As a patient of mine once quipped when speaking of how writing her memoir had helped her
deal with a sudden and unimaginable tragedy that had upended her life, “Writing is a much better quality of agony than trying to forget.
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I challenged myself over the course of a single year to write down, as accurately as I could recall, the details of at least one session every week (or every other week) when something interesting caught my eye, when I had the sense that the Buddhist element was in play. Sometimes this influence was overt: people might ask me about meditation technique, or I might spontaneously bring something I had learned from Buddhism into the conversation. And sometimes it was only a feeling: I might find myself reaching beyond traditional analysis to help someone grasp an alternative perspective on whatever issue was troubling them.
That I was resorting to my own discursive thinking was an irony not lost on me. My advice to Beth, however well intentioned, was not able to conclusively penetrate the mental walls she had erected.
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.
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.
We cannot erase our histories no matter how hard we try, but in learning to face them with kindness, as so many of my patients have been able to do, we enter the stream that flows gently, if not always merrily, toward inner peace.