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True Progress is in Awareness

May 9, 2020 / admin

I haven’t been able to ignore how there is a seeming increase in numbers of birds announcing the wake of dawn. The natural world making itself known. It’s soothing on the one hand, but with a hint of prophecy. Their symphony says, “You’re not that relevant!” I try and let it be my meditation. I try and rest my mind on it in order to avoid getting too caught up in my own inner chirpings. We take ourselves way too seriously. Apart from my own more private struggles, I’ve been waking up worrying about the developments of the virus. More lately, I wake up worrying about the developments of ignorance. If there was a time to make good sense of our lives – it is now.

A month ago, philosopher Slavoj Zizek made a call for us to act with cooperation, awareness, deep ethical choices and wisdom. By “wisdom” he was referring to the need to “become aware of what a fragile entity we are; these humans on earth”. Referring to the biology of Corona he said that we are now threatened “by the most stupid reproductive mechanism one can imagine…It’s a good lesson in modesty.” Chomsky, his philosophical opponent, who is now in his 90’s (has lived through several world crisis by now) argues that humans themselves are the real threat; especially humans like the man he emphatically describes as “The Buffoon”, Donald Trump. Chomsky believes humanity will recover from Corona but not from Trump. Whether we are talking viruses, poor leadership, or conspiracy theorists – I think both Zizek and Chomsky would at least agree that we are really at war with ignorance and that poor decisions will be our demise, not viruses.

I could no longer hear the birds over Zizek and Chomsky arguing in my head. Fiona lifted her cheek from my chest. Perhaps my heartbeat gave it away. She smiled a pleading smile at me, “come sit with me, just for 10 minutes”. By “sit” she means meditate. I haven’t formerly sat on a meditation cushion since the beginning of lockdown. There is panic living somewhere in my body. I haven’t wanted to greet it. Meditation is not all about “bliss”. The cultivation of awareness can sometimes be a real grind and, at the same time, it is the greatest freedom to simply turn within.

I spoke to a man yesterday who was deeply disappointed with himself for finishing a bottle of brandy. He was trying to shake the feeling that he was now back on “day one”. I have a problem with this 12-step kind of logic. It is ill aligned with the nature of human development. Before I could say anything, he reflected a bit further: “I would rather think of it as picking up from where I left off”. Setbacks are real but with consciousness, growth is inevitable. Although it is alarmingly easily to re-awaken problematic patterns of thought and behaviour, “relapse” is a problematic concept. It focuses purely on external behaviours rather than internal struggles. True progress lies in the development of awareness, not in simply changing behaviours. Why do we do what we do; when we do it; in the way that we do it; and, with what intention? I have worked with many people who have managed abstinence or sobriety for considerable years and yet the underlying states of mind that evoked their cravings remain unaddressed. They may still not have made sense of themselves to themselves yet.

Psychology is an attempt at making both a science and an art of the sense-making process. Specifically, with the hope that this may lead to change; even if this change is simply a change in perspective. If there was ever a time in the history of our lives to be making sense of things, it is now. Even when things will never make sense, we can’t resist our attempts to do so. And, when things don’t make sense or we don’t like the sense things are making – we often invent other, more convenient, truths. This is human nature.

Attempting to contribute to a making sense of what my client was diluting with brandy, I shared some of my ideas from the previous blog post. I told him that I had the impression that he sometimes seems alone in his marriage. He replied, “only because I close the door from the inside”. Such an honest moment. How often do we all “close the door from the inside”? Failing to admit it, we cry “abandonment” to those on the outside. We went on to talk about why he might be closing that door form the inside.

