Category Archives: Shadow

Strange Dreams

February 9, 2013 By in Depth psychology, Dream work, Ecotherapy, psychoanalytic theory, Shadow Tags: , , , , , 2 Comments

You know those nights, when you’re sleeping, and it’s totally dark, and absolutely silent, and you don’t dream, and there’s only blackness, and this is the reason, it’s because on those nights you’ve gone away. On those nights, you’re in someone else’s dream, you’re busy in someone else’s dream.

Some things are just pictures, they’re scenes before your eyes.
Don’t look now, I’m right behind you.

~ Laurie Anderson, Someone Else’s Dream, lyrics

The first time it happened was early in my career, too early for me to know or understand the phenomenon well – and certainly too early to trust it.

I was working in milieu therapy, a day treatment unit, where several hundred “severely and persistently” mentally ill adults came each day to receive their medication and case management, group therapy, art therapy and rehabilitation.

I dreamed that I was wearing a police officer’s uniform, and one of my clients was begging me to spank him, while he masturbated.

I was startled by the dream, it felt different in tone and quality from my “usual dreams” whatever that meant.

I explored it in my own therapy extensively – looking at the countertransferential sadistic and aggressive impulses that emerge when working with clients who have difficulty containing their own aggression. I considered the power and class differentials between me and my stigmatized, disempowered clients, and tried to examine my privilege and the authority, authoritarian, and social control functions that I was expected to serve on the treatment unit. I explored my personal, familial and historical associations to the specific client, to police officers, to spanking, and to domination and submission.

I explored my own sexual fantasy life – but, the sexualized aspects of the dream somehow felt off: a dream could have shed light on power/authority issues without sexualizing it.

But, the sexual nature of the dream just didn’t feel like my kind of kink.

The next week, the dreamed of client came in for an awake, daytime session and confessed that he had been embarrassed to tell me that he had been having masturbatory fantasies about me for sometime. He imagined me, dressed up as a police woman spanking him.

I felt enormous relief. The strange bits of the dream weren’t mine. The dream was about my role on the unit, and also about the ways I had been subtly, unconsciously pulled by this specific client to “police” and monitor his compliance and program attendance in ways that were stimulating to him, perhaps over-stimulating to him, and which made perfect sense with the clients history of sexual and physical abuse.

That was when I began to understand, many years, before I began to study Jung, that my own dreams about clients were not merely about my individual psyche.

I told my therapist excitedly about my new realization and he responded:

“Be careful.”

Be careful of what, I wondered? It seemed to me that I was in greater “danger” or getting pulled more deeply into some destructive authoritarian enactment, scolding or punishing, or chastising a client who could feel too stimulated by it if I hadn’t had the dream.

The dream had clearly protected me, and the client. Surfaced a dynamic, an unconscious currency, an exchange that was already present, but unspoken, unacknowledged.

The dream itself wasn’t the danger.

“If a dream shows me what sort of mistake I am making, it gives me an opportunity to correct my attitude, which is always an advantage”
~ C. G. Jung, Dreams

I left a long message on my therapist’s answering machine after that session, certainly too long, trying to shake off the undermining caution, and the traditional psychoanalytic models of dream theory that we had both been indoctrinated into

The various psychoanalytic branches which grow off of Freud’s ego psychological tree view dreams as subjective and individualized experiences, as a portal to unconscious conflicts which are about the clients personal history – and the conflicts from the past which have been transferred onto the therapist or other loved ones. And an analyst’s dreams could only reveal something about the analyst’s individual, private psyche, and transferences. If an analyst were to dream about a client, it would speak to their countertransference, the aspects of their own historical conflicts, or perhaps a dangerous over-identification, activated and constellated in the treatment.

I don’t know about your dreams. But mine are sort of hackneyed. Same thing, night after night. Just…repetitive. And the color is really bad – And the themes are just – infantile. And you always get what you want – And that’s just not the way life is…
~ Laurie Anderson Talk Normal, lyrics

There was another, more minor dispute about dreams a year or so later. Another one of “those” dreams – this time a strange dream I had about my therapist:

I was in his home, sitting on the treatment couch. His wife, as I imagined her, was nearby. A daughter, a son, and five month old baby boy. I sat and played with the baby boy while others went about their business around me, not interacting with me. The dream itself had little emotion attached to it, I was neither happy, nor distressed, perhaps a little bored, but enjoying the baby enough. Yet, in the dream, and afterward, I wondered why I was there, and worried that I was intruding on the scene.

Again, of course, I explored the dream extensively: as a transferential wish to have siblings, to be a part of his family, to be parented by him. To be trusted and invaluable member of his inner circle. I considered whether or not this tiny baby was an extension of my self, perhaps my inner child, that I wanted to be responsible for, as I was seated, held by the sofa now in the middle of his living room.

Four months later, he informed me that he would be taking a leave for a few weeks. Shorter notice than his usual vacation at an odd time.

“Are you about to have a baby? Is this a parental leave?” I asked.

Yes, he admitted, a boy.

I expressed my happiness and congratulations. But, I had a question:

“Do you remember that dream I had a while back? About you having a new baby boy?”

Yes, he said.

“Was your wife, by any chance, 5 months pregnant at the time?”

Yes.

“Did you think about that then? Did my dream seem strange or uncanny to you? Because I remember saying that it felt like a weird dream for me to have – and I worked very hard to try to understand how it might have been about me! But, now I see, it was also about you – or about us both!

Yes. He had thought of that.

“Well it would be very helpful to me if the next time that happens that you just let me know so we can sort it out. Maybe in a previous session I was sensing that you were internally preparing for the birth of your son, I’ve known you through other parental leaves, and I – or maybe both of us – felt that I was intruding on that scene. And you sort of left me trying to take responsibility for the whole unconscious scenario by myself.”

Fair enough, he promised.

“Enlightening an interpretation on the subjective level…may be entirely worthless when a vitally important relationship is the content and cause of the conflict. Here the dream content must be related to the real object. ~ C.G. Jung, Dreams

Many many years later, following a weekend which involved a very emotional and excruciatingly painful crisis involving my family of origin, a client of mine reported this excerpted dream (with permission) which she had herself after the previous Thursday session:

“You were motioning me to wait – but this guy started to upset you.  I thought you’d tell him to stop going through your papers (they were certificates, I think, of your degrees or licenses or something). Instead, your emotions quickly escalated and you started yelling / pleading with him to stop – and you screamed ‘what are you doing! you’re ruining my life’ He was completely in control of upsetting you.

