by Daphne Stevens
It is springtime. The Lenten daffodils have splashed color over the grey landscape, heralding the dawn of the season. The sunshine has appeared, and Easter is on the horizon. My fingernails itch for the sweet grit of earth beneath them; I find myself weeding and digging between office appointments, longing even for an occasional "no-show" so that I can work the garden outside the little white house where I do my work. I am smitten, as one of my patients said this week - drunk with the colors and textures of new-ness.
Our special thanks to Daphne Stevens for this powerful and moving article.
And yet it is an ambivalent season. It's too cold for shorts and too warm for sweaters. The pollen makes for soperific afternoons. The holy days recall me to the poignant paradox of sacrament and dogma. I want - and I don't want - to make a pilgrimage back to the liturgical altar that once nurtured my young soul.
I want to abandon myself to Eucharistic celebration, to immerse myself in the joy of the season, to play outside without sunscreen, and to leave the darkness of winter behind. But the shadow has laid its claim on me.
I am a foreigner in a culture caught up in the collective denial of the dark. The Resurrection is celebrated. Images of youth resound through the airwaves, and existential angst, it seems, can be remedied through a kind of collective excommunication of it. Aging, illness, death, it seems, will not affect the New Age generation. Is it good nutrition? Is it fitness? Or is it, as Robert Bly suggests, partly a simple loss among Americans of the ability to mature?
I, too, want answers that are easy. I want to buy a product or take a pill that will save me from the agony of the descent. I want to return to the altar of collective religion in a simple acceptance of the holy sacraments, and to trust that the gifts that I bring are enough. I, too, want the Resurrection without the Descent.
Yet I have come to trust the inward and downward journey. Dark seasons of depression have deepened my roots into the loamy soil that nurtures and sustains me. When sorrow has surrounded me, embracing my unwilling spirit in her arms, my first instinct has always been to fight. And, after my fighting impulse has been stilled by fatigue, it is in that place of humility and despair that I have discovered something essential about my spirit. It is in darkness that I have been initiated into my own gifts.
As a young psychotherapist, I collided rudely with the shadow. Having grown up in a family that judged vulnerability as weakness, I felt frightened and anxious as I heard my own feelings echoing in the voices of my clients. Did my resonance with these patients mean that I was mentally ill, morbidly sensitive, or merely weak?
I was mortified, one morning early in my career, to find myself reduced to tears in the midst of a patient staffing. It was just one of sad scenarios that we faced on a daily basis. Neither blatant child abuse nor overt domestic violence was apparent in the client family - only that more subtle violation of soul that occurs in relationships among the educated and the civilized. I was startled by my response, confused and humiliated by the quick hot tears of helplessness and heartbreak which formed behind my eyes. The impact of a million days of bravely marching to the beat of consensual reality and ignoring my inner "knowing" racked my body. The wise, encouraging words of my supervisor penetrated my aloneness then, and they echo within me to this day. "This is not a psychiatric problem. This is a spiritual gift."
Twenty five years of inner work have taught me that what we label "psychiatric problems" in this culture are often spiritual gifts. I am convinced that psychological symptoms hold the hope of healing in a world that denies the very presence of soul.
My profession has turned away from soul-talk. In the past quarter century, psychotherapy has shifted from an inner quest, into an endeavor which embraces quick fixes and short-term solutions. Patients are now called Clients. Therapist are called Providers. The space of the therapy hour, once a sacred trust between healer and seeker, is defined by market-place expediency. Consumers and professionals alike have been mesmerized into assumptions that scorn the yearning for wholeness as frivolity. Medication to relieve psychiatric symptoms is an end unto itself, and therapeutic work is definable into neat goals and steps.
Psychotherapy was the West's the last bastion for the nurture of soul-life. Mainstream Church confessionals were often bought and sold in the interest of social control. Freudians and their descendants returned to some of the basic questions - the nature of humanity, instinctuality, and the very presence of the unconscious. Jung turned us further into the depth of the spiritual realm, where the prima materia was realized as wellspring as well as the garbage dump of human possibility, and God was encountered in dreams, images, and symptoms. Analytic purists continue to seek solace and healing through learning to trust the yearnings of the unconscious to reveal the wisdom of the soul.
