Today's therapy session was outstanding, all the more because I couldn't make it in and we talked over the phone. But with the trust built on a dozen years of work, and my understanding that a good session begins with no agenda, I started blind. What we very quickly got into was the sorting out of two of my most important relationships: how they originate from the same place and yet are so entirely different. In one I must not be who I am if I am to have any relationship with this woman at all. I must listen very carefully to her, respond at every turn to her moods, her needs, her desires, her wishes, and give her the empathy she needs at that exact moment regardless of my mood, need, desire, or wish. This is a great deal of work for me...as much work as if I were in my chair marked "Therapist" in my consulting room. The sad reality is that she believes that she is doing all that for me also but in reality she is not hearing a word I am saying, even when I am empathizing with her. She is carrying on in her own world, and there I am attempting to carry on with her, being so little noticed as to not be there at all. Within that relationship, I am not. Or, in the luminous words of Martin Buber, there is no I-THOU relationship between this woman and me.
The above is sad. What follows is the devastation. For the past forty years of my life, I have believed exactly the opposite of what is reality. I have believed that she and I were in it together; that she was tracking with me as I was tracking with her; in short, that we had a relationship in which I was being my genuine self. None of it is true.
About that other terribly important relationship in my life: it has been tumultuous since the day I was born. Full of love and hate and envy and adoration and loathing and camaraderie and eroticism and every-flavor feeling. Now, through the adversities of these past 3 years of life, we two characters have found a new rejoinder to each other: a deep and abiding respect. At a level approximating that at which plate tectonics function, we intuit that throughout our lives each of those emotions, and the accompanying behaviors, has been blatantly honest, forthright to the bone. Each of us, for our own reasons, has journeyed toward enlightenment and we have lately caught sight of each other on parallel paths. We have become steadfast friends who can, and only do, tell each other the truth in all things; we rely on each other when we can and wait patiently for each other until we can. We have a relationship in which I can be, in short, my genuine self.
All that was discussed in my session today. Also discussed was that without [my dear] Dr. H. none of that could have been discussed. Such was the trust held over a tenuous telephone connection in this other inimitable I-THOU relationship which holds and strengthens me to shed light on the truths of my life, the greatest of which is that I do not and can not ever take for granted that I will trust myself as being seen in any given relationship. I must remember, with every person with whom I converse, to remember myself.
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My post script is odd but necessary. It is written to a remark made by Rush Limbaugh years ago. He commented on his radio show that psychotherapy is a forum in which people can blame all their problems on their parents. Rush Limbaugh's total ignorance in 1988 still makes me sad and angry--perhaps because I have so little reason to think he has had impetus to improve his insight into this most serious of the healing sciences and, thus, has continued to misinform his legions.