You sat down across from me, legs curled in and started crying out of control.  I couldn’t help but to cry as well – seeing you in so much pain. You were destroyed.  I think I tried to hug you but you were a broken, small, mangled version of yourself.

There was a pause in the dream. I’m telling you about the dream that I just had (above)- and how upsetting it was for me because it was so strange but midway through, it’s abundantly clear that you’re not listening.  You’re going through your papers.

I stopped talking mid-sentence and waited. You looked up at me and I asked you if you’re listening – if you’re with me.  but you weren’t. So I got up to leave, undramatically. but really very upset. And I said “I can’t do this.” you just watched and didn’t stop me.  I left without looking back.”

Her “strange” double dream not only anticipated my unexpressed concern with a crisis that was about to erupt, the distress I had been in – it showed me the ways in which I could re-injure the client, abandon her and damage our alliance if I chose to hide behind my professional papers, degrees and certificates.

We began by exploring her associations and history, her relationship with her wounded parent, and her personal subjective assumptions about the dream – I started slowly, as, frankly, I did not want to expose the details of a personal conflict that felt still vulnerable and I did not want to burden the client or require that she take care of a “small broken” version of myself. Neither did I want to abandon her behind a professional stance that exempted me from my responsibility for my own unconscious processes as they influenced the treatment relationship.

As we were about to move on, just as the subject was changing, I summoned my courage:

“So, listen, there may also be another component in the dream. You’ve been going through a very intense time, and I know that you have been really needing me lately, and whenever we feel we need someone, we watch them very closely. I am wondering if this dream may also be about me in someway… After our session on Thursday, I had a family emergency/crisis which flared up, and I think, I did, over the weekend feel quite small and broken and I did cry a great deal like in your dream. I wonder if you were reading the signs in me, maybe in the same way you learned to at home, to anticipate an upcoming crisis. And then, the second part of the dream expresses your fear that I could deny your astute perceptions of me, and just pretend that nothing ever happened. Kids learn to read their parents like the weather, and maybe you were reading me, and feeling my own storm coming on, and then expecting that I would just act like you hadn’t felt anything real about me.”

“Yes”, she said, breathing more deeply.
“I must have felt something coming on. I always had to do that at home, and my family would act like I was crazy.”

More deep, relieving breaths.

“Are you ok?” she asked.

“Yep.” I answered, “I take good care of myself.”

“It must be left to the analyst to decide how far he, himself, is the patient’s real problem” ~C.G. Jung, Dreams

In some therapeutic relationships, dreams become the transitional play-space where the patient and the therapists’ unconscious processes communicate and play with each other, telling us both about the aspects of the therapeutic relationship that we have consciously missed.

I’ve learned to trust my dream life, and my clients dream lives as they sense and sort through the unconscious processes that exist as a dynamic in relationship to others, to the systems we live in, to the culture and communities we embed ourselves in.

“That is to say, I take dreams as diagnostically valuable facts”
~ C.G. Jung, Dreams

I once dreamed about a client who was unable to tolerate weekly therapy and had terminated abruptly:

I walk down the streets of the city through various familiar neighborhoods and the client pops up randomly, here and there, as if they are making brief, cameo appearances -walking on the sidewalk next to me, coming out of a store, standing at the cross walk as I pass – in a movie that is about something else.

I realized upon waking that I needed to let the client come in as needed, pop up, pop-in, and not try to force them to into my story-board of weekly standing appointments.

Certainly there are many dreams that emerge entirely from our personal unconscious, our unprocessed conflicts alone, calling attention to our history of past traumas, losses and misattunements.

But in the past fifteen years of recording my own dreams, my dreams of clients, and my client’s dreams, it has become obvious to me that dreams serve many other functions as well.

Last night I had that dream again. I dreamed I had to take a test In a Dairy Queen on another planet. And then I looked around And there was this woman… She was writing it all down. And she was laughing. She was laughing her head off. And I said: Hey! Give me that pen! ~ Laurie Anderson Talk Normal, lyrics

I’ve come to think of dreaming as a natural, sensory and relational phenomenon, a means of digesting and incorporating our unconscious perceptions: dreams solve problems, anticipate transitions, highlight things we have overlooked, prepare us for dangers, help us communicate to each other, tell us what issues our psyche is working on in the background, reveal what lives and moves out of our awareness, point out imbalances in our relationships and environments, and extrapolate/project future outcomes from the current trends in the patterns we are embedded in personally, relationally, systemically, and globally.

All of nature talks to me. If I could just figure out what it was trying to tell me. Listen!
~ Laurie Anderson, Sharkey`s Day, lyrics

Many clients in the weeks before 9/11 reported dreams of the like that I have not experienced since. I had been enrolled in a Depth Psychology class studying Jung at an institute in the city, and everyone in the class was asked to keep a dream journal for ourselves, and for all our clients’ dreams. The week before the attack on the World Trade Center, we read aloud from our journals: Strangely, there were many dreams within dreams: of kamikaze jets flying down the streets of the city, of giant tornadoes coming “from the east” which destroyed tall buildings killing hundreds of people, dreams of four giant bombs dropped from the sky but the fourth one doesn’t explode. And those were just my clients. Other classmates’ journals contained surprisingly similar themes and images: lost pilots, building explosions and collapses, one classmate’s client dreamed of turning over the Tower card from the tarot deck.

We wondered together what violent shift was present in the environment that could be reflected in the community’s dreams.

Perhaps any random sample of dreams reported at any given time would contain similar imagery.

I don’t deny the statistical realities of probability or chance.

But I haven’t been privy to a similar thematic thread since.

And I would damn sure brace myself if I was.

