The mention of Kuan Yin was spontaneous; I did not know whether Jack was familiar with her, and, when he was not, I needed to explain her to him. This took some time and threatened to overwhelm the session, taking him away from his feelings and into his intellect. But I wanted to turn around Jack’s long-standing sentiments of never having been enough. If he could imagine himself, even for a moment, as the healer, I hoped this would begin to offset his unquestioning identity as someone who needed to be healed. His slightly off-balance reaction to our interchange suggested some degree of success. Instability is sometimes a sign of new possibilities.

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.

Shirley is striving to be “indifferent,” in her words, to her exhusband’s complaints, but I know there is an alternative to indifference that is closer to equanimity with a dose of compassion. Of course her ex is enraged and of course she feels unfairly attacked but, from an emotional

perspective, he has a point. Just as a mother has to bear the hatred intrinsic to being a mother, Shirley will have to accept the consequences of her decision to divorce. Craving understanding from the person she has left is not going to get her anywhere.

Jean had no doubts about who she was. Not only was she wrong to have written the forbidden prescriptions, she couldn’t even focus on her medical records. Nothing was working out the way she hoped. The fan in her life was definitely broken. Were I to focus

only on what was broken, I would be pulled into her suffering instead of pointing the way out. I wanted more uncertainty for Jean, more of that Zen doubt. Whatever conclusion she aggressively threw at me, I parried it back at her until we reached a truce. Surrender was Jean’s rhinoceros. It went against everything she thought.

I try to talk to Violette about how this could be good, about how the concept of what is ideal might be getting in the way of what is true, and possibly good enough. In the back of my mind are earlier discussions we have had about how her desire to please might be getting in the way of her own enjoyment. “You are going deeper into your own space,” I suggest. “Your husband can get the runoff. That will be nourishing for him. He can appreciate you as other and you will feel affirmed.” Violette is not necessarily having it. “Still, it’s not ideal,” she replies. But then she reflects upon some earlier relationships with actors who had more embodied her sense of the ideal. She had tended to submerge herself in those relationships, privileging their talents over her own, and had ended up feeling used and unappreciated. “I might not be so happy in the ideal,” she admits. “This is real,” I repeat. “Grappling with the real is the way to go.