconciled my interest in astrology with my evidence based practice as a clinician.  My answer, she remembers was “I don’t feel the need to reconcile them.”  She told her class this was a good example of someone who could tolerate a fair amount of “cognitive inconsistency.”

I, of course, have no recollection of this conversation.  But Dr. D.’s  example does point to something that separates me from lots of folks I know—and that’s the room I make for “mystery,”  that which makes no logical sense, cannot be seen, touched, tasted, smelled or proven directly or indirectly and yet seems to be there.

A vivid example of something not uncommon but no less mysterious is the testimony of many individuals working in hospice care who report that sometimes up to three days before death, their patients appear to be reaching for someone or seeing someone or hearing someone from  “the other side.”  My neighbor, a women who classified herself as non-religious, an atheist, not even spiritually inclined, reported that her mother, at death’s door raised her paralyzed arm to reach for someone, presumably her dead father.  She had no way to account for how her mother who had suffered a stroke on one side several years before had lifted that arm. But it did happen.

In this culture we lack a paradigm that can embrace, no less explain such phenomena.  But probably almost all of my readers can think of some example of “mystery” in their lives.  If you can’t, perhaps its because you have too rapidly dismissed a phenomena that you could not explain.  Without the paradigm we don't see, we don't hear that which we cannot understand.

For many years I had a client who claimed to be connected to another dimension.  I knew her very well, she was not psychotic, she did not hallucinate nor harbor delusions, but she had been severely traumatized throughout her childhood.  Psychic or paranormal phenomena are not uncommon among individuals who have suffered extreme cruelty.  Clinicians report this both formally and informally.

My patient’s reported phenomena was that she dreamt of spiritual beings in another dimension who had messages for her.  At other times it was during waking consciousness that she received guidance.  They guided her and they chided her.  They instructed her about her life, her therapy, her healing process.  The counsel was invariably wise.  If she followed the advice it led her in the direction of healing and wholeness.  She frequently resisted.  The counsel was difficult to implement and went against the grain, it would cause pain.

Of course one could argue these were her own wise thoughts, or an internalization of my view point.   That, however,  was not how she experienced it, and I had to make room that there really was a mystery here.  More than once I wished I had thought of the counsel, myself.  These beings seemed smarter and more far sighted than I.

My position as her therapist was to be consistently agnostic.  I neither believed nor disbelieved. But I supported these “advisors”.  And I was not above calling on whatever forces were at work here to support the direction we wanted to go.

What was much more challenging, however, was dealing with what my patient knew about me through the spiritual advisors.  I had no  explanation for these phenomena.  She knew things she could not have googled or learned from any another source—news items that only my immediate family had access to.  Sometimes the news was joyous,  sometimes it was profoundly sad.   I could never explain her clairvoyance.  I did not dismiss it as mind reading either.  I could only receive it, and I believe it enlarged my spirit to do so.

It has always seemed to me that dismissing mysterious phenomena,  those that don’t fit our existing paradigms, is rather narrow minded, irrational, and at bottom unscientific.

Dr. D. tells me that people with a higher tolerance for inconsistency are considered more “open and oriented to flexibility in their behavior.”  That seems like a good thing, right?

Being able to live with the mysterious only enriches us.

When The Worst Thing Is Not The Worst Thing: EMDR & Unpacking Meaning

A couple of months ago I received a request from the Mesothelioma Cancer Alliance asking me to include a link to their organization on my website (www.maybenatar.com). My contact noted that she was specifically interested in reaching out to therapists who provide EMDR therapy, as research had shown this technique particularly helpful in helping individuals deal with illness and loss.

I have not seen the research but my own experience would confirm this finding.

One has to ask how and why this is so. The diagnosis of a life threatening illness like mesothelioma is devastating. How can waving your hands in front of someone’s eyes or other forms of bilateral stimulation change that?

It turns out, devastating illness means something different to every patient, just as trauma
means something different to every “victim.” The prospect of loss of function, painful treatments, and a premature death is coded differently in each of us. And unpacking that unique meaning seems to facilitate processing. Maybe we can’t even process loss without that first step, unpacking meaning.

There are many paths to understanding meaning. Psychoanalysis utilizes free association;  relational psychotherapy uses the tool of the relationship as the main vehicle to meaning. Self psychologists focus on the state of the self; their major tool is empathy

In my, admittedly, limited experience the EMDR technique can provides a short cut to meaning.

The web of memory and meaning is an intricate, unpredictable one and EMDR can help one navigate the thicket.

EMDR is a technique that utilizes a very specific protocol that unpacks aspects of specific target symptoms and then stimulates, through the use of eye movements, taps, or alternating tones an internal process that seems to move individuals through a web of associations to the presenting images/symptoms back, back, back to some memories, earlier life experiences that may hold the key to unlocking the meaning of symptoms. This is free association on steroids.

See the following links for two short videos that demonstrate in pictures what would take me too many words to describe and describe poorly at that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZ5MLn1Cc94

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqbFIj5vwmA&NR=1

Sometimes the worst thing is not the worst thing.

One middle aged gentleman came to me when the lung cancer for which he had previously been successfully treated, returned. And it returned with a vengeance. He was at stage 4. Although he still had many treatment options and his doctors held out a great deal of hope, he was understandably devastated. He was alternately enraged and despairing. He was declining treatment, fighting with his doctors, unable to eat or sleep, alienating friends and family.

It would seem obvious that his fear of death was the primary cause of his suffering. At least that was what was obvious to me. But that is not what emerged with the EMDR treatment.

What emerged within one session was a memory of having wronged a good friend many years before, in his early 20’s. He felt enormous shame and guilt when remembering this during out EMDR session. The feelings were vivid, immediate, and intense. This one incident in which he had hurt and shamed someone else made him feel that he was a bad person.

Subsequent discussion over several sessions, revealed that some important part of him felt that he was being punished for his early cruelty. Lung cancer was the pay back.

Bringing this to light made it possible to process this event with the maturity now available to him. He found some compassion for his younger self. It was also now possible to reconsider that perhaps his misdeed had not caused his cancer. Cancer is awful. Facing death at 45 is awful. But feeling that you are a really bad person and that is why you are ill, that is worse.

Sometimes the worst thing is not the worst thing.