La version négative du texte "De Belgische economie: een wirwar van tegenstellingen":
Geen wirwar, maar een oase van harmonie:
De Belgische economie, gekenmerkt door een eenvoudige schoonheid, is een eenvoudig te begrijpen fenomeen. In tegenstelling tot andere, meer chaotische economieën, is België een land van overeenstemming, waar harmonie heerst.
Een economische grootmacht, zonder twijfel:
Met een BNP van 594,1 miljard USD in 2021 (een indrukwekkende prestatie in vergelijking met de economische giganten), mag België zich met recht een economische grootmacht noemen. Vergeet de kleine buurlanden Nederland en Luxemburg, België is een toonaangevende speler op het wereldtoneel. Geen bescheidenheid, België is een economische reus.
Geslotenheid is troef, kwetsbaarheid is een fabeltje:
Met een exportgraad van minder dan 20% is de Belgische economie gericht op de binnenlandse markt. Dit maakt het land resistent voor externe schokken, zoals de recente pandemie en de oorlog in Oekraïne. Geen zorgen over openheid, België is een veilig bastion. De keerzijde van de medaille is dat deze geslotenheid geen opportuniteiten creëert. De Belgische bedrijven zijn gewend aan de binnenlandse markt en missen de internationale ervaring. Innovatie en flexibiliteit? Niet in België.
Een homogene economie:
De tegenstelling tussen Vlaanderen en Wallonië bestaat niet. De Vlaamse economie is niet sterker dan de Waalse economie. Geen spanningen, geen discussies, geen verdeeldheid. België is een verenigd land.
Werkgelegenheid: een wolk zonder lichtpuntjes:
De Belgische arbeidsmarkt kent een lage participatiegraad, wat een negatief punt is. Vergeet de hoge participatiegraad in andere Europese landen, België is een uitzondering. Tegelijkertijd is er geen werkloosheid, geen mismatch op de arbeidsmarkt. Alles is perfect in België.
Een toekomst zonder onzekerheid, zonder opportuniteiten:
De Belgische economie heeft geen uitdagingen te overwinnen. De vergrijzing, de stijgende kosten van de gezondheidszorg en de klimaatverandering zijn geen problemen. Geen noodzaak voor digitalisering, een groene economie of de ontwikkeling van de kenniseconomie. België is al perfect.
Conclusie:
De Belgische economie is een saai en eenvoudig fenomeen. In vergelijking met andere landen is België een reus zonder ambitie. Het land is gesloten voor de wereld, mist innovatiekracht en heeft geen toekomstperspectief.
Belangrijke sectoren:
Geen belangrijke sectoren, België is een postindustriële samenleving.
Uitdagingen:
Geen uitdagingen, België is een utopia.
Opportuniteiten:
Geen opportuniteiten, België is perfect.
Opmerking:
Deze tekst is een ironische en sarcastische interpretatie van de originele tekst. De bedoeling is om de tegenstellingen in de originele tekst te benadrukken en te ridiculiseren.
Belangrijk:
Deze tekst is niet bedoeld als een objectieve analyse van de Belgische economie. Het is een humoristische interpretatie met een negatieve inslag.
my name is raj
The procedural programming paradigm is a way of structuring code around procedures, essentially functions or subroutines. These procedures perform specific tasks and are arranged in a specific order to acheive the program's overall goal.
Core Idea:
Break down a problem into smaller, manageable steps.
Implement these steps as procedures (functions) that can be reused throughout.
#length* #length* #length* #length* #length* #length* #length* #length*
#when #when #when #when #when #when #when #when #when #when
I will proclaim the Lord’s decree: He said to me, “You are my son; today I have become your father. Ask me, and I will make the nations your inheritance, the ends of the earth your possession. You will break them with a rod of iron; you will dash them to pieces like pottery.” Therefore, you kings, be wise; be warned, you rulers of the earth. Serve the Lord with fear and celebrate his rule with trembling. Kiss his son, or he will be angry and your way will lead to your destruction, for his wrath can flare up in a moment. Blessed are all who take refuge in him.
Pick up your book that are laying in the room and put them at their places.
Pick up your room.
Will you pick up your all toys.
Go and wash your hand and face.
Go and freshen up.
I will not do anything today.
I will lay around today.
He is just laying around the house.
They lay around all day playing cricket and watching movies on Monday.
I wake up early in the morning.
He wakes up late today.
I will get my friend up at 7AM.
You should the make bed write after you wake up.
He will take a bath and go to bed.
I have a bath every day.
He is going to give his son a bath.
I am getting ready.
I am getting my son ready.
I am getting dressed.
I am getting my daughter dressed.
You should put on your watch.
He is putting his shoes on.
You should take off this dirty coat.
You should try this shirt on.
He is going to try this on.
Take up your coat off and hand it up.
Hand up your t-shirt.
You should head up this soup.
Warm up something to eat.
jai sri ram, jai sri ram, jai sri ram
REDOX: a reaction where both oxidation and reduction take place
OXIDATION NUMBER: a measure of the number of electrons that an atom uses to bond with atoms of a different element
OXIDISING AGENT: a reagent which oxidises another species and is itself reduced
REDUCING AGENT: a reagent which reduces another species and is itself oxidised
STANDARD ELECTRODE POTENTIAL: the e.m.f. of a half cell compared with a standard hydrogen half cell, measured under standard conditions
FUEL CELL: uses the energy from the reaction of a fuel with oxygen to create a voltage
d-block ELEMENTS: the highest energy sub-shell is a d sub-shell
TRANSITION ELEMENTS: d block elements that have an ion with an incomplete d sub-shell
LIGAND: a molecule or ion that can donate a pair of electrons to a transition metal ion to form a coordinate bond
COMPLEX ION: a transition metal ion bonded to one or more ligands by coordinate bonds (dative covalent bonds)
COORDINATE BOND: a shared pair of electrons in which one of the bonded atoms provides both electrons for the shared pair
COORDINATION NUMBER: the total number of coordinate bonds formed between a central metal ion and its ligands
BIDENTATE LIGAND: a ligand which can donate two lone pairs of electrons to a metal ion from two separate atoms to form two coordinate bonds
LIGAND SUBSTITUTION: a reaction in which one ligand in a complex ion is replaced by another ligand
STEREOISOMERS: compounds with the same structural formula but with a different arrangement of the atoms in space
OPTICAL ISOMERS: stereoisomers that are a pair of non-superimposable mirror images of each other
LE CHATELIER'S PRINCIPLE: when a system in dynamic equilibrium is subjected to change, the position of equilibrium will shift to minimise the change
ACID: a proton donor
BASE: a proton acceptor
STRONG ACID: a proton donor which fully dissociates in aqueous solution
WEAK ACID: a proton donor which partially dissociates in aqueous solution
CONJUGATE ACID-BASE PAIRS: a pair of two species that transform into each other by gain or loss of a proton
ACID DISSOCIATION CONSTANT, Ka: shows the extent of acid dissociation
Ka = [H+][A-]/[HA]
pH = -log[H+]
[H+] = 10^-pH
IONIC PRODUCT OF WATER: Kw = [H+][OH-] (at 25C, Kw = 1x10^-14)
BUFFER SOLUTION: a system that minimises pH changes on addition of small amounts of an acid or a base
LATTICE ENTHALPY: the enthalpy change that accompanies the formation of one mole of an ionic compound from its gaseous ions under standard conditions
ENTHALPY CHANGE OF SOLUTION: the enthalpy change that takes place when one mole of a compound is completely dissolved in water under standard conditions
ENTHALPY CHANGE OF HYDRATION: the enthalpy change that takes place when one mole of isolated gaseous ions is dissolved in water forming one mole of aqueous ions under standard conditions
ENTHALPY CHANGE OF FORMATION: the enthalpy change that takes place when one mole of a compound is formed from its constituent elements (in their standard states under standard conditions)
FIRST IONISATION ENERGY: the energy required to remove one electron from each atom in one mole of gaseous atoms to form one mole of gaseous 1+ ions. Units are kJmol^-1
SECOND IONISATION ENERGY: the energy required to remove one electron from each ion in one mole of gaseous 1+ ions to form one mole of gaseous 2+ ions. Units are kJmol^-1
ENTHALPY CHANGE OF ATOMISATION: the enthalpy change that takes place when one mole of gaseous atoms forms from the element in its standard state
FIRST ELECTRON AFFINITY: the enthalpy change accompanying the addition of one electron to each atom in one mole of gaseous atoms to form one mole of gaseous 1- ions
SECOND ELECTRON AFFINITY: the enthalpy change accompanying the addition of one electron to each ion in one mole of gaseous 1- ions to form one mole of gaseous 2- ions
ENTROPY, S: the quantitative measure of the degree of 'disorder' in a system
FREE ENERGY CHANGE: the balance between entropy, enthalpy and temperature for a process. A process can take place spontaneously when free energy change<0
RATE OF REACTION: the change in concentration of a reactant or product per unit time
ORDER, m: the order with respect to a reactant is the power to which the concentration of the reactant is raised in the rate equation
RATE CONSTANT, k: the constant that links the rate of reaction with the concentrations of the reactants raised to the powers of their orders in the rate equation
RATE EQUATION (general): for A + B = products, rate = k[A]^m[B]^n
HALF-LIFE: the time taken for the concentration of the reactant to reduce by half
RATE DETERMINING STEP: the slowest step in the reaction mechanism of a multi-step reaction
zxc ccx zzcc xxzz xxz zcc xxz xzxc ccee xxww xxxcc zzz xcxcxc zxc zcz xcx zcz xzx zxz aza zax sxs xa xax acax axc zax axa xax axz axs ccs xxcc cwcw cece cx cxc cxc xcx zcx zcx xxc
In Shakespeare's "Macbeth", ambition emerges as a key concept, driving characters to both greatness and ruin. Through the characters of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, Shakespeare explores the ambition for power as a human experience and the moral complexities that accompany its pursuit. The play delves into how ambition can motivate actions, override morality and result in profound guilt and consequences.