There is a beautiful rule of thumb in psychology that – no behaviour is likely to be repeated unless it serves a function. Our behaviours might often seem completely senseless, but at closer inspection, there is usually a function they serve. Even if a less conscious function. Most of the decisions we make in our lives are not terribly conscious ones. Nevertheless, they have their causality and their consequences. I believe the recent surge in conspiracy theories is driven by our difficulty to face things for what they are. Buddhists call this “being with what is” and it isn’t always easy,

Are you sure? Are you not sure?
Well, things that start badly are never going to improve with age
The world has done things to you, but you’ve done more to yourself
Oh Robert! There’s something in the air
Slow release me now come on
From this awful night, I cannot stand the thought of all those lies
So I run from the light, from the thought I might
Not have done something right
At the back of your head, there’s an open door
There’s the shock and awe
It’s just shock that’s all

Chris Letcher

Truth, Responsibility, and Freedom

May 7, 2020 / admin

It’s 4.30am. Somehow the waves seem louder at this time of almost-day. The voluminous crash washes over my half-made thoughts. It’s a welcome intrusion. I try and use it to rinse the anxiety already waking up inside me. I am waiting for 6am, looking forward to our newly habitual walk to freedom, somewhere between 6 and 9. These walks leave me thinking about what it means to be truly “free”. To be told when you can and can’t leave your home is not real freedom, even though it feels like it for now. But, I get it! It’s my “responsibility” to stick to the rules. Although, whose responsibility is it to feed the people? We pass a man ploughing a pop-up suburban field. Now that is a man with a better contribution to make than me.

We take a long walk to a local farmhouse to see if we can buy chicks. The freedom to walk where you choose is one thing. But, the freedom to walk and talk alongside someone that you feel you can be so completely open with and they will still love you, is an entirely different thing. Just like we should have more than one word for “love”, we should perhaps have more than one word for “freedom” too. There are many freedoms.

A few people have asked me to write more about my divorce. I’ve had to think about this and why I have not written more before. One reason would be that it is far from over yet. The unfortunate thing about relationships that end badly is that everything that was bad remains and everything that was good evaporates into a vague ether. You start to wonder if it was even real. There’s an odd kind of grief to finding fictions in your own reality. Something vacuous about realising that it was other than what you thought or hoped it would be. I am sure for her, just as much as for me. However, there is perhaps no greater freedom than the truth. For me, divorce has been my greatest act of truth so far. There is freedom in truth, no matter how painful it is at first.

I can remember that moment that the truth first distilled in me. I was with, then, friends in the Transkei – walking. I felt free. The realisation felt free: I was not happy and yet I felt I should be free to be happy. I no longer wanted my life to be entirely hinged on a responsibility for someone else’s happiness. That is an easy mistake for a therapist to make. To make the happiness of other’s your responsibility. But, that doesn’t start in your psychology training, that starts in your childhood. I find myself sitting with my son, asking him why he doesn’t want to tell his mom the truth “I don’t know,” he sobs “I just don’t want to upset her even more.” I watch the shaping of myself in him.

As I sit here, my phone is heavy with messages received in the night. As I unlock my phone, I open the door into other people’s lives. What an odd yet beautiful freedom? To share in the lived experience of other people’s lives. A client writes: “Random thought, easier to type…I feel like I want someone to get me, to understand my shitty choices, to empathise, someone I don’t have to explain them to. Someone who doesn’t question but just accepts me for all my broken bits. I feel like this is everyone’s goal. In my aloneness I am actually exactly the same as everyone else. Except I don’t have my person. I should, but there are so many caveats. Mostly the ones I’ve put there because he has so many limits. That’s heartbreaking.”

I asked her if I could share this because I think it speaks for so many people. And, yes, this is “everyone’s goal”. To feel alone within your relationship is the real “lockdown”. In these situations it is not about the choice between staying or leaving. It is more about the question of what the truth will do. Along what path will it take you? Clients come to therapy because, somewhere inside them, they are finding the courage to take that path. It takes you where you need to go.

“I am just going to roll with it.” Another client tells me this week. She has started to recount her entire life and how feelings of “responsibility” run deep into her childhood. Fortunately, she is doing so with great compassion for those in her life story. Sometimes, however, finding compassion for ourselves (especially our younger selves) is not so easy. I asked her to think of herself as a young girl. What was she going through? “I can’t even imagine her”, she answers. The feeling of responsibility for our parent’s can rob us of aspects of our own childhoods.

What is our individual responsibility? What is the actual truth? What does it mean to be free? These are the questions we will find ourselves having to answer.