Some say our empire is passing as all empires do. And others haven’t a clue what time it is or where it goes or even where the clock is.
And oh, the majesty of dreams, an unstoppable train, different colored woodlands. Freedom of speech and sex with strangers
~ Laurie Anderson, Another Day in America, lyrics

I’ve had dreams, for example, where one highly/overly intuitive client critiques my treatment of another client with a highly/overly developed thinking function: the dream itself offering me excellent insight and supervision into both of the clients undeveloped bits and the functions that I am called upon to strengthen in each of them.

Sometimes I share dreams that have been helpful to me in a case with the client.

Sometimes I don’t.

And another interesting “strange dream” phenomena, which I have experienced many times – A client and I dream a similar sounding dream, the day or two before session, from different vantage points: A dream of a terrible storm in a steep valley, me looking from the ridge of the hill, the client looking at the clouds coming over the high tree-line. A dream with the client swimming against the current, tiring in the water looking up at a woman in a small boat, and me, in a small canoe trying to figure out how to pull a drowing client safely on board.

The dual dream content itself is usually fairly obvious, and takes little work to interpret, but the synchronistic phenomena itself has come to represent to me a kind of alchemical consolidation of the therapeutic relationship itself.

Our unconscious lives have found themselves in the same place, in the same time, working on the same problems, from different perspectives.

I don’t claim that this is science.

Nor do I believe it to be magic.

I remain agnostic as to the ultimate causes or explanations for such synchronistic and unconscious experiences.

But, to the degree that the function of dreaming remains mysterious, and unknown, perhaps we can only approach such mysteries with faith.

And to learn how our dream lives, whatever their origin or function, can serve to deepen our connections to each other and the world around us.

There was this man…And there was this road…
And if only I could remember these dreams…
I know they’re trying to tell me…something.

Ooooeee. Strange dreams.
Strange dreams

~ Laurie Anderson, Sharkey`s Day, lyrics

copyright © 2013
All rights reserved Martha Crawford

The Wrong Road

January 13, 2013 By in Archetype, Decision making, Depth psychology, New therapists, psychotherapy, Shadow Tags: , , , ,

“So what do you think is the right thing to do?”

“So should I leave him?”

“Should I take the job?”

“So are you saying I should tell my mother this?

There is one, simple, correct therapeutic answer to all of these questions:

“What the hell do I know?
What am I? A fortune teller?”

It is true that over the past two decades I’ve had a chance to watch a lot of people make a lot of decisions and I have borne some witness to the outcomes.

There have been trends, there are some patterns that emerge. I do have a sense, an impulse about the kinds of decisions will lead to conflict and chaos, or those that may make life more stable and comfortable.

There are statistical truths. But no one can tell you where one individual’s choices will place them along the statistical spread.

And in my experience, the worst outcomes from bad decisions emerge when bad decisions become cumulative.

It is generally true, perhaps, that impulsive, drunken Las Vegas wedding-chapel marriages between strangers are generally not successful – and if you were consulting with me – and if you paused the evenings revelry long enough to place a long-distance call for an urgent phone session and I picked up the phone (this has never happened and would never happen) I would undoubtedly express my concerns. I would encourage you to slow down, sober up, and think about it tomorrow – remind you that it is a decision that doesn’t have to be made tonight, and I would try to understand what lurks behind the intense urgency.

But always with the same caveat:

What the hell do I know?
Perhaps you’ll be divorced in a month, perhaps they will take you for everything you own, or perhaps, you’ll be married happily and prosperously for 50 years.

Chances may be slim mind you, but its possible.

If your intuition is pressing you forward despite all reservations – you will likely go ahead no matter what I say and meet your fate on the road ahead.

Perhaps this is the best or the worst choice imaginable, and either way it could change your life forever. Maybe it is the very wrongness of it that makes it a necessity. Maybe you in fact need to experience the terrible and awesome intersection of fate and free-will in order to face your destiny.

Such fateful decisions and dangerous trials loom at the heart of every myth and fairy-tale:

“Hansel, since you asked: I think you need to proceed with caution if you are planning to nibble nibble on that candy housekin like a little mousekin. And, you should talk to your sister, Gretel about it as well. Of course you are starved and abandoned – but, in my experience such candy houses are generally built by cannibalistic witches who use them to fatten children up for dinner – so be prepared. You do have other, more prudent options: you can collect kindling and try to fish from the nearby brook.”

“But what the hell do I know? Perhaps by surviving this witch, and finding a way to recognize and protect yourself from the Dark, Toxic mother, the archetypal Sow Who Eats Her Own Piglets you will be able to at least hear the song bird of your own psyche leading you back home, to your loving father. You’ll have to make your own choice, and encounter your own destiny. I’ll be here to back you up whatever choice you make.”

Some of the greatest saints and heroes of myth and scripture headed down the wrong road.

And there was no stopping them:

Before he became Saint Paul, he was a political assassin known as Saul, who set off down the road to Damascus “breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord” (King James Bible Acts 9)

And as he set off down the wrong road of murderous intent, Paul met his moment of grace:

“And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven and he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? (King James Bible Acts 9)

An instructor who introduced me to Jungian thought once advised me with regard to a “problematic” case:

“You have to be careful not to take anyone’s Road to Damascus away from them”

Oedipus, on the other hand, did everything he possibly could to mitigate his fate. He tried to make the safest, most self-and-other preserving choices imaginable:

In spite of his beloved parents’ denials and their attempts to protect his royal inheritance, Oedipus struggles with a persistent nagging suspicion that he has been adopted. He decides to seek the guidance of the Oracle at Delphi to uncover the truth.

The Oracle apparently ignores his question and tells him instead that he is destined to “Mate with [his] own mother, and shed/With [his] own hands the blood of [his] own sire.”

Desperate to avoid his foretold fate, Oedipus leaves Corinth, believing that Polybus and Merope are indeed his only parents and that, once away from them, he will never harm them.

On the road to Thebes, he unknowingly meets Laius, his biological father. Unaware of each other’s identities, they quarrel over whose chariot has right-of-way. King Laius moves to strike the insolent youth with his heavy scepter, but Oedipus throws him down from the chariot and kills him, thus fulfilling the first part of the oracle’s prophecy.

And we all know what happens after that… poor man.

Oedipus made the most loving decision possible based on the data at hand – (although perhaps ignoring his own intuition that insisted he was adopted, driving his consultation with the oracle in the first place)

And he too, met his fate on the road.