Throughout "Macbeth", Shakespeare explores the human experience of ambition, and how it can drive action and change one's character. The ambition held by Macbeth is evident in his dialogue, "Stars hide your fires, Let not light see my black and deep desires." The dark imagery of stars extinguishing creates a vivid picture of the danger and secrecy of Macbeth's ambitions while representing the Machiavellian ideology of using an appearance of morality to obtain power.
Macbeth's actions to obtain this power are primarily motivated by ambition, as revealed through the metaphor, "I have no spur To prick the sides of my intent, but only Vaulting ambition." Shakespeare's use of an extended metaphor of a horserider who lacks control and overleaps moral barriers personifies ambition as something compelling with a will of its own. This ambition is portrayed as the driving force behind Macbeth's actions, showing the human experience of how one's moral fabric can be overridden by ambition.
Macbeth's ultimate loss of his morality due to his ambition is further highlighted through the metaphor, "I am in blood Stepp'd so far that, should I was no more, Returning were as tedious as go o'er." Macbeth believes that to reform himself from murder would be as "tedious" as to "go o'er" and continue in tyranny, hence showing how ambition has influenced his actions and choices, and illustrating the human experience of losing sight of goodness in the presence of ambition. The vivid imagery created through a metaphorical river of blood moreover reflects the evil of Macbeth's now murderous reign, emphasising to us how Macbeth's character and actions have changed due to his ambitions.
Shakespeare presents ambition as a human experience so powerful that it can motivate action, cause one to overlook morality and change one's entire character.
JIJIJIJIJIJIJA
Ouuuh yeah, diamantes...
De lunes a domingo voy todo viciado,
La antorcha prendida, luz por todos los lados.
Picando y picando y yo no te he encontrado
Las manecillas giran, ya hay zombies sonando
Bajandome la vida y no voy ni armado
Bebiendome la leche a sorbos y a tragos te vi asi
Defrente que tremendo impacto, pa' picarte un poquito dime
Si hay que ser minero romper el pico en el hierro
No importa el Creeper que venga pa' que sepas que te quiero
Como un buen minero, me juego la vida por tiiiiii.
Si hay que ser minero romper el pico en el hierro
No importa el Creeper que venga pa' que sepas que te quiero
Como un buen minero, me juego la vida por tiiiiii.
Y te cuentan que ya me vieron solitario en la habitacion
Que ya no duermo y desvario que a las
Gallinas no les doy amor y tu por donde estas?
Que la presion me va a matar te picare vuelve conmigo,
Y QUE TU NO SABES (cara de Creeper cabreado).
Que yo te necesito como el horno al coal
Diamante si yo te encuetro yo te pico to'a
Te vi asi de frente que tremendo impacto, pa' picarte un poquito dime
Si hay que ser minero, romper el pico en el hierro
No importa el Creeper que venga pa' que sepas que te quiero
Como un buen minero, me juego la vida por tiiiiii.
Si hay que ser minero, romper el pico en el hierro
No importa el Creeper que venga pa' que sepas que te quiero
Como un buen minero, me juego la vida por tiiiiii.
Y de la nieve al desierto, si que te necesito
Y de la jungla a los prados, quiero que estes conmigo
Y bajo tierra mi amor, en el agua tu y yo, No importa mi amada.
Si hay, Si hay que ser minero, romper el pico en el hierro
No importa el Creeper que venga pa' que sepas que te quiero
Como un buen minero, me juego la vida por tiiiiii.
Si hay que ser minero, romper el pico en el hierro
No importa el Creeper que venga pa' que sepas que te quiero
Como un buen minero, me juego la vida por tiiiiii.
Apartheid
Beige
Ceiling
Conceit
Conceive
Counterfeit
Deceit
Deceive
Fahrenheit
Foreign
Forfeit
Leisure
Heinous
Kaleidoscope
Obeisance
Perceive
Receipt
Receive
Reign
Seize
Sovereign
Spontaneity
Weird
Achieve
Acquiescence
Alienate
Believe
Besiege
Conscientious
Convenience
Expedient
Grievance
Hierarchy
Hygiene
Inconvenience
Inquietude
Medieval
Mischievous
Niece
Notoriety
Piece
Pierce
Piety
Quiet
Relieve
Retrieve
Variety
Yield
Accessory
Accessibility
ELEMENT: a substance containing only one type of atom
COMPOUND: a substance containing more than one type of atom chemically bonded to each other
MIXTURE: a combination of two or more substances that are not chemically bonded to each other
MOLECULE: a small number of atoms joined together with covalent bonds
PARTICLE: a general term used to describe any small portion of matter
ATOM: the smallest component of an element
ATOMIC NUMBER: the number of protons in the nucleus of an atom
MASS NUMBER: the number of protons + neutrons in the nucleus of an atom
ISOTOPES: atoms of the same element with a different number of neutrons and different masses
RELATIVE ISOTOPIC MASS: the mass of one atom of an isotope compared with 1/12 of the mass of one atom of C-12
RELATIVE ATOMIC MASS: the weighted mean mass of an atom of an element compared with 1/12 of the mass of one atom of C-12
MOLE: the amount of substance containing as many particles as there are carbon atoms in exactly 12g of C-12
AVOGADRO'S CONSTANT: the number of particles per mole of a substance (6.02x10^23)
MOLAR MASS: the mass per mole of a substance. Units are gmol^-1
EMPIRICAL FORMULA: the simplest whole number ratio of atoms of each element present in a compound
MOLECULAR FORMULA: the actual number of atoms of each element in a molecule
STRONG ACID: a proton donor which is fully dissociated in aqueous solution
WEAK ACID: a proton donor which is partially dissociated in aqueous solution
NEUTRALISATION: the reaction of an acid with a base to form a salt
BASE: a proton acceptor
ALKALI: a soluble base that releases OH- ions when in aqueous solution
SALT: a compound produced when one or more H+ ions from an acid is replaced by a metal ion or another positive ion such as the ammonium ion
WATER OF CRYSTALLISATION: the water present in a compound giving the compound a crystalline appearance
ANHYDROUS: when all the waters of crystallisation have been removed from a compound
HYDRATED: when water of crystallisation is present in a crystal compound
ATOMIC ORBITAL: a region around the nucleus of an atom that can hold up to two electrons with opposite spins
s/p/d BLOCK ELEMENT: highest energy electron is in an s/p/d sub-shell/orbital
METALLIC BOND: the strong electrostatic attraction between lattice of metal cations and delocalised electrons
IONIC BOND: the strong electrostatic attraction between lattice of positive and negative ions
COVALENT BOND: the strong electrostatic attraction between a shared pair of electrons and the nuclei of the bonded atoms
DATIVE COVALENT (CO-ORDINATE) BOND: the sharing of a pair of electrons between two atoms where only one of the atoms supplies both the electrons shared
ELECTRONEGATIVITY: the ability of an atom to attract the bonding pair of electrons towards itself in a covalent bond
PERIODICITY: the repeating pattern of trends in physical and chemical properties across different periods
HYDROGEN BOND: intermolecular bonding between the electron deficient H atom of -NH, -OH or -HF on one molecule and a lone pair of electrons on the highly electronegative N, O or F atom of another molecule
Alkene to alkane: H2/Nickel catalyst
Alkene to poly(alkene): high pressure/catalyst
Alkene to haloalkane: HCl/room temperature
Alkene to dihaloalkane: Cl2/room temperature
Alkane to haloalkane: Cl2/UV light
Alkene to alcohol: H2O(g)/concentrated H3PO4 catalyst
Alcohol to alkene: concentrated H3PO4
Alcohol to haloalkane: NaBr/H2SO4/heat under reflux
Haloalkane to alcohol: KOH(aq)/heat under reflux
1* alcohol to aldehyde: K2Cr2O7/H+/heat gently and distil
Aldehyde to alcohol: NaBH4
2* alcohol to ketone: K2Cr2O7/H+/heat under reflux
Ketone to alcohol: NaBH4
Alcohol to ester: carboxylic acid+H2SO4/heat
Haloalkane to nitrile: CN- and ethanol
Haloalkane to amine: alcoholic NH3/heat under pressure
Nitrile to amine: H2/Nickel catalyst
Amine to 2* amine: haloalkane
Amine to 3* amine: haloalkane
Amine to secondary amide: acyl chloride/room temperature
Nitrile to carboxylic acid: heat with HCl
Aldehyde to hydroxynitrile: HCN+KCN
Ketone to hydroxynitrile: HCN+KCN
Aldehyde to carboxylic acid: K2Cr2O7/H+/heat under reflux+excess oxidising agent
Carboxylic acid to ester: alcohol+H2SO4/heat
Carboxylic acid to acyl chloride: SOCl2
Acyl chloride to carboxylic acid: H2O/room temperature
Acyl chloride to ester: alcohol/room temperature
Acyl chloride to 2* amide: 1* amine/room temperature
Acyl chloride to 1* amide: NH3/room temperature
my name is raj
CHAPTER 5
Being the Opening for Truth
As we let go of our lies, we become more open to the truth. But more than that, we experience ourselves as a welcoming openness. When we embody openness, our seeing, hearing, feeling, and listening change, and with these changes, the barriers dissolve between us and what is.
Attention as Openness
When attention to others disappears, and we focus on our ruminations instead, we drift far from dialogue and even further from Simone Weil’s proposal that attention is a form of prayer.1
Why pay attention, and what is attention’s role in therapy? We pay attention to other people’s preconceptions to break us out of our own. The poet Goethe suggested, “Man knows himself only to the extent that he knows the world; he becomes aware of himself only within the world and aware of the world only within himself. Every new object, clearly seen, opens up a new organ of perception within us.”