“The strength of a person’s spirit would then be measured by how much ‘truth’ he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted, falsified.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Still(a)Life#35: Freedom is the Luxury to Reinvent

April 30, 2020 / admin / 0 Comments

Sometimes I learn more from my clients than they learn from me. This week a client was asking herself “What do we define as our greatest luxury?” Her answer to her own question was “freedom”. We spoke about the freedom of movement, to travel and visit the people we love. We also talked about the freedom to go inward. In the face of so many people having to do what it takes to simply stay alive, having the space and time to consider my own thoughts and feelings is surely an odd luxury?

South Africa has followed suit with the Oriental trend of a draconian approach to Covid19. As of tomorrow, we are essentially still in lockdown and our efforts to combat the effects of Covid19 are only just beginning. The virus is one thing, the consequences of the virus are a whole new struggle.

We were delivering food to the local community. I asked the man in the picture if he had been receiving food since lockdown:

He shook his head in resignation, nothing.

Not even hot meals?

Nothing.

But I have heard there are people giving out hot meals on some days.

I am too afraid to leave my room, he replied, his head still shaking with resign.

Mark Epstein wrote that “Awakening does not mean a change in difficulty, it means a change in how those difficulties are met.” The problem is that fear robs us of creative action. Fear hinders us from becoming the things we could become. Fear literally starves us of our freedoms.

This man’s resignation stuck with me. As we drove off I thought of Dostoevsky – “To live without hope is to cease to live.” We sometimes die before death arrives. I hoped that taking food back to his community might give him a sense that things are possible. We cannot live without hope and we cannot afford to become paralysed by fear. Freedom is not just about exercising between 6am-9am tomorrow. Freedom is a willingness to reinvent ourselves in the face of crisis, to continue to imagine possibilities for our lives, beyond the narrow confines of our collective fearfulness.

Still(a)Life#34:Invitation inward.

April 29, 2020 / admin / 0 Comments

Today I was asked on radio “How are people dealing with all the uncertainty?” I don’t really have a straightforward answer to that. What I can say is that “uncertainty” is inherent to our everyday existence. Corona, however, is certainly the starkest confrontation with this uncertainty most of us have ever encountered. But, on any normal day, there is no real certainty of what is going to happen in the very next moment – I could be hit by a car, diagnosed with cancer or win the lottery. Certainty is something we try and build into our reality through the stories we tell ourselves about our imagined future.

In a recent interview, psychiatrist and Buddhist practitioner, Mark Epstein spoke about how we really don’t know what the next moment is going to bring and this is challenging for us because our tendency is to constantly try and imagine what the next moment will be like for us. This is one of the habitual tendencies of the mind – to forecast into the future. We also try and build security through the ways in which we habitually engage in the external world: through having things and doing things; by living outwardly rather than inwardly. Lockdown forces us inward as the doors to an outward are closed.

Stephen Batchelor also refers to this: how, through this outward orientation, our lives tend to leek away; we tend to dissolve ourselves into the world. In this regard, lockdown is an opportunity for re-collecting ourselves. Relative solitude allows for this. But solitude is not about a place or a space. According to Batchelor, it is a practice, an art form, any process that gives us access to our interiority – art, literature, poetry, dance or meditation.

At any given moment we are telling ourselves stories about our lives. Relative solitude allows us to bring some awareness to this more hidden, interior, storying process. Somehow, being open to this interiority has been considered taboo. We are, from young, encouraged to focus on the world out there rather than the universe inside ourselves.

To some extent, the interruption of everything habitual and recognisable to us “out there”, is a psychological gift, an invitation to turn inward. Even if, for now, we just take an initial peak. It’s a good start and it’s amazing what you might just find. You might just find that the only certainty available to you is to know what is happening while it is happening, inside you, in the here and now.

Still(a)Life#33: Ships in the Night

April 28, 2020 / admin / 0 Comments

Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing,
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.

This is an extract from a 1874 poem that left us with the figure of speech “like ships that pass in the night”. On any normal day, when you look out of our bedroom window, you’ll find an average of four ships within our line of sight. Tonight there are 18. They sit there like ghosts of a struggling economy, already long gone. In the stillness of the morning, you can hear the drone of some of their engines as they leave a streak of polluted air across the horizon. At night their lights blink at us – beacons from a world beyond our lockdown.