But the art of psychotherapy has been lost to the pragmatics of economics. Philosophical questions are no longer a part of graduate programs, ego psychology has replaced depth psychology, and moral courage in the therapy room has been supplanted with a hypervigilant preoccupation with "ethics"- mostly the fear of being sued - among therapists.
I have observed the changes wrought within my profession with varying shades of curiosity and sadness. Not everyone is called into a deeper encounter with Self. Medication has brought hope to untold numbers. Goal-oriented psychotherapy can be helpful to many. But a culture that denies the shadow will always pay a price. Peter Kramer, in Listening to Prozac, suggests that an introspective personality is less than effective (and less than welcome) in a fast-paced extraverted world. I would add that a culture that pathologizes spiritual hunger, and that trivializes the yearning for aesthetic expression, will always be reduced to handing out
Prozac to its dis-eased.
Jung taught us that those aspects of soul which are not claimed as consciousness will return to us as shadow. In the postmodern era, projections - racism, sexism, and the like - are Politically Incorrect, but personal complexes are aired as Trends: Men who fall in love with younger women, mothers who steal their daughters- boyfriends, and young people who divorce their parents are no longer the stuff of pulp fiction. They have emerged from the smutty tabloids who birthed their images in mainstream culture, marched brazenly through talk-shows and planted themselves in the evening news where they horrify, bore, and fascinate us with the psychodramas of our political leaders.
Jung referred to such things when he said "The anima no longer crosses our path as a goddess, but. . .as an intimately personal misadventure. . .When a highly esteemed professor in his seventies abandons his family and runs off with a young red-headed actress, we know that the gods have claimed another victim."
Media attention can make social issues out of illness and pathology. We are all "enlightened" about the lurid details of every twist and turn of human experience, and we wallow in collective disdain for those sins which seem to be greater than our own. Our collective identification with wounds and victimhood have come to serve as an anemic and destructive substitute for the true examination of our lives, and of the meaning of suffering. "Instead of listening to the passions of the gods," Robert Bly observes in The Sibling Society, "we watch utterly banal human beings on talk shows describe their degraded and repetitive brutalities toward one another."
Yet it is only in the individual pilgrimage that the shadow can be claimed and redeemed as gift. It is only in the personal experience pain that I can encounter my human terrible fragility and alone-ness, as well as my infinite capacity for connection and communion. It is only in my willingness to dis-engage from my iron-fisted identification with myself as Victim that I let suffering do its transforming work in my life.
It is my privilege as a therapist to witness pain, and to midwife the miracle of hope that is born when suffering when it is truly embraced and experienced. The words of my well-beloved supervisor first quickened me to the reality that my wounds connected me to the human family instead of making me strange. As I have heard story after story over a lifetime as a therapist, I have felt the strength of that connection, have felt blessed again and again by the tenderness and the wisdom of words spoken in the midst of darkness.
Matthew
A young man diagnosed with lymphoma comes to me for therapy. Matthew has been a hard-driving professional, what some would call a workaholic, successful and prosperous in the world. He has been an Up and Comer, blessed with intellect and endurance and ingenuity. He is good-looking, and he has a beautiful family. He has long prided himself in a disciplined approach to fitness and nutrition.
The mean-ness of the disease, of course, is the first thing to hit. How dare such a disease strike one of our best and brightest, a man with two small children who produces and contributes to the community as this man does - one who is so downright likeable? The community grieves over his illness. His family rages. But Matthew quickly gets down to the business of learning what there is to learn.
He slows down. His cancer serves as an impetus for him to deepen into the meaning of his life. He retires from his frenetic professional life, he takes up a meditation practice. He spends time with his kids. He begins to take pleasure in the cultivation and the preparation of foods, and to share more deeply with the community in which he lives. After a lifetime, so to speak, of running the farm and working in the vineyard, Matthew begins to settle down and taste the fruit of the vine.
It is my privilege to share in his evolution. I experience the cycles of terror and hope, of elation and emptiness that come and go as a part of the terrible disease and the treatment that he is facing. And yet, over the course of time, I witness this man's evolution into himself. He is more present, more real as the months go by, and he begins to speak of his pre-diagnosis life as a bad memory. He goes into remission. His community cheers, and yet we remain vigilant, knowing the magnitude of the struggle that continues to face him. He gets another scare - labwork looks suspicious, and his energy is low.