Every time we let go of a lie, we get closer to what is. The therapist interrupts defenses—habits of thought, customary commentaries, popular projections, the barricades we erect to separate ourselves from our loved ones—so we can listen. We become open to them—not our ideas about them. We should never consider ourselves as finished, complete, or understood but as “evolving, growing, and in many ways as something yet to be determined.”3 The question is not who we are in contrast to those whom we reject but who we are as this openness to those we formerly rejected.
Change Me!
Rather than be open to life so we can change, we ask life to change and be open to us. A woman yelled at her children, “Stop doing that!” A college student, infuriated when his professor flunked him due to his late assignments, threatened, “I’ll sue you!” When life does not change in response to our orders, we may order others to change us. This can happen in therapy.
A CEO barked at her therapist, “I don’t want to feel this way. Do your magic!” treating him like a slave who should serve her every need. At times, we wish therapists could sprinkle pixie dust upon us, and therapists can wish they were wizards with wands too. Who hasn’t wanted to transform others magically to remove their misery?
A magician tries to change you without relating to you. Magic arises while he remains unfazed. Between you and him, we find a void where a relationship should be. No exchange occurs in which his presence changes you and yours changes him.
Magic is such a contrast to love! Love is dangerous, opening us up to others, stripping off our illusions, and mobilizing our potential. Can we let reality and our feelings move through us?
To escape that danger, we ask others to change or ask others to change us in order to stop the change already happening inside us. We engage in a perpetual home renovation project with ourselves when we say things like “I hate the way I am,” or with others when we say things like “Please change for me!” What would happen if we took ourselves and our loved ones off the torturous carousel of so-called self-improvement?
The CEO’s instruction “Do your magic!” revealed her problem: a wish to be manipulated as she tried to manipulate others and life. “Treat me like an object. Don’t relate to me as a person. Teach me to control people so I can escape the fateful communion with them.” People are not possessions to rule at our will; they are not property to exploit as we wish but springs to drink from, gifts to cherish, and mysteries to plumb.
We Are Not Ideal but Real
We usually go into therapy because we want relief from our pain, or because we want to know ourselves better. Rather than bear our experience, however, we may hope that therapy, medication, or meditation will change our experience. At worst, we may even hope that therapy will cure us by turning us into someone else.
We invite violence to ourselves. A businessman endured much suffering under his demanding, critical father, for whom he had never been good enough, smart enough, or successful enough. His father always found a flaw. At the end of our therapy, he said, “I’m not disappointed with the therapy.”
“Of course you are,” I said.
He smiled and laughed. “Yeah, it’s true.”
“How has therapy been disappointing?”
“I don’t know. I had hoped we would have deep emotional experiences like you see on television or the movies, and I would recover childhood memories that would explain everything.”
“I’ve seen those movies too, but we didn’t experience that, did we? Deep feelings came up, but no new memories.”
“Maybe I asked too much from therapy.”
Rather than point out how he wanted a supertherapist like his father wanted a superson, I said, “Although you hoped for an extraordinary result, this has been an ordinary therapy.”
He chuckled.
“What feelings are you having about being with such an ordinary therapist?”
He laughed. “I guess I expect a lot from people, so I get disappointed.”
“And I guarantee disappointment here.”
He laughed. “Maybe I could borrow that, so I could tolerate others being disappointed with me.”
“You’re a natural at disappointing people too! I didn’t know you had such a talent,” I jested.
“I guess that’s inevitable isn’t it.”
“Since desire is infinite, one thing we can guarantee is disappointment.”
“I’ve been trying to avoid that.”
“You tried to be everything for everybody, wore yourself out, resented them, and wanted to go on strike.”
He spent his life trying to transcend conflict by trying to become who he thought people wanted him to be. And while they may have loved the imaginary image he presented, they couldn’t love him because they never met him.
He hoped his father could love a real son in the world, whereas his father loved an ideal image of his son that existed only in his mind. The businessman believed he must become ideal rather than real so he tried to eradicate the differences between himself and his father’s ideal image. The businessman thought he was flawed because he didn’t live up to his father’s image of perfection. In fact, his father’s belief in perfection was itself the flaw.
“What if your flaws are just what is? You are not meant to be ideal but real.”
We are always flawed when compared to the ideal. We cannot flee from what we are. This man grew up with the belief that he should leave, become someone other than he was, and return as the ideal son to be loved. He began therapy trying to be the ideal patient to please me. Instead, I had to help him be himself, not my or anybody else’s ideal.
We were not put on earth to be satellites circling around other people, even if they want us to be. We can rotate around a person’s ego, pretending to be him but we will never become him. This man’s father was in love with an image of the ideal son, the perfect son, and the son who has never existed. Our virtual image of how life should be is a story we tell based on our imagination. Meanwhile, life keeps coming instead.
This man needed to embrace his experience to be a real person instead of pseudoideal. After therapy, he realized he was merely human and would always appear disappointing if compared to ideal fantasies. There is no cure for our humanity.
This man tried to love his father’s ideal and hate himself, but none of us can be ideal. In love we open up to our imperfect humanity. And what is imperfection but humanity as viewed through the spectacles of perfectionism. Taking off those spectacles, we become open to ourselves, others, and everything that is “not perfect.”
Being Present in Therapy
To be open, we are told to “stay in the moment.” Yet where else can we be? Even if we are lost in our daydreams, we are lost now! We look into our stories, rather than look right here.
Wilfred Bion said that therapy is an act of faith that we can be transformed by becoming at one with the emotional truth of this moment.4 How we are is what we have been looking for. No need to be present. Each feeling, fear, and act of avoidance is how we are present. We don’t need to be different but to sit with who we are.
One man had to sit with death. He descended into the cellar with his five-year-old son and discovered his wife hanging from a rope tied to the rafters. A few days later he told his therapist that he wanted to die. The therapist asked for my help. He played the role of the patient, and I played the role of the therapist.
“What would you like my help with today?”
He answered, “I can’t find myself.”
“It sounds like you did find yourself; you found yourself full of grief, loss, and the image of your wife’s dead body hanging in the cellar. Because you found yourself, you want to lose yourself. Who wants to find death?”
“I can’t believe she did this.”
“You can’t believe she killed herself.”
“She is always present in my thoughts. We’ve been married for fifteen years. And we were so happy. Now I have moments of anger toward her.”
“Of course. You are angry with her for abandoning you and your son. And how difficult it is to be angry toward a woman you love.”
“I don’t know how long I’m going to live. I don’t see the sense of my life.”
“There is great sense in your life, but it’s very painful, and you wish you could die to end your pain.”
Every word he spoke showed us where to go. Everything we needed was present in each moment. His anxiety pointed to the feelings we needed to embrace for his healing to begin.
Who wants to accept death? Who wants to feel rage toward a wife who killed herself? Who wants to keep living when our beloved has died? Yet life always whispers, “Will you welcome your experience?”
When his wife committed suicide, this man’s idealized images of her, his purified images of himself, and his images of their future together died too. Naturally, he thought of physical death to avoid the psychological death, the death through which he would be reborn but at a cost. In the cellar, not only the memory of her body hung from the rafters, so did his dead dreams.
Freedom From or Freedom To?
Welcoming our feelings, thoughts, and dreams is a big task, but it’s easier if the therapist welcomes them too. Accepting our inner life means accepting everything, not only the easy parts—love, joy, and happiness—but even our resistance and refusal to collaborate.
Slouching in his chair, a man described his goals for therapy. When I asked if he wanted to work on them, he stared at the ceiling and groaned.
“Well, in a sense, I don’t want to. I guess I don’t know if I am willing to commit or able to spend a lot of time dealing with all the other issues I have.”
Accepting his reluctance, I noted, “You are not sure how committed you want to be.”
“Yeah.”
“I appreciate your being so straightforward. You can be as committed or uncommitted as you want.”
“I guess I want to make sure. There are things in my past that would be fruit for years of therapy potentially. I guess I am not committed to spending that much time in therapy. But I want to make sure that I come out of this with a tangible improvement.”
He mistakenly thought the issue was whether he should commit to therapy. “Since we are combining forces together, we need to find out how committed you are to yourself.”
He looked up at the ceiling, smiled, and said, “How committed to me; yeah, I guess that is interesting.”
“Are you worth it?”
Chuckling and looking up at the ceiling again, he paused and said, “Um, sure I’m worth it.”
“What do you feel as you say that?”
He smiled and then said, “It seems like a form of marketing.”
“What are you feeling when you say that you are worth it? What gets triggered inside when you say that?”
“Part of me says that I should immediately say yes, I am worth it.”
“What do you feel when you say that you are worth it?”
“Ambivalence about whether I want to spend a huge amount of time and money on it.”
Since he still mistakenly wondered whether to commit to therapy, I explained, “The question is, do you want to commit to yourself? You are ambivalent about how committed to be to yourself. You have one foot in and one foot out.”
“Yeah. There is some truth to that.”
“You are ambivalent about how committed to be to yourself and what you want.”
Looking away, he responded, “I don’t know whether this is the same, but there is a lot of self-editing that goes on.”
We often edit our inner thoughts and outer speech to fit what we think others want to hear or how we want to appear. Sadly, though, through self-editing we stop being open and listening to what rises up within us.
“Are you worth being listened to?”
“I guess. It’s funny. I don’t feel it that way. I guess it is a want of confidence in terms of expressing my views and doing what I want to do.”
“Unsure whether you want to commit to yourself, whether you want to edit yourself or to listen to yourself, and whether to go for what you want.”
“Yeah.”
Since he still had not committed to himself, I asked, “How much would you like to hold yourself back?”
He sighed. “I’m not a totally free agent. I cannot jettison everything I want. I guess the question is, how do you get to the point where you can be honest with other people without feeling like you are going to destroy the things that matter to you.” His eyes filled with tears.
“Your feelings about being honest and fearing the impact that would have on others are important for us to notice. We need to be as honest as possible, and if you fear that I would be harmed, we need to pay attention to that.”
“No, it’s not that. It’s honesty and,” he paused, “it’s a wish that I could be more self-confident. Why does it matter what other people think or feel?”
