There is no healing journey
on ☤ "working on" ☤ "your" ☤ "self"
Our lives weave a pattern
A staff twined by adders
Our mouths, sore to chew
Now you’re eating for two
—Cass McCombs, “Petrified Forest”
There is a hole in your heart. The Bad Thing put it there. Your mother put it there. The Fall of Man put it there. You were born with it. You were once shot through the heart and you don’t remember it because your wise body is protecting you from the memory. You are just imagining it. You are not quite imagining it but your body made it because you believed in it. There is a hole in your heart.
It is covered over and you cannot feel it, but you remember a time when it was raw all round the edges, like a leaf smoldering under a magnifying glass. You can remember that time, but you cannot remember the pain. You know that it was there because for a time you shaped your whole life around the pain, around tolerating it or drowning it out or muting it or ignoring it or solving it or obliterating it or escaping it. And then one day the hole in your heart was covered over and there was no more pain. You can forget about the hole in your heart sometimes. You remember that it’s there because sometimes something touches the the edge of the cover and you get a faint glimmer of the pain that was once familiar. Or sometimes when it is very quiet and you are very still you can feel the subtle, inexpressible, persistent echoing of nothingness inside the hole in our heart. Or sometimes you get a normal ass heartache and you are relieved because as much as it pains you, it’s not Like It Used To Be.
There is a Hole in The Heart. There is a hole in your heart. There is a cover over the hole in your heart.
And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day. And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob’s thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him.
And he said, “Let me go, for the day breaketh”. And he said, “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.” And he said unto him, “What is thy name?” And he said, “Jacob.” And he said, “Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.”
—Genesis 32:24-28, KJV
I don’t need to tell you that there are a great many ways to suffer. In order to not make your suffering other people’s problem, you have to work on yourself, haven’t you heard? There is no one who won’t benefit from working on themselves. We could all use some therapy! Your friend’s shitty boyfriend needs to go to therapy. Your cruel and negligent mother needs to get some help or you will Go No Contact.
This is not a therapy hit piece. But it is a therapy-ambivalent piece. I earned my ambivalence, goddamn it. In an earlier chapter of my life, I went to so many therapists. And what I learned is that so much therapy is so stupid. If you get the right therapist, you might have good luck feeling better. You also might experience profound betrayal. I will never tell you that you should Go To Therapy. I do not believe that We Could All Use Some Therapy. The risk is greater than they tell you. I will tell you to get emotionally deep relationships in which you build trust over time (“go to therapy” is basically shorthand for this, I think, which is bleak because it implies that therapy is The Only Place to have your emotional problems held). Maybe you will find such a relationship in therapy, but if you do, bear in mind that you will necessarily lose it.
There’s a certain-kind-of-therapists’ attitude that goes something like this: your present day problems have mostly to with your upbringing, mainly the things you didn’t get as a child. You can’t expect other people to give you these things, though. You have to find a way to give these things to yourself. This is the Healing Journey.
I have personally met with this sentiment in the therapy room (and elsewhere) on many occasions, and I find it abhorrent. I try to keep my cool when I hear it, because I understand the truth contained in it. Yes, so much of our personal suffering has to do with our relationship to the past, and yes, we have to get our own house in order and yes, we cannot expect anyone to save us from ourselves or plug our emotional holes. My question, which I learned never to ask therapists who peddle this wisdom, is this: If I am supposed to give myself these things that I need so much, whence will these things come? I do not have these things. If I had them, then I would have them, and I wouldn’t be in your office or on your dumbass Zoom looking for them.
I had a profoundly stupid therapist once who strongly believed this. I was looking for empathy and understanding from others, but really, I should be looking to empathize with myself. “No one can empathize with you like you can empathize with yourself!” she told me. My attempts to get my emotional needs met by others were actually misguided. My desire to be understood by my loved ones was a waste of time. What I should actually be doing was… well, something else! Had I tried pushing against a wall or playing with bouncy balls? Maybe wearing heavy shoes would help me stay grounded. I should really just be focusing on my own feelings, especially the ones in my body.
