Sexual abuse like the kind Willa experienced robs a person of innocence. Instead of discovering erotic life in a natural way with a peer, sexuality was forced upon her. Any pleasure she might have found in the awakening of her sensuality was contaminated from the beginning with confusion and shame.

Learn how to give loving attention to your whole experience. Open yourself, even to those aspects you would rather do away with. Cultivate equanimity rather than searching for the next peak experience.

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.

Reflecting on this session, I am reminded once again of the concept of the mind object, both Beth’s and my own. By focusing too much on the particulars of Beth’s food issues and trying too hard to make a change in her behavior, I was getting drawn back in to her closed world instead of helping her break out of it. I had lost track of Michael Vincent Miller’s essential point and was therefore, not surprisingly, sacrificing innocence for experience.

But, as important as it is to understand the sources and details of one’s pain, understanding is rarely enough. My patients come to therapy wanting the burden of their accumulated experience lifted. Yes, they want to make sense of their lives, but that is not usually their fundamental or exclusive aim. First and foremost, they are trying to get over their accumulated trauma in order to feel less fearful, isolated, forlorn, helpless, alone, anxious, or depressed. They might not be able to say it so clearly, but they are reaching for things

beyond thought, trying to make contact with essential capacities that have been sacrificed in their efforts to adapt, adjust, comply, cope, or conform.