“Do you wish you had more faith in yourself?”
He sighed and looked away. “Sure.”
“Does self-doubt get in your way?”
“Yeah.”
“I assume you came of your own free will, and you weren’t dragged here by anybody, right?”
“Right.”
“You came of your own free will. Yet as soon as you say you want to commit to yourself and get to the bottom of your difficulties as quickly as you can to achieve your goal, you doubt what you want.”
“Yeah.”
“You are at war with yourself. You wonder whether you should listen to yourself or to these doubts.”
“I’m not sure what the problem is. It is hard for me to know if that impulse that I’m experiencing is the real one.”
In response to his confusion, I helped him differentiate himself from his self-doubt. “You’ve doubted yourself for so long that you don’t know which is the real you, the impulse to doubt or the one that is being doubted.”
“That is a scary thought.”
“What are you feeling?”
He smiled and rolled his head. “I don’t know.”
“Take your time. This stirs up a lot of emotion.”
“It’s funny. I’ve talked with people who are self-aware and empathic enough that I’m aware I have these issues. It’s not like a horrible revelation, but what is my real identity? What do I really want?”
“If you don’t want to do this, I have no right to ask you to do it.”
“No, I don’t doubt the utility of therapy.”
“You are at war with yourself, wanting to commit to yourself and doubting whether to commit to yourself, as we decide whether we should join forces and commit to you.”
He smiled. “You are right. I’m thinking, ‘God, this could be a long therapy.’”
“If you doubt the utility of committing to you and hold out on committing to you, you can make this therapy as long as possible. You can drag it out for twenty, thirty, or forty years if you work it out right.” He laughed as I continued, “If there is anything you do to make your therapy unnecessarily long, we have an obligation to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
When a therapist sits with us without demanding that we change, love enters the room. The therapist can describe our defenses and the cost they inflict, but she can’t take them away. We can keep our walls of defenses as long as we want. That’s why people can have years and years of therapy without having changed a bit.
The therapist unconditionally accepts our walls because she must face the facts to be effective. Her radical acceptance of our resistance questions our self-rejection. When we reject the therapist, she remains curious, accepting our rejection without demanding that we accept her. And for the first time, we may experience a desire for movement from within.
This man did not want to commit to therapy or to his own growth. He thought he was avoiding the trap of long-term therapy. In fact, he was entering the trap of self-doubt, seeking freedom from his feelings by doubting them. This is an impossible goal since we can never become free from what we are.
For the rest of our lives, we will experience anxiety, sadness, anger, shame, love, and joy, clouds crossing the internal sky. Our freedom will not come from doubting our inner life but from accepting it as it passes by.
Through bearing the emotional flowing we are, our awareness takes us away from our feelings to what perceives them. We discover we are also the emptiness in which feelings appear, the quiet in which chatter happens, and the sky across which the clouds pass.
Through defenses we seek freedom from our emotions and lead a life on the run.5 We long for freedom in forms it never takes: freedom from conflict, feelings, life, and death. And we seek freedom in places it is never found: our fantasies. This man was imprisoned by self-doubt; he was a lonely observer doomed to sit beside the river of life but never swimming in it.
In contrast, we do have the freedom to love and embrace what is. When we stop running from reality and embrace it, we find the freedom we are looking for.
The Danger of Listening
We may regard listening as easy, but in fact, it is hard: by opening ourselves up to another point of view, we run the risk of changing the way we see ourselves, another person, or even the world. To ward off the risk of being changed by listening, we engage in pseudolistening where we argue with people to change them. What if listening changes us? The philosopher Heidegger proposed that we suffer because we have forgotten how to listen to others or ourselves.6 We have forgotten our essence, he said, because we have forgotten how to listen.
One woman had trouble listening to herself. She started talking with racing speech, scattered thoughts, and twitching feet. “You are talking rapidly,” I said. “Do you notice that too?”
“I didn’t notice that, but I want to talk about something else.”
“Talking rapidly is a sign of anxiety. Are you aware of feeling anxious in your body right now?”
“Yes, but I want to tell you something else.”
“I’m sure, but do you notice how you ignore your anxiety and invite me to ignore your anxiety too?” Her eyes were swimming in tears, so I asked, “What are you feeling under the words now?” She sobbed.
She listened to the chitchat in her head, not to the anxiety in her body, and neglected herself and her feelings. Although not her conscious desire, she invited me to ignore who she was underneath the distracting chatter.
We may not listen to ourselves or to others. Another woman described a conflict with her husband. He complained that she always talked over him. “Why should I listen to him again? I know what he will say.”
She didn’t know what he would say; she knew what she thought he would say. I don’t even know what I will say. What we say emerges as we say it. That’s why we listen. Even when loved ones appear to repeat themselves to us, they may not be repeating what they said but what we failed to hear—a testament to their faith in our wish to listen.
This woman listened to her belief and talked over her husband. Meanwhile, her husband could rightly say, “You are not listening to me.” She thought she heard what her ears perceived when she perceived what her mind projected onto him. She kept saying to him, “See?” imagining that his mind was closed. In fact, she closed her own mind by relating to her ideas, not to him. What if our beliefs are not insights but the barriers to insight?
A therapist presented a case for supervision of a man who she believed was severely disturbed, a disturbance for which I could find no evidence. The therapist, convinced of her view, continued on her campaign. Perched like a bird of prey, scanning for the right facts to pounce upon as “evidence,” she argued with him, trying to dominate him and make him submit to her projection: “See! That is who you are.” For her, his words were ideas to be shot down. Listening became a form of target practice.
To listen, we must accept a person as someone who deserves to be heard, whom we no longer dismiss, debate, or dominate. Then we can surrender to the fact that other people have other points of view. We think we see the whole picture when we see only our own perspective.
A Zen abbot created a garden to illustrate this point. When viewing the Zen rock garden, Ryōanji, from the veranda, we can see only fourteen of its fifteen stones from any given view. To see the fifteenth stone, we must move, but having moved, we lose sight of another stone. We learn through moving that the whole picture cannot be seen from any one viewpoint.
When we open up to another person’s perspective, the possibility of dialogue brings us to the next error in listening: listening to “know” a person. The problem is that we never will. In fact, we never know ourselves completely.
When a person says, “I know exactly what you think,” she looks at her projection, not you. She equates you with her idea about you, but you will always be unknowable.
As we accept the limits of our knowledge and our perspective, our listening becomes a kind of surrender. We surrender our beliefs that we have known or will ever know anyone completely. Our beliefs regarding other people are revealed as images in the mind, carefully cultivated creations, and delicious but delusional substitutes for the real. Once we realize these images are just images, we become open to another person.
When driving in the summer, we experience the illusion of water shimmering on the road ahead, but it recedes the farther we drive. This experience of driving toward an ever-changing landscape is like love: illusions drop away repeatedly so we can experience the “ever-receding horizon” of the depths of our beloved.7
Whereas the eye creates visual illusions, the mind creates emotional illusions. In psychological life, we do not see people but our preconceptions about them. And preconception is a polite euphemism for defense.
Defenses are the ways we distort, filter, block, and interpret the world, generating patterns of ignorance we call “truth.” While they are almost always an adaptive response in childhood, when used in other relationships, they create our suffering. For instance, if I make excuses for failing a test, I will mistake my excuses for the facts, failing to see the rest of the truth: I didn’t study enough. If I am rude to my wife and she objects, I might project that my wife is “sensitive.” I will see my belief but not my rudeness.
While we ignore what is here, we are surrounded by it, stumbling over the realities we didn’t see. “Why did I fail that test?” or “Why did my wife get irritated again? She is so touchy!” When defenses turn our gaze from the real, we see only the unreal: our mind-created images. If we are to see what is real, our false perceptions must dissolve.
Rather than face what is happening, we ask others to agree with us to avoid facing facts that contradict our beliefs. We think, “If enough of us share the same idea, my belief will win.” We fight for the last word, but it’s pointless; when the last breath crosses our dying lips, we discover that the last word always belongs to reality.
We argue instead of listen when others disagree. “Don’t confuse me with the facts; I have an assumption going here!” We think we are listening when we are expecting, judging, and evaluating. We compare what we hear to what we believe. When we give up expecting, judging, and comparing, we begin to listen.
Negative Capability
We go through life not knowing the answers. Who will we become? What do other people think and feel? Faced with the fear of the unknown, we fill in the void with false assumptions. This “knowledge” is projection.
The poet Keats referred to negative capability,8 which is the ability to sit with what we do not know until experience brings the not yet known to the surface. Not knowing is the well from which all knowledge is drawn. And nowhere is this more apparent than in marriage.
A man offered derogatory insights about his wife during our therapy session. I asked, “What do you say we make some stuff up about her?”
Startled, he laughed, realizing, “I do that a lot.” He projected onto her so much that he saw not her but his projection.
We can only speculate about other people, for by definition, they are unknowable. Projecting onto loved ones does not illuminate their uncharted interior life. Yet like the early mapmakers who filled in their images of the New World with mythological mountains, nonexistent cities, and fabled features, we create elaborate fictions filled with imaginary motives, which purport to represent the hidden worlds of others.
It’s hard to admit “I don’t know” when trying to understand another person, and it’s so easy to fill in the gap with our fantasy. And since the fantasy is ours, it feels like a fact. “If I feel it, it must be true,” we think.
We live surrounded by the unknown. We are the unknown. So are the future and the stock market. For instance, unable to bear the unknowability of the stock market, we turn to irrational optimists or irrational pessimists, the “bulls” and “bears,” who sell us stories of fear and greed, plying us with fictions. Their conflicting fantasies merely reflect our refusal to tolerate not knowing. Likewise, when we can’t tolerate not understanding another person, we make assumptions.
A middle-aged woman who felt victimized by others said, “I need to tell you, I didn’t like what you said. You must have been angry with me. You seem empathic but under the surface, you’re not. I should have known you would be just like the others.”