I have no way of knowing if you are setting off on the road to Damascus or the road to Thebes when you find yourself at the crossroads of a potentially fateful decision.

The blatantly obvious Good decision, the choice motivated by the best intentions can lead to hell.

And the wrong road can lead to an encounter with Grace.

Both possibilities and their opposites exist.

There is no telling.

Whatever “wisdom” I may have accrued, I make no predictions.

I cannot seal your fate. I am no Oracle.

I can listen with you for the “tells” that your own intuition sends out. I can voice my own intuitions and sensations about what may lie down either path. I can help you prepare for what you may encounter. I can stay by your side, and help you respond in alignment to who it is you mean to be.

But, such choices will always be your own.

And listen to this:

Perhaps it is the very process of trying to make the “right” decision – the judgements we create against or in favor of what we perceive as a “good” or a “bad” outcome – that causes our fear and suffering.

Suppose there no merely good or bad option.

Perhaps there is only:
A decision and the consequences, -anticipated and unanticipated – that flow from it.

Light and darkness are always mixed up together. Good and bad luck too.

Darkness can never be avoided. It is present, in some form, in every choice we will ever make.

The question is how will we respond when it emerges.

As therapists, it is easy to be seduced into wanting to protect the people in our care from their own choices. To watch someone making a complicating, challenging mess-making choice can make us yearn to redirect and intervene. We wish we could “stop” it, and help them to make “better choices”

But, sometimes the hard road is the only road where we will meet ourselves.

And we must always bear in mind that everyone simply chooses the road they need to choose. Most often, we make the only choice we know how to make.

One of my kids favorite folk tales is found nestled in a popular children’s book:
Zen Shorts by John J. Muth.

The Farmers Luck is an ancient Taoist tale in which a wise farmer encounters many twists of fate. His horse runs away and the neighbors cluck: “Such bad luck!” And the farmer responds: “Maybe…”

The horse returns with a wild herd, and the neighbors cheer: “Such good luck!” and the farmer responds: “Maybe…”

His son breaks his leg and the neighbors cluck.. and the farmer responds “Maybe…”

Officials come to draft his son into the army, and the broken leg exempts him. And the neighbors cheer…

Maybe.

There is no right road. There is no wrong road.

But what the hell do I know?

Maybe, our task at the crossroads is simply to tolerate the Maybe.

copyright © 2013
All rights reserved Martha Crawford

Butterfly Effect

September 22, 2012 By in Crisis, Ecotherapy, Morals & Ethics, Projection & Transference, psychotherapy, Psychotherapy and climate change, Self Care, Shadow, Wellness Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically.
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

Every late August /early September it comes, whether I like it or not.

As soon as the wind shifts, without any invitation at all.

In fact, when I resist or forget that it is arriving, it bursts in a rage, like some slighted and pissed of fairy-witch that spits curses, wreaks havoc, and grinds the whole works to a stop.

When I just remember to behave with grace when it knocks it becomes a respectful, polite, if somewhat impinging guest who is aware that their presence is inconvenient, and unavoidably disruptive, and their scheduled stay just a little too long.

When I am attuned, prepared and accepting, it brings with it quiet pleasures and relief.

As the earth under my feet cools, and draws the heat out through the bottom of my feet, my sap no longer expands, but contracts, retreating from my extremities redirecting itself down, down my trunk traveling from the tips to the roots.

There was a time when I would have had no word for it other than “depression” – perhaps it was at the time, and could be again – maybe there were even a few seasons of my life -especially when I stubbornly refused to heed the signs or adjust my behavior- when it could have met the official diagnostic criteria.

Although I no longer think of it that way, not at all.

Now, with many years of practice, and deep listening to myself and the world around me, I know it is my body’s response to the season changing. It is time to start to pull my attention inward and conserve my energies again. To shift the rhythm of my household from spontaneous, open-armed outdoor adventurousness to books, indoor art projects, and homework at the kitchen table. To warm up my diet. To carry a light sweatshirt on my morning run. To eat less raw, cold food. To give up the iced coffees of summer. To start cooking again. To put cinnamon on my oatmeal, and to wear closed shoes on my feet. To find my light cotton scarves, to make sure my kids have windbreakers handy, and for us all to come in from outdoors a little earlier each day. To get the garden, and the rest of us, ready for a colder season.

The green drains from the leaves, the downward migration begins.

Everything turns, and begins to head south when summer is over.

Even the monarch butterflies

Why should I be exempt?

Why should you?

Living in NYC it is shockingly easy to forget that we live in a larger world, that we are among the animals on the planet, that we are inextricable from the natural world.

Our clocks, and TVs, computer screens and lightbulbs, our subways and taxis and over-air-conditioned workplaces and shops, the cement and brick and glass and steel horizons and the meticulously groomed parks help us forget our instinctive selves and our place in this world.

We cannot easily wade in the rivers, climb trees, we do not rake our lawns – we must schedule long car trips out of the city to see the leaves turn. We see only a few stars faintly, and the moon is more often than not, hiding behind a building. Windows look out on other windows.

Right now there is a storm raging outside, the winds are gusting up to 50 miles per hour, but out my office window you would never know it. Nothing moves. If I look long and closely, I see a pot of dead decorative tall grass bending on the sun-deck of the condo a few buildings over, only a very thin slice of the river far off and barely visible between skyscrapers shows some white caps on the waves.

But I have seen the Monarch butterflies – every single day for the past two weeks – but certainly not today in this wind – I have seen them, in purposive, directional flight, past my office window on the top of a Wall Street skyscraper. One at a time, flying by every couple of hours, migrating like birds, to their winter roost in Mexico.

The Eastern monarch migration is endangered, and monarch numbers dwindling. Stateside, municipalities mow highway medians covered with milkweed – which feed and sustain monarch breeding – to improve highway safety. Corn farming uses pesticides – which kill caterpillars – to insure sufficient crop yield. The local resident loggers in Mexico facing overwhelming poverty, cut down trees – that millions of butterflies route to, and roost in – selling lumber to feed their families.

Neither are the butterflies safe from the measurable effects of climate change: drought, dehydration, forest fires, increasingly severe storms.