But there are entire worlds unfolding inside our private lockdowns. This week I have read a letter from a person wanting to leave their spouse; a letter from a spouse that has already had the courage to leave; a letter confronting an abuser in the past; a letter to celebrate a new found comfort in sexuality and excitement for the future; a letter about unrequited love and the fear of loneliness; a letter about despondence with a partner’s lockdown drinking; a letter from a past client, savouring life, despite lockdown…to name just a few.

If there is something you have been neglecting: a feeling; a conversation; a bad habit; a chapter in your past; a role you reluctantly play in the lives of those you love; or a hope for your future – it is likely to make itself known during this period. There is only so much alcohol left in your cupboard or laps you can do around the garden. My concern is for how shutting these things down inevitably shuts us out from those around us. This gives rise to a whole different kind of isolation. We so easily become those “ships in the night” to one another. Individual vessels that give nothing but a “look and a voice” towards one another.
It’s become common place to talk a bit about the reality of covid19 at the start of every session. Fifteen minutes into a very valuable discussion on the state of things, a client apologises for wanting to turn to matters “on my doorstep”. I reassured her that it is these matters “on our doorsteps” that are more important than ever. I think we had the fantasy that as the world went into crisis, these “doorstep” issues would easily be swept under a mat of comparative irrelevance. It seems quite the opposite – they have become more relevant than ever.

Still(a)Life#32: Letting Go

April 27, 2020 / admin / 0 Comments

I came downstairs from my last session of the day to find Fiona sifting through a lifetime of photographs. She wanted to know how to decide what to keep and what to chuck. I didn’t have a very helpful answer. In the end, we settled on imagining that, if she were writing her life story, what would she keep and what would she leave out. I was especially concerned for the things she might have been holding onto; that might be keeping stale pains alive. It’s a worthwhile task, when the time is right. A task worth doing when you have reached a point in your life when you can look back on its pictures, letters, postcards and memories with a bit of clarity. There is always the risk of holding on to things too long and too tightly. Even to the pain in the hope of one day revisiting it to find a better understanding. Alternatively, there is the risk of letting go of things too readily, even the sense of your own resilience. As we sit with ourselves in lockdown for longer now than we would like, this sorting process might start to happen all on its own in the backdrop of our minds. Such a process can be dangerous if not met with compassion. “So often, within the privacy of our inner worlds, we take the difficult thing and make it worse. Our own subliminal hate speech coats our experience and gives an added layer of meaning to things that are already difficult enough”, warns Dr Mark Epstein.

She skips past an intimate photo of a past lover, “Oops, sorry!” It’s an unusual position to be in; to once have been your lover’s therapist. As a therapist, I got to hear her life story with somewhat impartiality. Care in the absence of judgment. Wishing for her that she would flourish without feeling threatened by that. As a lover I find myself reluctantly wanting to shrink her story just to the chapter of her and I. I inevitably want to be the most significant part of her life. In this way, we rob each other of past and future. I try and remind myself of that therapeutic love. It guards against what Irvin Yalom’s critiques as “Marriage and its entourage of possession and jealousy [that] enslave the spirit.”

By the time we were lovers, I knew more than most people would know about their partners (after even decades of being together). We are, often, more honest with one another on our first date than we are on our first wedding anniversary. Concealment of our true thoughts and feelings becomes an anxious strategy to sustain a relationship’s security. The greater the insecurity, the greater the concealment. Infidelity gets a pretty bad moral wrap, but it’s just one of many dangerous concealments. In fact, infidelity is often simply the onset of an un-concealing.

The problem with saying “I do” is that following through on this runs the risk of having to conceal too much, even from ourselves. These parts of ourselves splinter off from who we say “I am” and, as a result, parts of us go on pause. Often, for so long that we become almost unrecognisable to ourselves.

I still don’t know what to do with this picture, she asks. Well, what does it mean to you, I answered. What does it mean to me, if she keeps it, is the question I would be asking.