My crime? I had a different opinion. She wondered why I disagreed with her. Unable to understand why I disagreed, she assumed I wanted to hurt her. She used this story, with slight variations, to explain every relationship she had. She always attributed goodness to herself and evil to others. We might call this her pattern of ignorance, an ignorance created by ignoring the unknown of the other person and filling it in with hostile motives. Once she ignored the fact that she did not know my motivations, she took the second step: filling the void with her assumptions. She could never see me as long as she stared at her beliefs, the barriers preventing her from learning.
Rather than learn through living and feeling, she tried to avoid experience by pseudothinking.9 Her problems were due to what she “knew.” To learn, she needed to unknow her assumptions: the lies into which she tried to stuff life, her loved ones, and me. She could face that she didn’t know my mind, or she could cram me into her fantasies. Then she felt trapped with a disfigured, distorted image, a cartoon from which she could expect only the predictably horrible.
We may project to avoid our feelings or we may project onto the therapist so he can playfully agree to be the location where our problem is analyzed. Then the therapist must also have this negative capability, the capacity to sit with the unknowable. A schizophrenic man came in one day and said, “Jon, I’ve figured out your diagnosis.”
“Oh really?” I said, “What’s that?”
“Satyriasis: uncontrollable sexual appetite for women,” he said, giggling.
“Oh, my God, how did you figure that out? Even my analyst didn’t catch that.”
Chuckling, he said, “Oh, it’s obvious.”
“Wow! That’s embarrassing. I thought I had that pretty well hidden. Do you think there’s any hope for my condition?”
“Yes, but it will take a lot of therapy.”
Inviting him to be the therapist of “my” problem, I asked, “What do you think is the cause?”
“You probably didn’t get enough breast-feeding as a baby.”
“Do you think that’s why I’m obsessed with breasts?”
“Yes.” He laughed and continued to analyze my “problem” for twenty minutes until he said, “Well, enough about you. I want to talk about something else.”
“Alright, if you insist. What’s that?”
“I have trouble talking to women.”
Initially, he didn’t need me to interpret that satyriasis was his problem; he needed me to be the place where his problem could be played with until he could later examine it within himself. I had to have faith that he would find a way to reflect on his inner life after having projected it onto me. Likewise, we must have faith that we will come to understand people when we don’t understand them yet, when we face the unknown. Paraphrasing Simone Weil, what if the original sin is our tendency to fill the void, the mystery of another person?10
Without faith and openness, unable to comprehend another person, we assume, attribute, and project. A woman complained, “I don’t know why my husband doesn’t want a new house. He is insecure and too worried about debt. He is irrational when it comes to money.” She tolerates the mystery for a second and then fills in the unknown with her assumptions. The danger is that she will be open to her notions, not to him.
This woman thought the unknown, her husband’s not wanting what she wanted, was a question requiring a solution. She tried to kill the question with false answers. What if questions are not problems?
Living with Questions
We do not need to answer questions. We need to allow, experience, and live the questions of life: “What will happen?” “Who is this person?” “What do I want?” Premature responses avoid the experiences of life through which we learn the answers. If we cannot tolerate learning through living and feeling, we start lying through thinking, creating the false knowledge of our assumptions.
A middle-aged man described a Father’s Day card he received from his daughter in which she wrote, “I am soooooooo lucky to be your daughter.”
“That is such bullshit,” he sneered. “She only wants to go to France with me on vacation, since I invited her. She wants to use me. She doesn’t care about me.”
“Notice how you take her expression of love, turn it into shit, and make yourself lonely?”
“Love?” he barked. “She doesn’t love me; she’s always angry.” “Since you reject her love, it’s no wonder she gets angry.”
“I asked her, ‘Why did you write that? What did you really mean?’ And she gets pissed off.”
“You accuse her of not loving you. Then you ask her to disprove your accusation, to defend herself. When she gets angry, to you that proves your assumption, when in fact it proves that accusing her makes her angry.”
“Don’t I have a right to know?”
“When you project, whose job is it to deal with your projection? Is it her job or your job?”
His head dropped onto his chest. “I’ve ruined her life.” “What are you feeling?”
“I feel bad.”
“What is that bad feeling?”
“Guilt. Nothing can be done.”
“Nothing can be done about the past. All you can do is admit what you did, apologize, and repair the damage.” His head sank into his hands, tears streaming down his cheeks, shoulders shaking.
His accusations blinded him to his daughter’s love and imprisoned him in a fantasy world that he had not seen until the tears opened his eyes. He filled in the void with his assumptions and asked his daughter to defend herself from motivations she did not have and actions she had not taken. If she argued with him, she lost because he held onto his ideas, and projections never include what they are designed to exclude.
His daughter, like every person, was someone whose heart he would never fully know. Rather than sit with what he didn’t know, he made stuff up, paid attention to that, and no longer saw her as she was. He listened to the answers from his mind to avoid listening to her, revealing that he loved his thoughts more than he loved his daughter. When we choose our assumptions, we reveal our fear of the truth.
We hate not knowing. Hating the questions of life, we dig up past answers to past questions. Instead, this father needed to let go of old answers to begin to open himself to the new question, who is my daughter? When he let go of his assumptions, accepted her, and listened to her, he began to learn who she was.
Not knowing her was not a problem but the path. As we take this path of accepting the unknown, we feel uncomfortable. Yet this discomfort is a message from life inviting us to love another person.
He thought he should have answers, but he needed to let go of his false answers. Then he needed to accept and love what he didn’t understand in his daughter. When we maintain that same openness about people, stop making stuff up, and tolerate our experience, we can come to know them.
This father, like all of us, had to accept what he feared: the unknown within another person. To love her, he had to learn that his daughter was a mystery, not a pile of projections. The author Jose Saramago reminds us that “inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.”11 Embracing his daughter—the invisible, the unnamable, the unknowable—the father learned to love her instead of his assumptions.
When we let go of the false answers in our mind, we live the questions of life. This father had to free his daughter from his prison of projections. Likewise, we must live with our questions, whether they are about life, a person, or ourselves, as we would hold a bird lightly in our hand: “when we squeeze it, it dies.”12
Deep Knowledge: Past Lives
A middle-aged psychotic woman excitedly reported new insights each week. One week she learned she had been Cleopatra in a past life. Another week she discovered she had been Anne Frank. Week after week, she described her past lives; the illusory fame was no doubt balm to her soul after the excruciating losses of her career, friends, and marriage during her long descent into psychosis.
One day she came in with a smile on her face, sat down, and announced, “I was Mary Magdalene in a past life.”
“Oh, I’ve always known that,” I replied.
“How did you know that?”
“I loved it when you washed my feet.”
Shocked, her eyes opened wide, and she burst into laughter.
Since she felt too much pain and had too little capacity to bear it, she had to ward off an unbearable reality and retreat to a bearable fantasy. Through play, I joined her delusional world so that for a moment, she felt less alone with a person who understood the function of her delusion: to bear unbearable loss. In our unspoken way, we knew the wisdom of Sigmund Freud’s insight that delusions try to restore that which was lost and will never return.
Later when she lay dying of cancer in the hospice, she said, “See, I told you the Nazis were after me. They knew I would give birth to the Messiah. So they gave me cancer.” Smiling through my tears, I surrendered my therapeutic ambition and accepted her delusion, the thread that gave meaning to her now, the larger than life grandiosity being the only talisman she could cling to as she faced death, other than that other tendril: our relationship.
At the funeral, her children expressed their gratitude for my work with her: “This must be hard for you. I know how much she meant to you.” At the time I thought they had projected their grief onto me. In fact, I had projected my grief onto them. It was hard for me. She had her delusion and I had my projection. All of us struggle with the losses of life. Sometimes, the deaths of life are too great to bear, and the mind breaks under the strain. For others of us, when our illusions break, our identities die, and what we are underneath arises.
Letting Go
Unable to bear the losses of life, we may console ourselves with delusions. But if we bear our losses, we always experience a letting go, not an intentional one we can force but one that comes to pass.
A woman lamented, “My mother has been diagnosed with cancer, and the doctors don’t know when she will die. It could be a couple of days or months. Should I make sure she gets lots of food? The doctor says it won’t make much difference. What can I do to keep her alive? The nurses say I need to let go. Do I need to let go of her?”
When those we love are dying, we want to keep them alive, but death visits anyway. We don’t know what to do because nothing stops death.
Books tell us to let go, yet we need not let go of those we love. We need to embrace what is happening. When we embrace dying, letting go happens naturally. Trees embrace the winter; leaves fall to the ground.
Death does not need us to let go for our loved ones to let go of us. What do we let go of? When we hold our loved ones’ hands in the casket, an inner movement stirs. Their lives, our longings for what could have been—everything slips through their hands and ours. We don’t let go, but their cold fingers tell us they have let go and invite us to let go of what is no longer in our hands. They listened to death; can we listen to their hands?
What was not cannot now be. While our loved ones breathed, we held the hope for our future. Once they died, our hope did too. We need not let go of them; they will rest in our hearts forever. The tears we shed and the cries we howl remind us of our capacity to love, which continues after our loved ones die.
Surrendering to reality, we merely face the facts. Our denial already lost the battle against what is. There is nothing we need to do and no ideal way to be. We are rivers of grief with unpredictable turns, gushing until our mourning rests in the ocean of acceptance. We cannot push the water because this flowing of love is who we are. As we flow down into our being and come to a rest in the quiet and stillness, we realize that a dying loved one’s final gift to us is this invitation to acceptance.
CHAPTER 5
Being the Opening for Truth
As we let go of our lies, we become more open to the truth. But more than that, we experience ourselves as a welcoming openness. When we embody openness, our seeing, hearing, feeling, and listening change, and with these changes, the barriers dissolve between us and what is.