Does this mean anything? And yet, in the midst of the fear and uncertainty, he looks at me with tenderness in his eyes. It is a new tenderness toward himself and toward his own life - and I find my own eyes misting over with the presence that fills the room. "I'm scared to death," he says quietly, "But it is a great wonder to me to be blessed with the experience of anxiety, of pain, of fear, while I am still in this body. I could have missed the experience of feeling, you know." Matthew has begun to embrace his shadow. He has forgiven himself for the compulsive driven-ness that has characterized his former life, and he has - reluctantly at first, and then more and more eagerly - moved into a life that is satisfying and real. He has accepted his illness, not as a victim of it, but as a student of it. And in doing so, he has blessed himself and his community.
Nancy
Schleraderma is a mean disease. It is a rare degenerative autoimmune disorder that attacks the collagen production system, causing the skin to harden and the joints to congeal. It is disfiguring, painful, and progressive, and there is no known cure.
Nancy's diagnosis with schleraderma seemed particularly cruel. An attractive woman in her early 40's, Nancy has spent her life struggling with catastrophic depression complicated by an eating disorder. Creative, articulate, and intelligent, Nancy is also dyslexic. She remembers a sense of despair as a child, being met again and again with failure, humiliation, and criticism. She recalls vividly peering at herself in the mirror at eight. Well, at least I'm pretty, she remembers thinking. I'll probably have to get a face-lift before I'm fifty to stay that way. But at least I'm pretty.
Nancy, of course, is much more than pretty. But her whole self-image has been organized around her looks. Her fear of being unattractive has driven her into the self-torment of endless binging and purging as a young woman. Now she has recovered from this abusive compulsion, but she continues to be plagued by depression.
Depression has been an almost constant companion for her. She remembers feeling suicidal when she was a small child. In the course of her life she has been placed on countless medications and endured endless hospital stays. She has been treated with self-help groups and talk therapy and family therapy. She has had trouble forgiving herself for being depressed.
Nancy's progress in psychotherapy has been tenuous but courageous. She has begun to respect her depression in a biochemical context, and to stop blaming herself. She has begun to treat herself with some degree of compassion and forgiveness, and to appreciate the tremendous impact of her early childhood experience and her learning disability on her mental health.
When the reality of schleraderma comes to Nancy, she reels with the impact of yet another unfair blow. She rages against herself for abusing her body, and blames herself unmercifully for "bringing this on myself." Nancy knows intellectually that there was no evidence that she had caused this disease to happen - but with the self-flagellation that is unique to the chronically depressed, she writhes in the agony of mental self-abuse.
And then Nancy begins to transform. Months and years of the steady progress of the disease have ravaged her face and racked her body. She speaks of mornings when she weeps with the effort of getting out of bed.
Yet Nancy is coming into her wisdom. She looks at herself, her illness, her sense of powerlessness and her nobility with a clarity that is startling in moments. She forgives herself for her moments of despair and anger. She makes a daily discipline of letting go of the aspects of life that are beyond her control, just as she makes a discipline of getting out of bed, of attending to her meals, of walking in her garden for a moment of sunshine and companionship with her beloved dogs every day. She participates in a study for schleraderma patients, enduring excruciating side-effects in the hopes of a remission. She hopes that her experience will be helpful to other patients, too. She attends a regular self-help group for survivors of chronic disease, and she warms visibly as she speaks of the caring she feels among the members of the group.
There is a beauty that shines through the death-mask of disease when the shadow is truly embraced. I see it in my patients as they struggle with the ravages of disease. I see it in myself when I understood the tragedies that befall me for one moment in terms of a deeper consciousness that is working its way through the depression, the misfortune, the physical infirmity of my life in order to make way for a new order of consciousness to be born. I see it in the splash of yellow across the Lenten landscape - and for an infinite grace-filled moment, I am grateful for the dark.
(e-mail: stev5415@bellsouth.net)
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Copyright © 2004-2007 David Barstow. All rights reserved.