ryansutter·net

In early 1995, shortly after my wife had beaten cancer and my mother had given birth to my baby sister Jasmine, I was feeling as if I were at my wits end from stress. I bottled up anger, bitterness, sadness, and even joy just so I could maintain a calm demeanor in the middle of chaos. My process for selecting therapist was quite simple. I had a job that had a phone number you could call for “employee assistance” of any sort. Health problems, money problems, work problems, it didn’t matter. It was like a counseling service.

I called EAR (the Employee Assistance Resource, or some such silly acronymn) and said that what with the cancer and the bills and the divorce of my parents and working 65 hours a week that I was losin’ it and needed to see somebody. They set me up with a woman named Jean. Now, I didn’t realize it at the time, but Jean wasn’t a full-fledged psychotherapist, more of a good listener, a social worker. She worked in a therapy office and was nice to talk to, but other than offering a supportive ear and encouragement she did little in the way of digging into the plumbing between my ears. I liked that about Jean. Still, eventually, I decided that I didn’t need supportive encouragement any more and I stopped seeing her.

My life today is very different although the stressful time I recently went through was, if anything, an even greater stress than the one I experienced back when I started seeing Jean. Due to various circumstances both past and present, I have a lot of emotional difficulties with trust, I get physically ill when certain subjects arise, and I occasionally battle bouts of depression. I am tough and resiliant in some ways and fragile in others. Esther suggested maybe it was time I saw a therapist again and I agreed.

I think I pictured therapy as being something like it was when I was seeing Jean. There would be a nice man or woman who would listen to what I was saying, jotting little notes down, offer me some tea, let me vent, and send me on my way. However, having now had two sessions with Paul I can safely say it isn’t going to be anything at all like that. This is going to be work. Exhausting, painful, but hopefully productive, work.

Yesterday was my second session with Paul. In the first, I had given him a bunch of background, just trying to get him caught up to where things where in my life, give him the big picture. It kinda bothered me that he kept wanting to jump into things before I got done telling the whole story. I would say something and he would seem to think it was significant and ask more about it and I would be thinking, “ah, but I can’t answer that until I explain this next part” and so on and so on.

The second visit I had no idea what would happen. He asked me what we were going to do and I said, “I don’t know, I was going to ask you the same thing”. This time I let him ask whatever he wanted and I answered. It didn’t take long before he had me in tears.

The exact nature of the questions he asked and the way they caught me off guard and made me see things in different ways are irrelevant and none of your damn business, but it’s the process that I want to talk about because even with the smallest exposure to this process I can already see that it might be a) very uncomfortable and b) very powerful. Not unlike meditiation.

At home I have a book by Alan Watts called Psychotherapy: East and West that discusses the two different approaches to therapy, the western one of Freudian analysis and the eastern one of sitting meditiation. I really need to read that book because one thing I am now sure of is that my emotional issues may have arisen in response to external events, but they are maintained by me for purely internal reasons and if I am to learn to live with my own mind, I will find the answers there.

It’s so strange how things that seem on the surface to be so obvious (I’m angry because the Watchtower Society has my family trapped in a lie and I will never get to see them again) might contain subtle falsehoods, lies that we tell ourselves. Take that example, for instance. Yes, it is true that my family lives in the world of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and that as long as they do I will always be an outcast, but is that really why I’m angry? Yes, anger is one potential response to the situation but so is compassion, so is peaceful resignation, so is laughter if one found the situation humorous. The situation is one thing, my emotional response is something else. Why anger and not one of these other emotions? Why any emotion at all? The true cause of anger is not the situation, it is my own desires, perceptions and wishes about the situation. If I can look into those things, I can wind up with a different response to the situation even if the situation itself never changes.

Meditation is a process to bring yourself to those realizations. Analysis is a process whereby somebody else brings you to those realizations. The techniques are different, the results are likely different as well. I don’t have a lot of experience yet to judge that by. I do know that it was easier yesterday sitting in that office to try to fight the process, to try to second guess what he was asking, to try to give him the answer I thought he wanted. In meditation there is a struggle as well as you try to quiet and understand the mind but it’s different, you can observe the mind at least. You can’t observe the mind of another person. When a third party is directing the action it’s a little more jarring.

Ultimately I don’t think I will replace meditation with analysis. In fact, I think I will combine the two, spending more time meditating then I have been in hopes of really making the most out of the revelations that come out of the analysis. The mind is such a complex thing and life is too. When life turns you around and screws you up you need a few tools to get straight again. I sincerely hope that analysis will be one of them.