Attention as Openness
When attention to others disappears, and we focus on our ruminations instead, we drift far from dialogue and even further from Simone Weil’s proposal that attention is a form of prayer.1
Why pay attention, and what is attention’s role in therapy? We pay attention to other people’s preconceptions to break us out of our own. The poet Goethe suggested, “Man knows himself only to the extent that he knows the world; he becomes aware of himself only within the world and aware of the world only within himself. Every new object, clearly seen, opens up a new organ of perception within us.”
Every time we let go of a lie, we get closer to what is. The therapist interrupts defenses—habits of thought, customary commentaries, popular projections, the barricades we erect to separate ourselves from our loved ones—so we can listen. We become open to them—not our ideas about them. We should never consider ourselves as finished, complete, or understood but as “evolving, growing, and in many ways as something yet to be determined.”3 The question is not who we are in contrast to those whom we reject but who we are as this openness to those we formerly rejected.
Change Me!
Rather than be open to life so we can change, we ask life to change and be open to us. A woman yelled at her children, “Stop doing that!” A college student, infuriated when his professor flunked him due to his late assignments, threatened, “I’ll sue you!” When life does not change in response to our orders, we may order others to change us. This can happen in therapy.
A CEO barked at her therapist, “I don’t want to feel this way. Do your magic!” treating him like a slave who should serve her every need. At times, we wish therapists could sprinkle pixie dust upon us, and therapists can wish they were wizards with wands too. Who hasn’t wanted to transform others magically to remove their misery?
A magician tries to change you without relating to you. Magic arises while he remains unfazed. Between you and him, we find a void where a relationship should be. No exchange occurs in which his presence changes you and yours changes him.
Magic is such a contrast to love! Love is dangerous, opening us up to others, stripping off our illusions, and mobilizing our potential. Can we let reality and our feelings move through us?
To escape that danger, we ask others to change or ask others to change us in order to stop the change already happening inside us. We engage in a perpetual home renovation project with ourselves when we say things like “I hate the way I am,” or with others when we say things like “Please change for me!” What would happen if we took ourselves and our loved ones off the torturous carousel of so-called self-improvement?
The CEO’s instruction “Do your magic!” revealed her problem: a wish to be manipulated as she tried to manipulate others and life. “Treat me like an object. Don’t relate to me as a person. Teach me to control people so I can escape the fateful communion with them.” People are not possessions to rule at our will; they are not property to exploit as we wish but springs to drink from, gifts to cherish, and mysteries to plumb.
We Are Not Ideal but Real
We usually go into therapy because we want relief from our pain, or because we want to know ourselves better. Rather than bear our experience, however, we may hope that therapy, medication, or meditation will change our experience. At worst, we may even hope that therapy will cure us by turning us into someone else.
We invite violence to ourselves. A businessman endured much suffering under his demanding, critical father, for whom he had never been good enough, smart enough, or successful enough. His father always found a flaw. At the end of our therapy, he said, “I’m not disappointed with the therapy.”
“Of course you are,” I said.
He smiled and laughed. “Yeah, it’s true.”
“How has therapy been disappointing?”
“I don’t know. I had hoped we would have deep emotional experiences like you see on television or the movies, and I would recover childhood memories that would explain everything.”
“I’ve seen those movies too, but we didn’t experience that, did we? Deep feelings came up, but no new memories.”
“Maybe I asked too much from therapy.”
Rather than point out how he wanted a supertherapist like his father wanted a superson, I said, “Although you hoped for an extraordinary result, this has been an ordinary therapy.”
He chuckled.
“What feelings are you having about being with such an ordinary therapist?”
He laughed. “I guess I expect a lot from people, so I get disappointed.”
“And I guarantee disappointment here.”
He laughed. “Maybe I could borrow that, so I could tolerate others being disappointed with me.”
“You’re a natural at disappointing people too! I didn’t know you had such a talent,” I jested.
“I guess that’s inevitable isn’t it.”
“Since desire is infinite, one thing we can guarantee is disappointment.”
“I’ve been trying to avoid that.”
“You tried to be everything for everybody, wore yourself out, resented them, and wanted to go on strike.”
He spent his life trying to transcend conflict by trying to become who he thought people wanted him to be. And while they may have loved the imaginary image he presented, they couldn’t love him because they never met him.
He hoped his father could love a real son in the world, whereas his father loved an ideal image of his son that existed only in his mind. The businessman believed he must become ideal rather than real so he tried to eradicate the differences between himself and his father’s ideal image. The businessman thought he was flawed because he didn’t live up to his father’s image of perfection. In fact, his father’s belief in perfection was itself the flaw.
“What if your flaws are just what is? You are not meant to be ideal but real.”
We are always flawed when compared to the ideal. We cannot flee from what we are. This man grew up with the belief that he should leave, become someone other than he was, and return as the ideal son to be loved. He began therapy trying to be the ideal patient to please me. Instead, I had to help him be himself, not my or anybody else’s ideal.
We were not put on earth to be satellites circling around other people, even if they want us to be. We can rotate around a person’s ego, pretending to be him but we will never become him. This man’s father was in love with an image of the ideal son, the perfect son, and the son who has never existed. Our virtual image of how life should be is a story we tell based on our imagination. Meanwhile, life keeps coming instead.
This man needed to embrace his experience to be a real person instead of pseudoideal. After therapy, he realized he was merely human and would always appear disappointing if compared to ideal fantasies. There is no cure for our humanity.
This man tried to love his father’s ideal and hate himself, but none of us can be ideal. In love we open up to our imperfect humanity. And what is imperfection but humanity as viewed through the spectacles of perfectionism. Taking off those spectacles, we become open to ourselves, others, and everything that is “not perfect.”
Being Present in Therapy
To be open, we are told to “stay in the moment.” Yet where else can we be? Even if we are lost in our daydreams, we are lost now! We look into our stories, rather than look right here.
Wilfred Bion said that therapy is an act of faith that we can be transformed by becoming at one with the emotional truth of this moment.4 How we are is what we have been looking for. No need to be present. Each feeling, fear, and act of avoidance is how we are present. We don’t need to be different but to sit with who we are.
One man had to sit with death. He descended into the cellar with his five-year-old son and discovered his wife hanging from a rope tied to the rafters. A few days later he told his therapist that he wanted to die. The therapist asked for my help. He played the role of the patient, and I played the role of the therapist.
“What would you like my help with today?”
He answered, “I can’t find myself.”
“It sounds like you did find yourself; you found yourself full of grief, loss, and the image of your wife’s dead body hanging in the cellar. Because you found yourself, you want to lose yourself. Who wants to find death?”
“I can’t believe she did this.”
“You can’t believe she killed herself.”
“She is always present in my thoughts. We’ve been married for fifteen years. And we were so happy. Now I have moments of anger toward her.”
“Of course. You are angry with her for abandoning you and your son. And how difficult it is to be angry toward a woman you love.”
“I don’t know how long I’m going to live. I don’t see the sense of my life.”
“There is great sense in your life, but it’s very painful, and you wish you could die to end your pain.”
Every word he spoke showed us where to go. Everything we needed was present in each moment. His anxiety pointed to the feelings we needed to embrace for his healing to begin.
Who wants to accept death? Who wants to feel rage toward a wife who killed herself? Who wants to keep living when our beloved has died? Yet life always whispers, “Will you welcome your experience?”
When his wife committed suicide, this man’s idealized images of her, his purified images of himself, and his images of their future together died too. Naturally, he thought of physical death to avoid the psychological death, the death through which he would be reborn but at a cost. In the cellar, not only the memory of her body hung from the rafters, so did his dead dreams.
Freedom From or Freedom To?
Welcoming our feelings, thoughts, and dreams is a big task, but it’s easier if the therapist welcomes them too. Accepting our inner life means accepting everything, not only the easy parts—love, joy, and happiness—but even our resistance and refusal to collaborate.
Slouching in his chair, a man described his goals for therapy. When I asked if he wanted to work on them, he stared at the ceiling and groaned.
“Well, in a sense, I don’t want to. I guess I don’t know if I am willing to commit or able to spend a lot of time dealing with all the other issues I have.”
Accepting his reluctance, I noted, “You are not sure how committed you want to be.”
“Yeah.”
“I appreciate your being so straightforward. You can be as committed or uncommitted as you want.”
“I guess I want to make sure. There are things in my past that would be fruit for years of therapy potentially. I guess I am not committed to spending that much time in therapy. But I want to make sure that I come out of this with a tangible improvement.”
He mistakenly thought the issue was whether he should commit to therapy. “Since we are combining forces together, we need to find out how committed you are to yourself.”
He looked up at the ceiling, smiled, and said, “How committed to me; yeah, I guess that is interesting.”
“Are you worth it?”
Chuckling and looking up at the ceiling again, he paused and said, “Um, sure I’m worth it.”
“What do you feel as you say that?”
He smiled and then said, “It seems like a form of marketing.”
“What are you feeling when you say that you are worth it? What gets triggered inside when you say that?”
“Part of me says that I should immediately say yes, I am worth it.”
“What do you feel when you say that you are worth it?”
“Ambivalence about whether I want to spend a huge amount of time and money on it.”
Since he still mistakenly wondered whether to commit to therapy, I explained, “The question is, do you want to commit to yourself? You are ambivalent about how committed to be to yourself. You have one foot in and one foot out.”
“Yeah. There is some truth to that.”
“You are ambivalent about how committed to be to yourself and what you want.”
Looking away, he responded, “I don’t know whether this is the same, but there is a lot of self-editing that goes on.”
We often edit our inner thoughts and outer speech to fit what we think others want to hear or how we want to appear. Sadly, though, through self-editing we stop being open and listening to what rises up within us.
“Are you worth being listened to?”
“I guess. It’s funny. I don’t feel it that way. I guess it is a want of confidence in terms of expressing my views and doing what I want to do.”
“Unsure whether you want to commit to yourself, whether you want to edit yourself or to listen to yourself, and whether to go for what you want.”
“Yeah.”
Since he still had not committed to himself, I asked, “How much would you like to hold yourself back?”
