Recently I finished the second four-day training module in a series of five modules (spread out over the course of the year) in the therapeutic model I like best. The more I learn and practice, the more emboldened I am to commit to this approach with my clients. And the more I commit, as with so many things, the more deeply meaningful the experience becomes.
The first task of the AEDP therapist is to "undo aloneness." The idea is that facing danger and pain and cruelty, even facing our own dark feelings, becomes truly terrifying and often traumatic when we we are completely alone in the task. And so nowadays when I sit across from someone, I think about how to undo their aloneness; how to help them feel safe enough to permit me to draw closer and help them carry the pain inside so that it becomes bearable, feel-able.
Using this model has been bringing out the human in me and my clients. The really real, the tender and precious, the profoundly connected. I always say the best part about my job is how it continually teaches me that everyone is lovable and no one is boring. (The worst part is sitting in a chair all day). If I can help someone feel safe enough to be their authentic self with me, they're easy to care about and be interested in. But now, with this new level of therapeutic engagement, I am learning something more: that our deepest nature is to be in communion. Connected. With ourselves and others and the infuriating glorious world around us. To participate in love.
Big claims, I know! But seriously. I have been so moved this week by what can happen therapeutically within the felt sense of connectedness.
Last night when I picked Beatrice up from soccer practice she was upset. Without saying too much about her experience, it boiled down to feeling excluded and alone - not only in practice, but in the lonely predicament. It was that awful sense of "I'm on the outside, and no one can help me get in, and I will always be in this terrible isolated place." We were in the car together. Darkness quickly fell outside, and as she told me about practice her pain filled the car's shadowy interior. I felt a vise tightening inside; my heart ached with her ache. I wanted more than anything to fix it! To distract with humor, to point out the positive things about soccer, to remind her of the times she'd felt good after practice. But all this connecting I've been doing lately has strengthened my pain-tolerating muscles, so instead I listened and let her cry and told her I was sorry she felt so bad, that I've felt that way too, that it really and truly is awful.
We pulled up at home and walked through the gate to the back door. We set her soccer ball and water bottle and my book and jacket down in a pile in the kitchen and I hugged her close. Gabriel was in the kitchen and he asked if she wanted to talk about it, and she did, and he hugged her too. We ate dinner and kept making space for her darkness, and as we did it began to ebb; the tide drew it back out of Beatrice's beloved body leaving lightness and spaciousness behind. Then she was ready to do some problem-solving and talk a little about how to make things better. Then we watched a documentary in which someone with a lot of struggle in life manages to try anyway, to have new experiences and take risks. Beatrice really connected with that.
My children's pain is as hard, maybe harder, than my own to bear. Holding their grief during Mike's illness and after he died was the most difficult thing I've ever done. Sometimes I was afraid their pain would break me, perhaps in part because I had to carry it alone, without Mike. Widowhood introduced me to the most acute aloneness imaginable.
And even though all I wanted then was to cry in someone's arms, someone who wouldn't advise or judge or try and shake me out of it but simply be there with me, I can forget that truth when my arms are the ones doing the holding. Or rather, deny that truth. Ignore it.
Because damn, it can feel nearly impossible to be present to another human being! To offer yourself fully and completely, and stand in whatever true thing is happening together without trying to change it or push it aside. I mean, wouldn't it be easier to get some takeout? Check your phone? Yes, it definitely would!
But the being together, the attending completely, might be the most exquisite gift anyone can give anyone else. And when you give it, you are nurtured by that generosity too. Because you are together. Because the whole experience is shared. Because we aren't meant to do any of this alone.
Maybe you are thinking: uh, yeah, Meagan. Haven't you figured this out yet? What with all the parenting and caregiving and therapizing and being a person in a world full of people for forty-six years? Did you really need a weekend of talking secure attachment and core emotions with a bunch of emotive therapists to figure out that love is more or less what we are here to do?
And to that I say, well, yeah. Maybe I did. Because love is SO HARD and heart-stretching and scary that I need lots of reminders and inspiration all the time. I need a lot of support! I need an enormous zoom room full of therapists. And people like Thich Nhat Hanh and Richard Rohr and Glennon Doyle. And my family, clients, coworkers, boyfriend, friends, ancestors. September skies, cool mornings, sunlit leaves. Also novels and music and documentaries about people who are brave. Tearful daughters who sit in the car and tell me how much it hurts.
I can't just show up with my whole heart and stay there without a thousand hands at my back.
Thank you world, for reminding me every time I forget, and teaching me anew.
