I was pleased with this session because I managed to get David to feel behind all of his accrued self-doubt and into his heart. For an instant, when his tears began to flow, I knew he was connecting to a neglected but super-important part of himself. We had gotten to this place through a discussion of mindfulness, but our conversation did not stop at the intellectual level. David’s memory had led us deeper into his personal history and straight to the defenses he had built around his mother’s unavailability. By allowing himself to follow his affect rather than dwelling in his story, David was able to discover something true: the love he had always doubted was alive inside him.

That evening, I had dinner with my former therapist and current friend, Michael Vincent Miller. I told him about the two sessions, about how it can take so many years for certain things to come out. I have enormous respect for Michael’s therapeutic acumen. He helped me a lot as my therapist and has guided me for years while becoming a real friend, and I have referred many patients to him. In the past fifteen years, he has begun to meditate, and we now share an interest in how seamlessly the two disciplines of Buddhism and psychotherapy can fit together. “You know what makes Buddhism and therapy similar?” he asked me. I waited for him to tell me. “They both aim for the restoration of innocence after experience.

Dr. Kernberg was kind to me and helped me to see that, while their deprivation may have been real, these patients had lots of internal conflict around anger that was holding them back. In showing me this, he also, without having to say it directly, made me see that I, too, was pushing anger away. He gave me language to use. “You might not be aware of how angry you are,” he suggested I say. “But you are in danger of destroying the very support you need the most.” By beginning my communication with “you might not be aware” rather than confronting my patients’ anger directly, I could encourage them to reflect upon something they were otherwise just acting out unawares. My skills as a therapist improved dramatically as a result. Kindness without the proper intelligence to back it up was of little use, but the use of kindness in the service of therapy’s insights was very helpful.

He [Winnicott] was by no means a Buddhist, but I believe he, too, healed by modeling being. He mostly used mother/infant vocabulary to describe his mode of relating, but this did not stop him from describing, in disarmingly frank terms, his own internal process:

It is only in recent years that I have become able to wait and

wait . . . and to avoid breaking up this natural process by making

interpretations. . . . It appals me to think how much deep change I

have prevented or delayed . . . by my personal need to interpret. If

only we can wait, the patient arrives at understanding creatively

and with immense joy, and I now enjoy this joy more than I used to

enjoy the sense of having been clever. I think I interpret mainly to let

the patient know the limits of my understanding. The principle is

that it is the patient and only the patient who has the answers. We

may or may not enable him or her to encompass what is known or

become aware of it with acceptance.

I remember talking with another Tibetan lama, years later, about how difficult it is for some Westerners to engage with this idea because of how conflicted they are about their own

mothers. “For those people,” the lama said, smiling, “I always say think about your grandmother instead.” He would have approved of my new friend Zeki’s ayahuasca memories!