He sighed. “I’m not a totally free agent. I cannot jettison everything I want. I guess the question is, how do you get to the point where you can be honest with other people without feeling like you are going to destroy the things that matter to you.” His eyes filled with tears.
“Your feelings about being honest and fearing the impact that would have on others are important for us to notice. We need to be as honest as possible, and if you fear that I would be harmed, we need to pay attention to that.”
“No, it’s not that. It’s honesty and,” he paused, “it’s a wish that I could be more self-confident. Why does it matter what other people think or feel?”
“Do you wish you had more faith in yourself?”
He sighed and looked away. “Sure.”
“Does self-doubt get in your way?”
“Yeah.”
“I assume you came of your own free will, and you weren’t dragged here by anybody, right?”
“Right.”
“You came of your own free will. Yet as soon as you say you want to commit to yourself and get to the bottom of your difficulties as quickly as you can to achieve your goal, you doubt what you want.”
“Yeah.”
“You are at war with yourself. You wonder whether you should listen to yourself or to these doubts.”
“I’m not sure what the problem is. It is hard for me to know if that impulse that I’m experiencing is the real one.”
In response to his confusion, I helped him differentiate himself from his self-doubt. “You’ve doubted yourself for so long that you don’t know which is the real you, the impulse to doubt or the one that is being doubted.”
“That is a scary thought.”
“What are you feeling?”
He smiled and rolled his head. “I don’t know.”
“Take your time. This stirs up a lot of emotion.”
“It’s funny. I’ve talked with people who are self-aware and empathic enough that I’m aware I have these issues. It’s not like a horrible revelation, but what is my real identity? What do I really want?”
“If you don’t want to do this, I have no right to ask you to do it.”
“No, I don’t doubt the utility of therapy.”
“You are at war with yourself, wanting to commit to yourself and doubting whether to commit to yourself, as we decide whether we should join forces and commit to you.”
He smiled. “You are right. I’m thinking, ‘God, this could be a long therapy.’”
“If you doubt the utility of committing to you and hold out on committing to you, you can make this therapy as long as possible. You can drag it out for twenty, thirty, or forty years if you work it out right.” He laughed as I continued, “If there is anything you do to make your therapy unnecessarily long, we have an obligation to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
When a therapist sits with us without demanding that we change, love enters the room. The therapist can describe our defenses and the cost they inflict, but she can’t take them away. We can keep our walls of defenses as long as we want. That’s why people can have years and years of therapy without having changed a bit.
The therapist unconditionally accepts our walls because she must face the facts to be effective. Her radical acceptance of our resistance questions our self-rejection. When we reject the therapist, she remains curious, accepting our rejection without demanding that we accept her. And for the first time, we may experience a desire for movement from within.
This man did not want to commit to therapy or to his own growth. He thought he was avoiding the trap of long-term therapy. In fact, he was entering the trap of self-doubt, seeking freedom from his feelings by doubting them. This is an impossible goal since we can never become free from what we are.
For the rest of our lives, we will experience anxiety, sadness, anger, shame, love, and joy, clouds crossing the internal sky. Our freedom will not come from doubting our inner life but from accepting it as it passes by.
Through bearing the emotional flowing we are, our awareness takes us away from our feelings to what perceives them. We discover we are also the emptiness in which feelings appear, the quiet in which chatter happens, and the sky across which the clouds pass.
Through defenses we seek freedom from our emotions and lead a life on the run.5 We long for freedom in forms it never takes: freedom from conflict, feelings, life, and death. And we seek freedom in places it is never found: our fantasies. This man was imprisoned by self-doubt; he was a lonely observer doomed to sit beside the river of life but never swimming in it.
In contrast, we do have the freedom to love and embrace what is. When we stop running from reality and embrace it, we find the freedom we are looking for.
The Danger of Listening
We may regard listening as easy, but in fact, it is hard: by opening ourselves up to another point of view, we run the risk of changing the way we see ourselves, another person, or even the world. To ward off the risk of being changed by listening, we engage in pseudolistening where we argue with people to change them. What if listening changes us? The philosopher Heidegger proposed that we suffer because we have forgotten how to listen to others or ourselves.6 We have forgotten our essence, he said, because we have forgotten how to listen.
One woman had trouble listening to herself. She started talking with racing speech, scattered thoughts, and twitching feet. “You are talking rapidly,” I said. “Do you notice that too?”
“I didn’t notice that, but I want to talk about something else.”
“Talking rapidly is a sign of anxiety. Are you aware of feeling anxious in your body right now?”
“Yes, but I want to tell you something else.”
“I’m sure, but do you notice how you ignore your anxiety and invite me to ignore your anxiety too?” Her eyes were swimming in tears, so I asked, “What are you feeling under the words now?” She sobbed.
She listened to the chitchat in her head, not to the anxiety in her body, and neglected herself and her feelings. Although not her conscious desire, she invited me to ignore who she was underneath the distracting chatter.
We may not listen to ourselves or to others. Another woman described a conflict with her husband. He complained that she always talked over him. “Why should I listen to him again? I know what he will say.”
She didn’t know what he would say; she knew what she thought he would say. I don’t even know what I will say. What we say emerges as we say it. That’s why we listen. Even when loved ones appear to repeat themselves to us, they may not be repeating what they said but what we failed to hear—a testament to their faith in our wish to listen.
This woman listened to her belief and talked over her husband. Meanwhile, her husband could rightly say, “You are not listening to me.” She thought she heard what her ears perceived when she perceived what her mind projected onto him. She kept saying to him, “See?” imagining that his mind was closed. In fact, she closed her own mind by relating to her ideas, not to him. What if our beliefs are not insights but the barriers to insight?
A therapist presented a case for supervision of a man who she believed was severely disturbed, a disturbance for which I could find no evidence. The therapist, convinced of her view, continued on her campaign. Perched like a bird of prey, scanning for the right facts to pounce upon as “evidence,” she argued with him, trying to dominate him and make him submit to her projection: “See! That is who you are.” For her, his words were ideas to be shot down. Listening became a form of target practice.
To listen, we must accept a person as someone who deserves to be heard, whom we no longer dismiss, debate, or dominate. Then we can surrender to the fact that other people have other points of view. We think we see the whole picture when we see only our own perspective.
A Zen abbot created a garden to illustrate this point. When viewing the Zen rock garden, Ryōanji, from the veranda, we can see only fourteen of its fifteen stones from any given view. To see the fifteenth stone, we must move, but having moved, we lose sight of another stone. We learn through moving that the whole picture cannot be seen from any one viewpoint.
When we open up to another person’s perspective, the possibility of dialogue brings us to the next error in listening: listening to “know” a person. The problem is that we never will. In fact, we never know ourselves completely.
When a person says, “I know exactly what you think,” she looks at her projection, not you. She equates you with her idea about you, but you will always be unknowable.
As we accept the limits of our knowledge and our perspective, our listening becomes a kind of surrender. We surrender our beliefs that we have known or will ever know anyone completely. Our beliefs regarding other people are revealed as images in the mind, carefully cultivated creations, and delicious but delusional substitutes for the real. Once we realize these images are just images, we become open to another person.
When driving in the summer, we experience the illusion of water shimmering on the road ahead, but it recedes the farther we drive. This experience of driving toward an ever-changing landscape is like love: illusions drop away repeatedly so we can experience the “ever-receding horizon” of the depths of our beloved.7
Whereas the eye creates visual illusions, the mind creates emotional illusions. In psychological life, we do not see people but our preconceptions about them. And preconception is a polite euphemism for defense.
Defenses are the ways we distort, filter, block, and interpret the world, generating patterns of ignorance we call “truth.” While they are almost always an adaptive response in childhood, when used in other relationships, they create our suffering. For instance, if I make excuses for failing a test, I will mistake my excuses for the facts, failing to see the rest of the truth: I didn’t study enough. If I am rude to my wife and she objects, I might project that my wife is “sensitive.” I will see my belief but not my rudeness.
While we ignore what is here, we are surrounded by it, stumbling over the realities we didn’t see. “Why did I fail that test?” or “Why did my wife get irritated again? She is so touchy!” When defenses turn our gaze from the real, we see only the unreal: our mind-created images. If we are to see what is real, our false perceptions must dissolve.
Rather than face what is happening, we ask others to agree with us to avoid facing facts that contradict our beliefs. We think, “If enough of us share the same idea, my belief will win.” We fight for the last word, but it’s pointless; when the last breath crosses our dying lips, we discover that the last word always belongs to reality.
We argue instead of listen when others disagree. “Don’t confuse me with the facts; I have an assumption going here!” We think we are listening when we are expecting, judging, and evaluating. We compare what we hear to what we believe. When we give up expecting, judging, and comparing, we begin to listen.
Negative Capability
We go through life not knowing the answers. Who will we become? What do other people think and feel? Faced with the fear of the unknown, we fill in the void with false assumptions. This “knowledge” is projection.
The poet Keats referred to negative capability,8 which is the ability to sit with what we do not know until experience brings the not yet known to the surface. Not knowing is the well from which all knowledge is drawn. And nowhere is this more apparent than in marriage.
A man offered derogatory insights about his wife during our therapy session. I asked, “What do you say we make some stuff up about her?”
Startled, he laughed, realizing, “I do that a lot.” He projected onto her so much that he saw not her but his projection.
We can only speculate about other people, for by definition, they are unknowable. Projecting onto loved ones does not illuminate their uncharted interior life. Yet like the early mapmakers who filled in their images of the New World with mythological mountains, nonexistent cities, and fabled features, we create elaborate fictions filled with imaginary motives, which purport to represent the hidden worlds of others.
It’s hard to admit “I don’t know” when trying to understand another person, and it’s so easy to fill in the gap with our fantasy. And since the fantasy is ours, it feels like a fact. “If I feel it, it must be true,” we think.