I had a different therapist who believed a different version of the same thing. He told me, often, with the bravado of a man bestowing great wisdom, that just as the body knows how to heal a paper cut, the mind knows how to heal trauma, if only we get out of its way. I rolled with this; as I said, I see the truth contained in it. I believe that we get in our own way without realizing what we are doing, especially when we think we are helping ourselves. Over the brief course of my work with him, I came to realize that I do not believe that the mind can get a paper cut, or anything analogous. Psychological trauma is a terrible metaphor. The psyche does not heal like a finger. It is not made of flesh; it can’t generate new cells. The heart, the pinprick at the center of your being, is as it has it always has been. Sicut erat in principio et nunc et semper et in sæcula sæculorum.
Psychodynamically oriented therapists (which the two mentioned above were decidedly NOT) believe, to varying degrees, in something called organization of the personality. Starting in infancy (or maybe even in utero), like a tree around barbed wire, your self begins to coalesce around a (usually fear-related) theme: fear of being engulfed by the demands of others, fear of losing control, fear that other people seek to hurt you, fear that you are essentially bad, fear that you are actually empty inside or don’t even exist, etc. Because you are organized around this theme, you find it again and again throughout your life and you live your life according to it. If you are in distress, you will live out this theme in ways that hurt you and others; the greater the distress, the greater the hurt to yourself and others. If you are not in distress, you will live out this theme in ways that are quiet and subtle. You cannot escape your theme, because it is written into you, into your substance.
This idea has always sort of reminded me of the Fall of Man, of Original Sin. To me, it rings a lot more true, or more deeply true, than the Paper Cut of the Mind theory. Maybe it is because I am a Christian, but I would much rather believe that while my deepest, most inborn pain and deficit and longing are my responsibility to manage, I cannot cure or solve or absolve them in any way that matters, and it is a waste of time and energy to try.
And how does a person manage? I don’t know. I know I manage now. I don’t manage because I focused on my own feelings so hard, or because put the right salve on my mind-wound and then left it alone. I manage because I have those aforementioned relationships of hard-won trust. I also know that I didn’t have those relationships for a long time because I didn’t know how to have them, and sometimes didn’t even think I wanted them, and I had to learn that I wanted them,1 and once I did, the desire was insatiable. I couldn’t get the thing I needed because I didn’t have it and I didn’t know what it would mean to have it, didn’t know how to care for it or keep it. I appreciate that this is very circular. It was a terrible circle to be caught in. I had to learn how to be in relationship by being in relationship. That also sucked ass. It is embarrassing and discouraging beyond words to try to be pro-social when you don’t know how.
Some people, of course, have the opposite problem. They are caught in a different kind of terrible circle, because they have a different organization. They are drowning in other people. They can’t be alone. They don’t know who they are when they are alone, and they are scared to find out. They turn outward and outward only. But their relationships are brittle and tenuous. No matter how many people they connect with, the cannot get what they need, because they are not really connecting at all, because they are not really there.
You can’t get out of that circle by adding more relationships. You have to turn inward. But I couldn’t have gotten out of my circle by turning inward (despite what the bouncy ball lady would have me believe). I had to turn outward.
Yes, I don’t need to tell you that there are a great many ways to suffer. There are a great many ways to alleviate suffering (though I swear to Christ none of them has to do with bouncing balls or wearing heavy shoes).
There’s this distinction in psychology between what are called “externalizing psychopathology” and “internalizing psychopathology”. Externalizing is when you act out your problems: doing drugs in a crazy way, yelling and screaming or otherwise being scary, lying and manipulating, etc. Internalizing is when you act in your problems: being really sad, withdrawing from relationships, stopping eating, eating too much, etc. On its face, this distinction makes good sense.2 If you think about it for two seconds, though, the distinction breaks down, because human existence is relational. All psychopathology is both internalizing and externalizing. Hostility is an internal experience as much as it is external. Sadness affects everyone around the sad person. I’ll probably write more about my philosophical problems with this distinction, but not today. For today I just want to emphasize that all problems are both relational and subjective because all life is relational and subjective, and it’s bizarre to claim otherwise. It’s all both. It is all one thing, and the thing looks like this.
