Good Therapy

About a month or so ago I went to try therapy.

“Let’s see,” she said. “So you started using drugs regularly at 15. I am sure you have heard that whatever age you start using is the age that you basically stop growing. So we’ve got a lot of work to do. It’s time to grow up. You are still, essentially, 15.”

Hmm. Maybe it’s possible that this woman, who for the first 45 minutes of our meeting did not allow me to talk except to answer her pointed questions, somehow missed the part where I mentioned that for over eight years I’ve been on a committed path of recovery and self-help, learning to take responsibility for me and aiming for emotional maturity.

Of the “adult” skills I’ve actually focused on, one has been the willingness to allow others room to be heard; so normally this helps to curb any immediate reactiveness to asinine fucking comments like the one above. But that day on the therapist couch the blood curled around my neck even as I smiled graciously at her opinion, oh, uh-huh, mmm-hmmm. It was later in the session when the radical, albeit kind, honesty kicked in. When she tried to tell me that my wanderlust and great passion for traveling too were indicators that I needed “to grow up.”

One of the other adult skills I’m really working on is learning to integrate information from various different sources and in the end use them to supplement my own views with all the regularly outputting stimulus of the world. I am learning, in other words, how to trust myself.

Needless to say, therapy, this time, didn’t quite work out.

I was 15 when I first found myself saddled up with my bags and my trinkets, my combat boots and cigarettes, scowling from low down in the passenger’s seat of the blue hatchback my mom behind the wheel, my brother’s perpetual chirpiness behind us his head in the middle between the seats. Up the Baltimore beltway then down 295, on our way to Dr. Lessey in the city. He had an office on Park Ave. On the corner was a soul food joint with bars on the window and a yellow sign for Lake Trout. Across the street and to the left was a store called The Leather Underground.

I had my learner’s permit, I was almost 16, it would soon be my regular, weekly route. Soon enough it was just me in the car. I was never brave enough to try the soul food. The bemused gay men in the bondage store, however, eventually knew this pink-headed purple-booted riot grrl by name. It was the early 90’s and hard to find places like that were ahead of the soon to come piercing trend. Leather Underground was the only place that I knew of that you could go for a belly button ring, and they used a 10 gauge cow-ring, not a bar, and there was nothing girly or petite about it.

Dr. Lessey was soft and gentle with gold spectacles and a sandman peace about him. I always pictured him with a nightcap on, the kind that triangles down one side of the head with a little cotton ball on the end, you know faded cotton-white with light blue stripes. And a candle in his hands.

It was six or eight months that I went to the city to see him. I was touched in a way that I couldn’t get my words to say, I was touched by the kindness of this sweet, quiet little man. I never told him about the pot I was smoking or the drinking that was edging beyond exploratory. I kept us occupied by tales of the girls I hated at school and this new, daring guy who showed up one day by my side, grinning down at me delicious in his eyes, walking me up the stairs to my homeroom. He had just gotten kicked out of public school. I was entranced and a month or so later when the same guy got locked up at Harbour Hospital in South Baltimore, Dr. Lessey encouraged me to go see him. I trusted the good Doctor. I used to bring my friends there to meet him, my brother, my boyfriend even (the boyfriend that I had secured as result of a visit paid to him at South Baltimore’s Harbour Hospital mental ward.) Dr. Lessey looked on in amazement, the only adult who didn’t judge and seemed uniquely interested, when my friend Briana showed up with me in his office sporting her knew Leather Underground navel loop. I loved how much he seemed, simply, to care.

Around the time that I really did start to make changes and work to get my life cleaned up, this would be roughly the spring of 2001, I entered in to another therapist relationship, this time with Father Ed. His was, I think, the fourth “couch” I’d been on by then. He was supplied to me for free by the uber-conservative liberal arts college that I’d already by then dropped out twice from, both times as result of drinking and drugs. Father Ed had me do things like hold fake conversations with the air; the air of course was always a character and usually someone close to me in life. I had to hold pillows tight and close and pretend that they were me. He was the first therapist I ever cried in front of and lord did it make me feel so, so clean. I loved him, Father Ed, for the same reason as Dr. Lessey, he truly seemed to care. That, and one clear, new thing: I was capable, or at least so beginning, of being honest. Truly honest about me. No more hiding the extracurricular’s that were so much a part of my life it wasn’t that I was even purposefully hiding them before, just that I took them so much for granted as a part of how I lived my life. The drugs and the alcohol were, plainly, part of me, of who I was, as natural as air or water or food when it came to the things I did each day. I just never questioned any of it, no matter the consequences or miserable thin vein of fear that seemed to increase with each passing year, feeling like ice in my blood and a cold wall at the base of my heart, steadily growing.