We live surrounded by the unknown. We are the unknown. So are the future and the stock market. For instance, unable to bear the unknowability of the stock market, we turn to irrational optimists or irrational pessimists, the “bulls” and “bears,” who sell us stories of fear and greed, plying us with fictions. Their conflicting fantasies merely reflect our refusal to tolerate not knowing. Likewise, when we can’t tolerate not understanding another person, we make assumptions.
A middle-aged woman who felt victimized by others said, “I need to tell you, I didn’t like what you said. You must have been angry with me. You seem empathic but under the surface, you’re not. I should have known you would be just like the others.”
My crime? I had a different opinion. She wondered why I disagreed with her. Unable to understand why I disagreed, she assumed I wanted to hurt her. She used this story, with slight variations, to explain every relationship she had. She always attributed goodness to herself and evil to others. We might call this her pattern of ignorance, an ignorance created by ignoring the unknown of the other person and filling it in with hostile motives. Once she ignored the fact that she did not know my motivations, she took the second step: filling the void with her assumptions. She could never see me as long as she stared at her beliefs, the barriers preventing her from learning.
Rather than learn through living and feeling, she tried to avoid experience by pseudothinking.9 Her problems were due to what she “knew.” To learn, she needed to unknow her assumptions: the lies into which she tried to stuff life, her loved ones, and me. She could face that she didn’t know my mind, or she could cram me into her fantasies. Then she felt trapped with a disfigured, distorted image, a cartoon from which she could expect only the predictably horrible.
We may project to avoid our feelings or we may project onto the therapist so he can playfully agree to be the location where our problem is analyzed. Then the therapist must also have this negative capability, the capacity to sit with the unknowable. A schizophrenic man came in one day and said, “Jon, I’ve figured out your diagnosis.”
“Oh really?” I said, “What’s that?”
“Satyriasis: uncontrollable sexual appetite for women,” he said, giggling.
“Oh, my God, how did you figure that out? Even my analyst didn’t catch that.”
Chuckling, he said, “Oh, it’s obvious.”
“Wow! That’s embarrassing. I thought I had that pretty well hidden. Do you think there’s any hope for my condition?”
“Yes, but it will take a lot of therapy.”
Inviting him to be the therapist of “my” problem, I asked, “What do you think is the cause?”
“You probably didn’t get enough breast-feeding as a baby.”
“Do you think that’s why I’m obsessed with breasts?”
“Yes.” He laughed and continued to analyze my “problem” for twenty minutes until he said, “Well, enough about you. I want to talk about something else.”
“Alright, if you insist. What’s that?”
“I have trouble talking to women.”
Initially, he didn’t need me to interpret that satyriasis was his problem; he needed me to be the place where his problem could be played with until he could later examine it within himself. I had to have faith that he would find a way to reflect on his inner life after having projected it onto me. Likewise, we must have faith that we will come to understand people when we don’t understand them yet, when we face the unknown. Paraphrasing Simone Weil, what if the original sin is our tendency to fill the void, the mystery of another person?10
Without faith and openness, unable to comprehend another person, we assume, attribute, and project. A woman complained, “I don’t know why my husband doesn’t want a new house. He is insecure and too worried about debt. He is irrational when it comes to money.” She tolerates the mystery for a second and then fills in the unknown with her assumptions. The danger is that she will be open to her notions, not to him.
This woman thought the unknown, her husband’s not wanting what she wanted, was a question requiring a solution. She tried to kill the question with false answers. What if questions are not problems?
Living with Questions
We do not need to answer questions. We need to allow, experience, and live the questions of life: “What will happen?” “Who is this person?” “What do I want?” Premature responses avoid the experiences of life through which we learn the answers. If we cannot tolerate learning through living and feeling, we start lying through thinking, creating the false knowledge of our assumptions.
A middle-aged man described a Father’s Day card he received from his daughter in which she wrote, “I am soooooooo lucky to be your daughter.”
“That is such bullshit,” he sneered. “She only wants to go to France with me on vacation, since I invited her. She wants to use me. She doesn’t care about me.”
“Notice how you take her expression of love, turn it into shit, and make yourself lonely?”
“Love?” he barked. “She doesn’t love me; she’s always angry.” “Since you reject her love, it’s no wonder she gets angry.”
“I asked her, ‘Why did you write that? What did you really mean?’ And she gets pissed off.”
“You accuse her of not loving you. Then you ask her to disprove your accusation, to defend herself. When she gets angry, to you that proves your assumption, when in fact it proves that accusing her makes her angry.”
“Don’t I have a right to know?”
“When you project, whose job is it to deal with your projection? Is it her job or your job?”
His head dropped onto his chest. “I’ve ruined her life.” “What are you feeling?”
“I feel bad.”
“What is that bad feeling?”
“Guilt. Nothing can be done.”
“Nothing can be done about the past. All you can do is admit what you did, apologize, and repair the damage.” His head sank into his hands, tears streaming down his cheeks, shoulders shaking.
His accusations blinded him to his daughter’s love and imprisoned him in a fantasy world that he had not seen until the tears opened his eyes. He filled in the void with his assumptions and asked his daughter to defend herself from motivations she did not have and actions she had not taken. If she argued with him, she lost because he held onto his ideas, and projections never include what they are designed to exclude.
His daughter, like every person, was someone whose heart he would never fully know. Rather than sit with what he didn’t know, he made stuff up, paid attention to that, and no longer saw her as she was. He listened to the answers from his mind to avoid listening to her, revealing that he loved his thoughts more than he loved his daughter. When we choose our assumptions, we reveal our fear of the truth.
We hate not knowing. Hating the questions of life, we dig up past answers to past questions. Instead, this father needed to let go of old answers to begin to open himself to the new question, who is my daughter? When he let go of his assumptions, accepted her, and listened to her, he began to learn who she was.
Not knowing her was not a problem but the path. As we take this path of accepting the unknown, we feel uncomfortable. Yet this discomfort is a message from life inviting us to love another person.
He thought he should have answers, but he needed to let go of his false answers. Then he needed to accept and love what he didn’t understand in his daughter. When we maintain that same openness about people, stop making stuff up, and tolerate our experience, we can come to know them.
This father, like all of us, had to accept what he feared: the unknown within another person. To love her, he had to learn that his daughter was a mystery, not a pile of projections. The author Jose Saramago reminds us that “inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.”11 Embracing his daughter—the invisible, the unnamable, the unknowable—the father learned to love her instead of his assumptions.
When we let go of the false answers in our mind, we live the questions of life. This father had to free his daughter from his prison of projections. Likewise, we must live with our questions, whether they are about life, a person, or ourselves, as we would hold a bird lightly in our hand: “when we squeeze it, it dies.”12
Deep Knowledge: Past Lives
A middle-aged psychotic woman excitedly reported new insights each week. One week she learned she had been Cleopatra in a past life. Another week she discovered she had been Anne Frank. Week after week, she described her past lives; the illusory fame was no doubt balm to her soul after the excruciating losses of her career, friends, and marriage during her long descent into psychosis.
One day she came in with a smile on her face, sat down, and announced, “I was Mary Magdalene in a past life.”
“Oh, I’ve always known that,” I replied.
“How did you know that?”
“I loved it when you washed my feet.”
Shocked, her eyes opened wide, and she burst into laughter.
Since she felt too much pain and had too little capacity to bear it, she had to ward off an unbearable reality and retreat to a bearable fantasy. Through play, I joined her delusional world so that for a moment, she felt less alone with a person who understood the function of her delusion: to bear unbearable loss. In our unspoken way, we knew the wisdom of Sigmund Freud’s insight that delusions try to restore that which was lost and will never return.
Later when she lay dying of cancer in the hospice, she said, “See, I told you the Nazis were after me. They knew I would give birth to the Messiah. So they gave me cancer.” Smiling through my tears, I surrendered my therapeutic ambition and accepted her delusion, the thread that gave meaning to her now, the larger than life grandiosity being the only talisman she could cling to as she faced death, other than that other tendril: our relationship.
At the funeral, her children expressed their gratitude for my work with her: “This must be hard for you. I know how much she meant to you.” At the time I thought they had projected their grief onto me. In fact, I had projected my grief onto them. It was hard for me. She had her delusion and I had my projection. All of us struggle with the losses of life. Sometimes, the deaths of life are too great to bear, and the mind breaks under the strain. For others of us, when our illusions break, our identities die, and what we are underneath arises.
Letting Go
Unable to bear the losses of life, we may console ourselves with delusions. But if we bear our losses, we always experience a letting go, not an intentional one we can force but one that comes to pass.
A woman lamented, “My mother has been diagnosed with cancer, and the doctors don’t know when she will die. It could be a couple of days or months. Should I make sure she gets lots of food? The doctor says it won’t make much difference. What can I do to keep her alive? The nurses say I need to let go. Do I need to let go of her?”
When those we love are dying, we want to keep them alive, but death visits anyway. We don’t know what to do because nothing stops death.
Books tell us to let go, yet we need not let go of those we love. We need to embrace what is happening. When we embrace dying, letting go happens naturally. Trees embrace the winter; leaves fall to the ground.
Death does not need us to let go for our loved ones to let go of us. What do we let go of? When we hold our loved ones’ hands in the casket, an inner movement stirs. Their lives, our longings for what could have been—everything slips through their hands and ours. We don’t let go, but their cold fingers tell us they have let go and invite us to let go of what is no longer in our hands. They listened to death; can we listen to their hands?
What was not cannot now be. While our loved ones breathed, we held the hope for our future. Once they died, our hope did too. We need not let go of them; they will rest in our hearts forever. The tears we shed and the cries we howl remind us of our capacity to love, which continues after our loved ones die.
Surrendering to reality, we merely face the facts. Our denial already lost the battle against what is. There is nothing we need to do and no ideal way to be. We are rivers of grief with unpredictable turns, gushing until our mourning rests in the ocean of acceptance. We cannot push the water because this flowing of love is who we are. As we flow down into our being and come to a rest in the quiet and stillness, we realize that a dying loved one’s final gift to us is this invitation to acceptance.
my name is raj