In so many wisdom traditions across the globe, this ecological understanding is inescapable. The individual is just an individuation of Creation/Creator/the whole, BUT the fact of individuation is significant. Where a lot of secular Americans are confused about the first point, a lot of Spiritual Types I know, who found out about the Oneness Of Creation last week, sometimes seem a little bit confused about the second point. They think they can have access to the beating heart of the universe right now, just because they know they are connected to it. They think they are undifferentiated from it. They confuse themselves for It. They think because they know about Thou, there is no such thing as I anymore. This doesn’t square with any of the non-dualistic traditions I know about. You are everything, but you are also YOU. Just because there’s the Self (the soul, the essence, etc, etc) buried under the shit-assed self, doesn’t mean the shit-assed self isn’t there. Even in Christianity, every hippie’s least favorite religion, God Himself is in three Persons in the Trinity.
यत्रोपरमते चित्तं निरुद्धं योगसेवया।
यत्र चैवात्मनाऽऽत्मानं पश्यन्नात्मनि तुष्यति।।
The Bhagavad Gita, chapter 6, verse 20
The individuation is the schism between I and Thou. This is the Hole In The Heart.
And Jacob asked him, and said, “Tell me, I pray thee, thy name”. And he said, “Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name?” And he blessed him there. And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: “for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.” And as he passed over Peniel the sun rose upon him, and he halted upon his thigh.
Therefore the children of Israel eat not of the sinew which shrank, which is upon the hollow of the thigh, unto this day: because he touched the hollow of Jacob’s thigh in the sinew that shrank.
—Genesis 32:29-32
If you are one of God’s favorite guys, maybe then He will kick your ass and give you an extra special new name. But only if you live with your wounds forever. Your new name is the name of the wound.
I have been to hell and back. I was very suicidal for many years as a child and teen and young woman. The agony cannot be overstated; but, of course, a hard thing about agony or pain of any kind is that it cannot really be stated at all. There is a Hole in The Heart. The kind of pain I was in is the kind of pain that stretches human endurance, the kind that some would call “intolerable”. Sometimes when the pain exceeded my personal endurance, I would try to kill myself.
This was all a long time ago now. It both does and does not occupy my mind. I don’t talk about it much in real life (not nearly as much as this blog might have you believe). But inevitably, in the course of getting to know someone, the topic arises.
When people learn about my early years, sometimes they have some kind of sage wisdom or simpering adulation. They sometimes say something like, “I’m so glad you’re still here.” It depends on the person and the tone and such; sometimes this sentiment doesn’t bother me. Sometimes it really, really does. I recently realized that I’m not sure if I am glad I’m still here. I like my life. I am happy and content and peaceful, yes. But none of that was guaranteed. None of it will last, because nothing lasts. What they don’t tell you is that anything could happen at any time. I may be happy for the rest of my life, or I may suffer deeply again, in ways I have never even considered. If I had succeeded in killing herself and I could look on from this timeline to that, I would not blame myself. I did not have any evidence that things could ever be different. I did not know that I was a member in a body, that I mattered to others and that others mattered to me, because deep pain occludes and precludes that knowledge. Pain makes you alone, and if it kills you, that is how it kills you.
My stupid therapist who loved the bouncy balls would sometimes tell me that because I am doing well now, I will never Go Back There again. It is easy to want to believe this. It is easy to want to believe that health is permanent. But it is not. Woundedness is our natural state. You were born rent and you will be rent again.
There is no healing journey. There is no healing. There is no journey. There is no “working” on “your” “self”. There is this, right now. There is pain and betrayal. There is love and pleasure. There is I and Thou. There is God and Man. There is Father Son and Holy Ghost. There is the Caduceus. There is the Hole in The Heart. There is a hole in your heart.
There is your heart.
guess which psychodynamic personality type I have, I’ll give you one guess!
in fact, there is a whole new taxonomic system that relies very heavily on this distinction. I invite you to read about it, it is very interesting.
So good, Sorbie. Truly.