What is it about this need to possess? To have thing for ourselves. Stephen Batchelor argues that our need to “have” engenders an anxiety that increasingly gets in the way of our ability to “be” and estranges us from knowing who and what we are.

It’s so much more joyful to strive to “be with” you rather than to try and “have” you.

Still(a)Life#31: On Writing and Listening

April 26, 2020 / admin / 0 Comments

It has been interesting to write for 30 continuous days. I find myself writing on most days but this writing is usually a bit more focused on things outside of me. Mostly a reflection on a client’s circumstance. Sometimes a love letter. Now and again an erotic thought. I have tried not to write these lockdown diaries out of obligation. Doing anything out of sheer obligation is seldom a good idea. It has been freeing to write more openly. Even though it goes against the grain of a psychologist’s training. But, client and therapist are, after all, just two people in conversation. It’s been an ongoing project to try and find my own authenticity in that somewhat necessarily contrived relationship. The less contrived the better, I think. On the topics of authenticity and writing, I am reminded of the words of Charles Bukowski: “If it doesn’t come bursting out of you, in spite of everything, don’t do it. Unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut, don’t do it.”

Some people, whose journeys are well known to me, have sent me endearing messages about what the writing has stirred in them and the choices they are finding the courage to make as a result. But, to continue writing tonight would be out of sheer obligation. There is nothing bursting out of me right now. I want to rather listen out for what the distant crash of waves has to tell me; the warmth of my lover can provide for me, as the hypnotics of sleep hopefully come and find me.

Still(a)Life#30: Coming Out of Hiding

April 25, 2020 / admin / 0 Comments

While we collected wild fermenting guavas off the driveway, Josh found the courage to start telling me things he has been experiencing lately. Somehow the shared task made it easier for him to talk. He asked me questions about my own parent’s divorce and we seemed to find a sense that we’re in this together. Rather than him being the victim of my choices, we both spoke about how the boy in me felt similar things to the boy he is now. I realised just how much feeling and insight he harbours inside him; overly cautious about the implications for others of disclosing them. This is not a habit that I hope gets too ingrained in him. It is, perhaps, something I made a habit of myself. I guess I made a career out of that habit, tuning into other’s feelings rather than my own. Other people’s needs can easily become a hiding place. As Winnicott wrote, “It is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found.”

I left my marriage when the joy subsided, and as I increasingly realised the disaster of not being found. Nobody’s fault but my own, I guess. It still takes conscious effort to ask to be found. Many of my friendships ended when I stopped doing all the finding. Now I increasingly feel the joy of coming out of hiding. The year I decided to leave my marriage I was gifted a ticket to AfrikaBurn. I camped with a large group of people, some of them my clients. But my identity as therapist seemed to be completely irrelevant in a dust storm of other people’s freedoms. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself. If I wasn’t rescuing someone or facilitating something, I wasn’t quite sure who I was.

I have found freedoms that I only ever allowed myself to imagine. It leaves me restless. I can’t shake the feeling that I am running out of time. Irvin Yalom, probably the greatest living therapist, wrote some time back “One thing I feel clear about is that it’s important not to let your life live you. Otherwise, you end up at forty feeling you haven’t really lived. What have I learned? Perhaps to live now, so that at fifty I won’t look back upon my forties with regret.” I feel like I just got started and then the world went on pause.
These freedoms are not always outward. The real rebellion is an inward one. Especially against the outdated voices in our heads that illegitimate our own feelings. There is something rather freeing about legitimating our own feelings. It somehow breathes life into us, despite the anxiety that comes with it. Lockdown seems a good time to bring awareness to those inner voices. As I write this, Josh is struggling to sleep. He seems upbeat, like he doesn’t want the day to end. I hope, somewhere inside of him, outside of his ability to language it, is the realisation that his love for those in his life does not have to be at the sacrifice of his own feelings and their legitimacy.

This afternoon I found myself writing feedback to a dear client that I have known for years: “I think absolute honesty about our feelings is the litmus test of any relationship and over censorship is the absolute demise of ourselves.”