And neither are we.

The clients who come to see me have heard many such stories, if not this one, then others. The plight of the distant polar bears, the poaching of elephants, the ever growing list of extinct and endangered species. The short-term, immediate desperate human demand for food, for folk medicine, for oil, for energy for money, for stuff, for power that makes us a danger to the natural order, and corrective natural phenomenon a danger to us as well.

The battle, a false dualism, appears to set human needs against the natural world. An intricate and complex interconnectedness has created a scenario that leaves all parties, residents and butterflies, in insufficiency.

This is the dark side of the archetype of Interconnectedness:

Nothing is without its shadow.
Every action has its reaction.
Everything we do can fuck something else up.

Acts of creation are usually reserved for gods and poets.
But humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how.
To plant a pine for example, one need neither be god nor poet;
one need only own a good shovel.
For one species to mourn another is a new thing under the sun.

~ Aldo Leopold

as quoted in Monarch Butterflies, The Last Migration, by Benjamin Vogt

All archetypes are bivalent, and two-faced.

Every gesture we make has the power to heal something too.

What often looks terrible can be essential and transformative.
And what looks good and clean and perfect will eventually reveal a darker under-belly.

If we were to live with awareness that we are of the earth and effected by it, and that we also have a significant effect up on the world – what would change?

Many shut down such questions down, dismissing the dilemma entirely, defensively certain that none of it matters anyway.

Some live in constant fear about coming catastrophes. Some are paralyzed with hopelessness.

Some believe, self-righteously, that they know as a point of fact, the “best choices” to make, the one right and true and obvious answer.

Others are just trying to tolerate the questions.

I ask myself what are my responsibilities and capacities as a psychotherapist in the face of it all.

Social workers emphasize the importance of understanding clients as “persons in environments” and as therapists, we are further trained to assess our client’s (and our own) capacity for healthy relatedness and ability to empathize with others. We try to discern and describe attachment styles and strengths. We take note of how well impulses are contained, if gratification can be delayed, and the development, or lack of judgement as well as short and long term reasoning. We determine the of severity of symptoms, orientation to reality, rigidity and effectiveness of defenses. All of these assessments are based, in large part, on our proximal environment of human relationships and structures, particularly co-workers, immediate friends and family.

But perhaps we are also called to asses the larger circles of interpersonal functioning beyond the immediate tribe and social environments, widening to include our interconnections to the much larger communities we dwell within: the local, regional and global community, our immediate habitat, region and ecosystem.

Insurance companies do not require us to assess the sense of relatedness and relationship to the planet itself. Our training rarely helps us figure out how much our client may or may not feel themselves to be a indivisible part of the natural world, or how divorced they may be from understanding their integral and entwined position among plants, oceans, animals, weather, bugs, bears, bats, clouds, soil, light and climate. How aware are we of the fact that our individual beings, and our supposedly self-determined fates remain absolutely inseparable from each other and the rest of the creatures, minerals and vegetables and vapors swirling around on this blue dot?

Here is what I do know: we are rarely destroyed, but usually strengthened by facing our fears and integrating our shadows, both personally and collectively.

As psychotherapists it has always been our obligation to promote our clients awareness of themselves in a larger environment, and deepen their contact with strengthening realities, even if approaching reality is uncomfortable or difficult.

As clients, we are called to face and accept what we do not want to know about ourselves.

Jesus sat under the sky on the hot desert sands to face down his shadow, Buddha sat under the Bohdi tree, with a finger touching the earth. Fairy tale heroes and heroines must commonly align themselves with animals of the forest, and draw on the support of flora and fauna to conquer the witches and demons that threaten them. The desert, the tree, and the animals guide them into deeper contact with themselves-as-part-of-the-larger-world, and therefore, more in touch with themselves, and more in touch with the world.

When we allow ourselves to wonder about what it means for us to be absolutely intertwined and interdependent upon the natural world at this point in history, we may feel angry or impotent, afraid, overwhelmed, anxious about what is to come, disoriented about how to proceed when our culture produces so many diversions, distractions and explicit minimization and misinformation.

Raised in captivity in labs, experimentally living under controlled temperatures, sheltered from the wind, the sun, the rains, adapted to prolonged artificial lighting, or exposed to electromagnetism the monarchs also become lost and disoriented. When they are released during the migratory season they scatter in random directions.

How do the wild monarchs find their over-wintering trees? They have no cognitive knowledge of how the hell to get to Mexico. They are two or three butterfly generations away from the tree where their grandmothers wintered before laying spring eggs.

Like us, they are heading somewhere they have never been before.

But somehow they do know. Or they figure it out.

They feel the cold slowing the beat of their wings. Too cool, and they are paralyzed, frozen. Too hot and they dehydrate. They fly just enough toward the sun, to the south, toward conditions that allow them to keep moving, that maximize their strengths, and ultimately to the roosts that support the survival of their species and the lives of their offspring.

Like the Fisher King who must heal his own wound before his land and grounds will be fertile again, our work will begin by accepting that we hold many illusory beliefs about ourselves as entirely autonomous and self-determining, and by addressing our own estrangement from ourselves, and the truth of our essential, undeniable interdependent nature.

Some how, monarchs are able, with much smaller brains than ours, to feel their own bodies, to read the weather and to instinctively feel where they are and where they are headed and how they should respond to the earth itself.

They will start the trip all alone, heeding the warnings of colder realities. They glide and soar and flap toward the sun, and catch thermal winds that warm and animate them, they follow a circular and indirect route. In time, those that survive and are not eaten or blown off course will gather in a flocks – or more properly a rabble of butterflies. The rabble will increases in size until they are in the hundreds of thousand in flight together. As they near their destination millions upon millions of them will soar together, they will stop traffic, and darken the skies.

But for now, I sit in my office and watch for them – one at a time, caught in updrafts, swirling through thermals, sometimes switching directions and then switching back, undaunted and too small to be afraid of what lies ahead or to dread the arduousness of the long and treacherous journey, each slowly, steadily finding their way to where they are meant to be.

copyright © 2012
All rights reserved Martha Crawford

Books that informed me in writing and for more reading:

Four Wings and a Prayer: Caught in the Mystery of the Monarch Butterfly
by Sue Halpern

Monarch Butterflies: The Last Migration
by Benjamin Vogt

Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re In Without Going Crazy
by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone

The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
by Alan Watts

Portrait of the Psychotherapist as a Young Artist.

