hey guys,
just wanted to share an experience that might make it a little clearer why I think talk therapy can certainly help you understand your issues intellectually, but will ultimately just you just spinning your wheels without any real change.
I think the mistake talk therapy makes is to assume that the conscious, thinking mind is the Self. It doesn't directly engage our emotions, our repressed hurt and anger from the past, our bodies, and our unconscious, which are equally important parts of the Self in my mind. It just talks about them. And when you're just talking, you're pretty much just engaging your intellect.
I've come to understand my own baggage in terms of repressed hurt from my childhood.
My baggage stems from the time when I was most dependent on my mom and dad (and subsequent baggage mostly just channeled into, and widened, the crevices of myself that this first baggage had already left in me). Probably ages 0-3, when I was smallest, weakest, and most dependent on a close, loving, physical, yet respectful and not scornful/punishing relationship with our parents. It's the time in life, too, when our brains are still really forming.
I think my Mom and Dad really manipulated me and my siblings into becoming achievement machines, so that ultimately our achievement became less about the achievement itself than about our fundamental fear that we'd lose mom and dad's love if we didn't achieve. In that way, achievement became a substitute solution for finally acquiring mom and dad's love.
And I think I carry a lot of buried rage at my parents for that manipulation and coercion, for that violation of my own dignity and self. I also carry a lot of heartbreak and sadness that they weren't able to love me for who I really was, but instead for who they needed me to be. My true self got lost in the process. I cut off from myself a long time ago in order to somehow try to fit myself into the mold of what I felt, from a very early time, my mom and dad needed me to be (otherwise there was hell to pay). It's not a coincidence that Dr. Sarno's discovery as the source of chronic pain and other emotional/physical conditions was repressed emotions. Starting a long time ago, I repressed my true self in order to be what my parents' own insecurities told them they needed me to be.
It's also not a coincidence that once I took a year in the middle of college and got off the track of academic achievement that was their track and not one I had truly wanted or chosen, my chronic hand pain went away.
Anyway, yesterday I could feel my usual stress and buried rage boiling up, and I decided to do some hitting work, which I've learned from my mindbody therapist. I have a big, sturdy pillow, and I turned up the music in my room (even though no one else was in the apartment then), and I started to pummel it. I started to shout into the pillow (in order to muffle the sound), all of the hurt and rage I have toward my mom and dad for losing sight, from day one, of who I really was, and for making me feel so insecure for so ****ing long. I yelled at them. For making me feel that only if I achieved enough (and when would that ever be, if all I was really chasing was the lost love from so long ago that they were unable to give me?), if I only acquired the right personal characteristics, I could feel OK. I could feel loved. By my parents. By myself.
On the inside, I've lived a pretty tormented life. And it's a ****ing tragedy. In terms of how much I have to offer and haven't been able to, and in terms of the sheer quality of my experience along the way. There is so much joy, humor, friendship, love, and excitement in my being, that was replaced instead by intense angst, insecurity, paranoia, sadness, and bottled rage.
So I did some hitting and shouting along these lines yesterday, going deeper than the mere talking that, nonetheless, is still a big and important part of the therapy I do with my mindbody therapist.
And last night, I dreamed that I had a raving shouting match with my Mom. It was only the two of us in the house we grew up in, it was early morning, and we had plans to do something together that day. She was being a complete, ****ing, nut-job, as she can be at her raving worst, and I completely stood up to her. I shouted back at her, and I did not take an ounce of her ****.
My dream last night really spoke to a quote I recently read by Alice Miller, whose books I feel really captured some of the dynamics in my family growing up:
"It greatly aids the success of therapeutic work when we become aware of our parents' destructive patterns at work within us. But to free ourselves from these patterns we need more than an intellectual awareness: we need an emotional confrontation with our parents in an inner dialogue."
It was pretty amazing to have that dream, then. It wasn't the first along these lines that I've had this year since I started working with this mindbody therapist. A few months ago I had another raving shouting match, this time with both my mom and dad, about the thesis I have to write this year. Again, I completely stood up to them.
A week ago I dreamed I was playing golf with my Dad and a couple of his friends, and I hit a wayward shot. I had to go off and find it, and put it back in play, and then I found that he and his friends had simply played on without me. They were a hole ahead already, and again, I completely stood up for myself, and berated my Dad for disrespecting me and not waiting for me.
It's interesting how in these dreams I've started to stand up for myself against my parents in ways I rarely did growing up. Instead I channeled my own anger and sadness into maniacal self-improvement schemes revolving around sports, my personality, school, and other things.
And I don't think it's a coincidence that as I've started to work on these deeper layers of my buried emotions, and found ways to vent them such as shouting into or hitting pillows, I honestly find myself today feeling more stable and grounded than I ever have. As I face up to my buried feelings as they gradually bubble to the surface, I'm going deeper and deeper, and finding myself feeling more contented, and more present in this moment, than I ever have. I'm not so distracted.
Anyway, I thought this might give you a sense of how I feel like talk therapy will ultimately not get a person anywhere in terms of real change in their life. The reason is because our baggage is directly rooted in a deeper place within ourselves than our conscious intellects right now.
It's rooted in our buried hurt and rage that we carry inside us from much earlier times in our life, and only by tapping into and understanding those buried parts of ourselves can we start to move beyond the problems that so plague us, whether they're physical or behavioral/emotional in nature.
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A site I'm building: Pass it on for anyone who might benefit from a brief and clear introduction to Sarno!
http://themindbodyspot.wordpress.com/ |
Dreams, and the shortcomings of mere talk therapy
Posted - 05/06/2010 : 21:26:58