Yalom also wrote, “To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.” Love is an invitation to express and to grow. To sometimes hear the things you would rather not hear or say the things you are too afraid to say. Far too often, love seems to require censorship rather than expression.

Still(a)Life#29: Conditional Arising

April 24, 2020 / admin / 0 Comments

“Life is the sum of all our choices” said Camus. Today I spoke to a man about to make the biggest decision of his life. Rather, it is perhaps true to say that he feels that the decision is making him. Lockdown is not an easy time to make life changing decisions. But, at the same time, it is perhaps the best time to be making those kinds of decisions – while life is dramatically changing in any case. Dramatic decisions are the bedfellows of dramatic events, even if secretly.

Buddhists call the way our contexts (internally and externally) give rise to our thoughts, feelings and actions – “conditional arising”. In other words, there are certain conditions that precede any thought, feeling or intention. This falls in line with what neuroscientist Sam Harris argues – there is no such thing as free will. You don’t pick your parents or the society you are born into. But, these are the things that shape who and how you become. Resistance to this fact can lead to a kind of self-righteousness, one that negates our capacity for compassion; our ability to identify with other people and the causes of their own actions.
Thoughts, intentions and choices are the “proximate cause of your actions” (Harris) and yet these arise out of conditions outside of our own control. It helps, to some extent to mitigate this with reason and ethics. But, as the world runs out of ICU beds, we learn that there are limits to the usefulness of reason and ethics. Sometimes decisions simply have to be made, actions have to be taken and the only immorality is not making a decision at all. We will only understand the true consequences of lockdown in retrospect.
“I should have bought more wine.” “I should have saved more money.” “I should have never left that job.” Should have’s have us looking backwards at times when we most need to be looking forwards. The choices we make over the next few months will feel definitive but there may not be right or wrong choices to be made, as long as you are making them.

Stephen Batchelor encourages that “Instead of asking “What is the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ thing to do?” the practitioner asks, “What is the wisest and most compassionate thing to do?” For now, I’m making Mampoer. That is probably the wrong decision.

Still(a)Life#28: The Plague

April 23, 2020 / admin / 0 Comments

When I first started my practice in Johannesburg, I used to make sure that I was always wearing a good pair of shoes. I was young and needed to be taken seriously. Clients spend an inordinate amount of time staring at your feet. Especially when you ask the more difficult questions. The other day I asked a client a difficult question, she simply turned the lid of her laptop up to the ceiling as she tried to answer it. There are some interesting advantages to online therapy.

Today I didn’t wear any shoes. I felt at first as I imagine a Muslim woman might feel without her hijab. But one or two sessions in and it felt comfortable: honest. There’s a book at my feet. I don’t get much chance to read it but I keep it close for a sense of security; that someone might just know a way forward for us. In 1941, the French Algerian, Albert Camus, started writing a book about a virus transmitted from animals to humans. He portrays how the society in the book doesn’t really question what it means to be alive until their lives come into a clear and present danger. For Camus, the real plague is not the virus but the fact that we are perpetually vulnerable to the absurdity of life. There is no hidden meaning or purpose to the plague, human suffering has no underlying “purpose” and death is a reminder of how our lives can be rendered suddenly meaningless. This is the human condition.

Camus’ real concern is for how humanity engages with this condition. For instance, our tendency to create an “us” and a “them” – to think of ourselves as uniquely immune to human struggles. Throughout History, pandemics, have proven that we are ultimately all vulnerable to the same fate. Camus, however, seems to find little value in panic. For him, panic is a response to a transient condition that we could potentially solve. Rather, if the condition we need to treat is the very circumstance of being human, then we need to find ways of “living”. Camus proposes that the only way to fight the plague would be through “decency” to one another. And the only way to deal with the human condition would be to live as fully and sensuously as possible. To live life to the fullest is to make life worth enduring.

And so, today, I enjoyed the feeling under my feet, the sun casting shadows on the wall, Josh laughing outside as he played with the dogs. I wondered what he meant by living with decency…Perhaps it’s simply to love?

“They knew now that if there is one thing one can always yearn for, and sometimes attain, it is human love.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

Jason Ross