July 1, 2012 By in About Me, Creative process, psychoanalytic theory, psychotherapy, Psychotherapy Fees, Scape goating, Shadow Tags: , , , , , , 29 Comments

Someone just asked me how I decided to become a therapist.

It’s a question I am asked from time to time. I’ve answered different ways at different times of my life, and understood my trajectory toward this point in different ways.

This is my answer for the moment.

There is of course, a longer, far more complex narrative, of which I am only partially aware. I suspect the unconscious processes, both personal and collective, that set me on this path began the day I was born, or maybe even before.

But there was, in fact, a moment when I actually decided, or perhaps realized, that this was the path I intended to pursue.

I had majored in Theater and Philosophy in undergraduate – and had dropped out, smack in the middle of my senior year – giving my parents a total heart-attack (and completely in keeping with their own history of totally impulsive shenanigans) and certainly disappointing many of my professors in both majors who believed in and supported me.

Why? I only knew that I couldn’t do it any longer – continuing to work to finish my undergraduate degree felt “wrong” and utterly intolerable. In fact, I felt that I somehow needed to “save” my final semester, and any graduate schooling for “later.”

That was the best explanation I could muster.

I could not invest any more energy consolidating the identity I had cobbled together out of scraps and left overs. I could not would not stack one more brick in the construction of a jerry-rigged persona. It would either work or it wouldn’t based on whatever effort I had already put in. “I” was held together with spit and duct tape but I was either “good enough” as is, or I wasn’t. It was time to find out.

I had started therapy the year before dropping out – and was certainly the most annoying, defended, overtly resistant patient that had ever presented voluntarily in a therapists office. Her obvious empathy annoyed me. I didn’t want someone to empathize with my “troubles.” I wanted someone to say I was going to be just fine, I was following my heart and that these instincts certainly meant something important. I wanted her to assure me that there were many roads to happiness, and that I was sure to have a bright future ahead of me if I stubbornly followed my intuition, and so to not be afraid. She said none of those things. She looked concerned. I hated her more than half the time. The rest of the time she scared the shit out of me.

I got a mindless gig in a nearby restaurant, relieved and happier in obedience to the pressing internal mandate. I gazed down on the ceremony from high up in the amphitheater the day my dearest friends and my class graduated without me – without a drop of regret. I had no desire to flip my tassel.

I left that state and that therapist the first chance I had, and never looked back.

The next seven or so years are a blur. I did a brief stint in a regional theater and eventually moved to New York with hundreds of thousands of other 20 year olds to act and act out.

Here is what I remember: the East Village & Alphabet City, waiting tables, various very bad boyfriends, auditions, panic-attacks, bar tending, head-shots, grief, acting gigs, mourning, the Equity Actors union waiting room, flash-backs, and scraping by.

I found my second and final therapist – and used all of my personal resources just to show up regularly. I offered up my cash tips from my black half-apron pockets for what seemed to have become my central task in life: Therapy. Twice a week. I didn’t know why it felt like I was living life in a giant pin-ball machine – buffeted from one misery to the next – and worse: I had the terrible, unshakable sensation that whatever the crap was playing out – it had all happened before.

And I wanted it to stop.

Of course it had all happened before – but I had no idea what a “repetition compulsion” was – I just knew I hadn’t liked it the first round either.

I was pursuing acting as a career. I worked in the restaurant industry. But, it was clear as crystal that showing up for therapy was my real job.

Somewhere in there I met a boy, a stable and kind boy, and would eventually move in with him. His parents had been holocaust survivors, and he seemed completely undaunted by my little shit-show. He remains undaunted and steadfast to this day.

This next part is aesthetically humiliating but true. I paid what must have been seven bucks at the time to see a matinée of the Prince of Tides. I went alone. I remember very little of it. The therapist, played by Barbara Streisand is bad – probably as terrible as the movie, and also bad as in naughty. Does she sleep with a patient? Or just the sibling of a patient? Not that that is okay either. She is categorically a bad therapist in a bad movie – but, I experienced a strange overwhelming confluence:

Here was an actress, playing a therapist. Something shook loose in my head. An actress, one known to have had a lot of psychotherapy, was acting as if she was actually a therapist.

Hmmmmm.

When the movie finished, I spent another seven bucks and saw it again. I next went straight to Samuel French theatrical publishers and bought every little paperback copy of every play I could find with a therapist in it.

It was in the early nineties that I purchased my own first book on psychodynamic theory. The title caught my attention as I had been reading Joyce: “The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Patient” by Gerald Alper.

The first paragraphs of the preface sent me straight to the cashier to smooth out a stack of crumpled bills from the bottom of my backpack:

“The artist who appears here belongs to a special population of struggling, non-commercial, artist-patients rarely seen in the private office of a psychoanalytic psychotherapist (as is the case here) for the compelling reason that they cannot afford a normal fee”

and further down the page:

“Here is the common, recurring profile of the artist as patient: someone in their mid to late twenties, more likely female than male…. generally not indigenous to New York City, but arriving and settling in from the Midwest and even California, an aspiring actor, actress, dancer, musician, painter, singer or writer; generally unemployed in his craft and having to fall back on part-time survival work such as waiting tables in restaurants (almost unanimously despised) predominant presenting problem of depression (often narcissistic) work inhibition, creative block, paralysis of initiative, and day to day functioning accompanied by frequent feelings of inner deadness”

Yikes. Was he supervising my therapist?

In it, he discusses his caseload of young artists, in the 80′s, surviving and suffering and acting out in the East Village, in the ten block radius around my fifth floor walk-up.

I had no idea at the time if it was a “good” piece of clinical writing or not – and had never heard of any of the theorists he referred to – Kernberg, Kohut, Winnicott, and Bateson’s’ “double bind.” The book felt like a cold slap: pathologizing, harsh, objectifying. But, absolutely no less objectifying than the restaurant managers or casting directors that dismissed, criticized or hollered at me every single day. The case examples seemed off-point, and unlike any peers I could identify with. Little was discussed about the complexities of creative processes, or career building. No stories of hope or big breaks.