The honesty made all the difference. Clarity is a mixture of willingness, or at least a capacity, to be honest with myself and then trusting me enough to know that my own truth is the one that counts. The therapists that I’ve gained the most from over the years, as I’ve sorted through and grieved out my humanness and wounds, are the ones who’ve made it clear that they care and you can’t fake that, caring is a quality that is or isn’t. I know when it’s true, and more, affront when it is false or faked. In an atmosphere of care one feels safe, and safety is what is required, at least for me, to get to a place where I am willing to get honest with myself—on whatever level, at whatever risk of responsibility it means that I am going to have to take. And good therapy, for me at least, has been no more than the process of showing up to witness that allowing. Good therapists ask the right questions and then let the process of discovery guide its self. I always end up being the one who sees what I need to see just by having a safe place to say it out loud.

So if I’ve learned anything at all over the years, it’s that the answers are indeed within; and that especially it’s not a sign of weakness to sometimes need another’s help in order to get them out. In fact I’d say that empowering oneself like that is all about being Brave. But that other person doesn’t get to tell you what to do. They definitely don’t get to yield control over your ideas. Self-trust is the goal to me, and so it was that over a month ago my life started to turn around at its darkest point: what I thought would be the beginning step in self-discovery when I took the plunge on to a new couch turned out actually to be the exercise I needed to affirm the ending of self-doubt. And now that I am here, doing the Real Work with a book and some close friends as my guides, I am realizing that the two concepts are actually one and the same.

Feminist Spiel: because duality is part of My Own Perfect Symmetry

So I'm getting a kick out of the feminist blog-rave and sensationalism going on last weekend over the cover of Mybama on Ms. Mag.

(click on image to visit the Ms. homepage)

Evidently some "feminists" were up in arms about the supposed symbolism of a male trumping the inherant female gender issues that make up feminist claim. Well. Let's take a closer look:

(from dictionary.com)
fem⋅i⋅nism 
/ˈfɛməˌnɪzəm/ –noun
1.
the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men.
2.
(sometimes initial capital letter) an organized movement for the attainment of such rights for women.
3.
feminine character.

All right gang, first of all. I don't know about your own understanding but to me common sense dictates a rather empirical base application of equality: it requires differences. Thus equality extolls the value of venerating the differences between varying ideals, genders, races etc. Making room for each of those differences, of there own right, to be accepted as equally important. I mean, right? Obviously this is where the lines blur and the principal of ethics is called in to question. But to me, the above premise of beginning with differences is the first and most clear place to start.

So now let's apply the definition of feminism. Not as a movement, but as a word usage minus the loaded contextualism that's granted its connotativeness, as happens to most words or ideas, absloute bastardization--so much so to be a feminist is practically taboo ever since we got out of the 90's and the "Decade of the Woman". (here's where I, if i dont hop off the box, launch in to an all out bitch session bemoaning media irresponsiblity and the absolute rampant yellow journalism that i claim to take such staunch dispute over though aint that blogging? here an opinion there an opinion everywhere opinion-pinion...)

Again, feminism: 1.the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men. Nothing more, nothing less. A simple call for recognition of women's, who are inherantly different from men, yes! equal social and political rights. If you believe in that--guess what. A feminist are you...

If I claim myself to be a feminist under these standards, then there is not a damn thing that is male-hating or bashing about me. No! (and truly, that is the case....i loooove me some men) In fact, to me, what it indeed claims is that I venerate the differences....

To me, my modern feminism is about humanitariasm. That despite our differences we all are equal, and that indeed within our differences lie our strengths. Thus the ethics of equality is room for understanding. A model of this, one in which I personally find all sorts of guideposts, symbology and messagry to inform my own journey of being human, is absoloutely found through inspection of the values historically held as, and yes, in my opinion at times underminded, female. That does not complete the neccecary view of what it is to be human, no! But personally for me messagry, story, psychology and spirituality that empowers the deep
feminine helps me find balance and power inside of me.

This quote by Virginia Wolff, and the art of Kjersten Hallin deGaia (available here ) is a fine example: "As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the world." I find personal, not female, power in this because the deep values in me (that some modern "feminism" deactivates!) of Caregiver and Mother see value in all life, regardless of division of country, class, race, gender or state. This is messagry existent in my own cosmology that I have sought to claim and empower. Likewise, however; are the ambitious fighter energies in me, that Underdog Avenger superman thing--that deeply symbolic decidedly male quality that my father his self embodies and that exists in equal part in me.

What I mean—to me, as a modern feminist, I advocate seeking balance of the counter powers that exist in every one of us—the intuitive, the emotional, the creative—hence the supposed "feminine"; as well as the ambitious, the logical, the physical strength of what is associated with the "masculine". Mind you these are connotative applications of ideas, but born of the system of duality pre-existent in the natural world and meant, I believe, to foster through the pressure of opposing forces better self-understanding. Sure as you or I are living we have strong tendencies towards certain traits—male/female, left/right brain, call them what you will. Seeking awareness and balance on a self-development level is the purpose of informing ourselves of our own set of skills. Change literally begins within, the human heart is literally the force that grounds the human feet in the physical community s/he then calls home—the communities where we make our stand. Walking, being the change amid the flux of such opposing energies as conflicting as they are out in our world is just what this grand tapestry is ultimately all about....

So go on Obama! I'm proud to call you a feminist, too, and to count you among the many responsible peoples trying to take a stand.