Just stories of symptoms and dreams of loyalty to a creative process going no-where. No Where.

Yet, Alper was clearly familiar and compassionate toward my tribe of misfits when he discussed us in aggregate. All of us thin-skinned folk, hoping to make a creative living off of the utter sensitivity of our exposed, raw nerve endings, bruised and battered by brute contact with the pointed corners of unyielding reality.

Many of us trapped, feeding the insatiable appetites of demanding patrons during the day, while unable to satisfy our own deepest hungers.

He even describes the “waiter’s nightmare” which haunted me for many years:
“gigantic outdoor cafes, peopled by hundreds of clamoring patrons, situated thousands of feet apart”

Re-reading it now for the first time twenty years later, clinically, it’s not my professional language, or model, and doesn’t speak to my practice or approach. The book is too focused on psychoanalytic diagnostics for my taste – all artistic processes redefined as a cocktail of healthy and pathological narcissistic processes – artist’s relationship to his talent/creativity: narcissistic, to the audience: narcissistic, and all artists and participants in the creative act: narcissistic. Kohutian, Kerbergian, or Winnicottian – it seems unnecessarily reductive of what, in my view, are essentially numinous, spiritual, unconscious processes of the psyche.

Of course, there is always danger of inflation and deflation when wrestling with archetypal content and the Unconscious. But in my work over the past 15 years with the same struggling creative population – too many writers, actors, musicians, playwrights, dancers to count – I have come to think of the suffering artist much more as an “identified patient” in a disordered environment. They are the Cassandras, the too willing scapegoats, the canaries in our coal mine. They feel the toxicity in any system first – and often respond before they know what they are reacting to. Artists struggle to give it voice, shape, movement, and symbol so the rest of the community can confront the shadow content that would otherwise be ignored, repressed, disavowed. The artists I have seen, seem to me, not narcissistic enough. Too willing to be dismissed as flakey, as failures, too willing to absorb the collective toxins, take them into their own systems to metabolize, and transform them into something beautiful or communicative or confrontative. Eternally, masochistically hopeful that they can make the deaf hear, the blind see, artists do so at costs to themselves they don’t always recognize.

A little like therapists.

Yet, Alper was clearly a caring and compassionate therapist, and the parallels between creative and clinical inspiration and artistry are not lost on him. Alper mentions that he was a novelist before becoming a therapist, and describes the pursuit of a career in psychoanalytic psychotherapy as a “decision to try and earn a living doing the thing we most love.”

Twenty years ago this was perhaps the first time I had the notion that 1) I had a not-so-common sensitivity, receptivity, and a relationship to my own unconscious processes, and 2) It was actually a skill set I had developed – as well as a deficit. Also, 3) that this skill set was maybe even directly transferrable to work as a therapist.

The same year, I was working on a piece of experimental theater – “workshopping” some obscure German Expressionist piece, with a group of other wounded waiters I knew. The two “producers” had hired a “director” with some family funds – and we were using psychodramatic exercises, along with our own significant trauma histories to “flesh out” the sparse, strangely translated text. Putting all our horrors “on their feet” and improving our way through our worst and cruelest “high-stakes” memories. Beatings. Abuse. Discovering suicided family members. Psychotic breaks and involuntary commitments. Drug overdoses.

We thought we were being brave and creative. Now, I can see that it was just so obviously, and on every level: A Very Bad Idea.

When the final actor had exposed his own darkest living nightmare for others to enact, I heard the director whisper to himself:
“This is good…. we can use this….”

That night, I called an old dear friend: She had walked through her own house of horrors – and wasn’t all the way out yet, but she had managed to get her MSW a year or two before and was, as a result, way more gainfully employed than I was.

“Use this??!!” I hollered into the phone, back when people talked on phones. “Use this?! Is this what all actors are doing all of the time!? Use this!! This SHOULD NOT BE USED! This shit is SACRED unto ITSELF! We should only respect it and sit near it and bear witness!”

The first eight words of her response changed my whole life:

“You don’t have to be an actor, you know. There are lots of actors who would kill to be getting the work you complain about.”

“Wait?! What did you say?!!?!? Excuse me did you say: “I DON’T have to be an actor?! I don’t have to be an actor..… “

I thanked her and hung up. Called someone and quit the hot German-Expressionist mess. The next day I ordered catalogues from every social work program in the city. And called my would-be alma mater to figure out how the hell I was going to finish my degree seven years after dropping out.

Interestingly enough, I found out that my credits were on the brink of expiration, and if I had waited even a few more months, I would have had to start my Bachelor’s degree over. As it was, I transferred some credits back – and completed some research projects for independent study credits: One on the history of the Yiddish theater on the Lower East Side, and another on the Psychology of Creativity, extensively citing my favorite book du jour: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Patient.

One year later: I had tied up my loose ends, and enrolled in a clinical social work program.

So it is with deep gratitude and thanks to my chaotic inheritance, my first half-detested therapist, my disappointed professors, several bad boyfriends, every restaurant manager I ever was oppressed by, my husband, my final and current therapist, a sadistic director, Gerald Alper, my dear friend Julie, a Very Bad Idea, and of course ladies and gentleman, the Incomparable Barbara Streisand, that I exist as I am now:

A psychotherapist, no longer young,
but in many ways walking the same path,
practicing the art of psychotherapy,
with some success and some failures,
still struggling to remain loyal to the inner guidance of my own psyche and the creative process.

copyright © 2012
All rights reserved Martha Crawford

The Bear Will Eat You

June 5, 2012 By in psychotherapy, Shadow Tags: , , , , 50 Comments

This one is just for me.

No great idea, no over-arching theme revealed. No burst of poetic inspiration.

No gift from me here.

This is the dark-side of the moon – the cost of the work – the damage it does to those of us who practice.

Damage is not all that it does, but make no mistake: damage is done.

There are seasons that cycle through your practice:
Cycles of joy, pride and celebration.
Cycles of sorrow, pain and loss.

And there is darker more disorienting stuff than that.

Cycles of hate, paranoia, terror, nausea, horror, and cruelty that set your world on edge and claw at your sense of reality.

Sometimes all the birds are flying in the wrong direction.

Days and weeks when you hear things that you can never un-hear. Impossible and unjust traps of fate as destructive as the one that Oedipus encountered. As intolerable as the torture of Job.

Rashomon days.

When the stories you hear overwhelm and contradict, and undermine your ability to believe easily in anything simple, or reliable, or good.

When your head swims with the horror of how cruel and destructive we can be to one another, and nothing makes sense at all.

Certainly this was true of the months and months of crisis work in NYC after 9/11.
Each day, a round of fresh horror.

But, even without mass tragedies – be warned that when you approach this field there will be weeks when you will sit in one Kobayashi Maru after another – un-winnable scenarios, from which there is no escape.

There are days, where the darkness you bear witness compounds thicker and heavier with each narrative that spills forth in your office.

Days when the road to hope becomes so steep, it rises up ninety degrees into a sheer, impassable wall blocking your path. No way to move forward. No place to run.

Tragedies so entrapping that they can tear clean through the fabric of living.

I will tell you one such story – disguised beyond recognition – but exactly as impossible and intolerable as one I encountered my first year in the field – many many years ago.

The client had her first psychotic break at age twelve, following a violent rape by a stranger. She has spent a life time in and out of hospital, day treatment programs, residential treatment facilities. In her early 20′s she had a child, which she knew she could not raise, who her sisters and mother raise and care for on her behalf. The woman remains close and connected to her child and family. Shortly after her daughter turns twelve the family stops returning the woman’s calls and refuse to let her come to the house, causing her great distress. Eventually, many many months later a sister calls to tell me that the twelve year old daughter has survived a violent rape by a stranger who broke into their apartment and was arrested. She was hospitalized medically to recover from her injuries for over a month. She seems to have also had a psychotic break as a result, is hearing voices, pre-occupied with internal stimuli, and has now been admitted to the same adolescent psychiatric unit that her mother was after her assault and decompensation. They could not bring themselves to tell the child’s mother, and asked that I do it, as they are hoping that a visit from her may help her daughter.

On the street, in the news papers, at the coffee shop – we find ways to distance ourselves from stories like these: My neighborhood isn’t like that, we don’t have mental illness in the family, such things could never happen to me.

Just like those of us who have never had cancer can hang onto our magical thinking that cancer will never happen to us either.

But that kind of distancing is an abandonment in a therapists office.

And remember: tragedy, like mercy, rains down evenly on the just and the unjust.

Sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes, a (fictionalized) day or a week can look like this:

10:00am – A woman’s child has disappeared. The police search.

11:00am – A husband mourns his wife’s recent suicide and cares for their child who found her body.

Your capacity for hope, for faith, for belief in humanity, shaken into crumbs and dust.
You may be dangling by your fingertips but you know that you are needed.

12:00pm – A fresh, out of the blue stage four cancer diagnosis.

1:00pm – Lunch and email. No good news. An email from your son’s teacher concerned about his talking in class. An urgent and contentious co-op meeting called that evening to discuss a potential high-stakes lawsuit.

Reeling, unable to process it all. Lost, bewildered.

None of these are new cases. All of these people you have been working with for years and years on other things – finding more job satisfaction, improving their marriages, resolving their conflicted relationship with their parents.

All are blind-sided.
You are half-way through your day.

2:00pm – A man with chronic debilitating physical pain losing hope.

3:00pm – A survivor of long ago child sexual abuse abuse forcibly subpoenaed to testify as more recent victims seek to prosecute the perpetrator.

You stop looking at your schedule. You don’t want to know what is going to come next. You close your eyes between sessions and hope that the next person is the actor who may have just landed a long sought after role, or someone who has just met the love of their life.

4:00pm – A woman, recently moved in with a man she has trusted for many years has been hit by him.

5:00 – A man finds out that his romantic partner of 20 years has emptied their mutual bank account, has had a secret life, and left him with nothing.

6:00 – Dinner. You can’t think straight.
You have no advice to offer, you know no way out but through it all.
You are afraid to even check your email, your voice messages, your text messages.

There is nothing you can do in the face of such broken-ness but to break as well.

It is the only sane response. The only place to connect. To be broken together.

If you care for these people, and you do, deeply, you must let it break you too.

You struggle with your personal responsibility. Should you have seen it coming? Is that what that dream they had was about? How could you, should you have protected them from this? Could you have stopped something, diverted something, prepared everyone for the shock?

Darkness wins sometimes. Or can at least, successfully dominate for a long season.

And by this point in my career, I am exhausted by the naiveté of those who insist that everything is meaningful and simple, that our choices cause our fates, that Love is always stronger than hate.

I am just as exhausted by my own naive wish that life be always sensible, causality clear and obvious, and controllable. How, after all these years, after all I have seen, can I still be stunned by senslessness? How can I still be loyal to a split off archetype of how things “should” be? How do I manage to still feel violated, and disrupted by the darkness in the world?

Some bears are too big to eat.

Some stories, especially when told by those you have invested in and cared for and nurtured, leave scars on your brain, and break your heart in too many different ways at once.

Later, maybe, they can be wrestled with. Meaning can be forcibly extracted, or shoved down the throat of senselessness. We cannot choose what happens to us, or to others. But many learn how to make tragedy meaningful in the aftermath.

But only in the aftermath.

For now, you can’t look away.
The job is to look. To hear.
To sometimes let love break you.

7:00- a man whose beloved but unstable twin brother has relapsed again and committed a violent offense while high.

8:00 – A woman whose partner has delivered a still born child

9:00 Home. To curl briefly in the bed with your sleeping child and smell their breath and hair before watching some stupid, mindless anesthesizing TV with a glass of wine.

And you feel guilty/thankful, that this time, for this round, it isn’t you.

And you know it has been before. And it will be again.

You remember how much it meant – when it was you – to tell the story to someone who wouldn’t look away.

You fall asleep, and dream compensatory, consoling dreams.

In the morning, you spend time with your family, work-out, feed yourself a healthy breakfast. Put on your lipstick, and head back in.

And hope today you will eat the bear.

copyright © 2012
All rights reserved Martha Crawford

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