The Gentle Healer – Part II

Eighteen months after the mandated but helpful therapy experience with Bill, my “demons” were still present.

I’d found a way to attend class, perform up to expectation, and enjoy the facilities at the YMCA, but my need to know myself better had evolved into something deeper and more compelling.

For too long, I’d nurtured a destructive rebellious streak, struggled in my marriage, and at times displayed a level of anger that was damaging to my relationships with loved ones, friends, and professors. In addition to this, if I was going to be a successful psychotherapist it made intellectual sense to know myself. However, that too wasn’t the main reason I’d decided to enter into another therapeutic relationship. No, my despair and brokenness, childhood wounds notwithstanding, had become unbearable.

As I progressed through the graduate program, the task of finding a clinical supervisor became necessary, and the person who was recommended to me, Jim, became the answer to my personal odyssey as well—a confluence that saved my life.

“I keep farmer’s hours,” he’d said over the phone after I’d explained my reasons for calling him, “and I’m also busy, but I’d like to work with you.” Our first appointment was at 5:30 a.m. on a Tuesday.

I walked into his waiting room, a sparsely furnished and dimly lit space that had the warmth and coziness I’d known in my grandparents’ Brooklyn home. I made a cup of instant coffee and waited.

He came to greet me a few minutes before our scheduled appointment, and once inside his office he suggested I lie on the couch. Following a brief exchange of pleasantries he explained that his orientation was psychoanalytic, and from that perspective he believed that the most beneficial form of supervision was one’s own analysis – if I wasn’t already in treatment with someone else.

I wasn’t seeing anyone, and I felt adrift.

He agreed to work with me, three mornings a week at 5:30.

I accepted his offer.

The walls of his office were lined with bookshelves containing row upon row of authors I recognized from the fields of theology and psychology, some of whose works I’d studied and knew well. The spines on most of the volumes were worn, and though this room was only dimly lit, the presence of Greek sculptures, bronze and ceramic busts, including prominent ones of Freud, and several etchings and brightly colored paintings made the room seem brighter than it was. The energy in the room, however, came from the man who would sit behind my head as I lay on the analytic couch.

I was home.

Jim opened doors to my inner world, patiently “walked” with me into dark recesses I’d avoided, and gently but firmly guided me as we disentangled threads of anger, hurt, and despair. Childhood struggles were explored, embraced, and understood as fears were allayed. Years of cultivating an image of rebelliousness that had created self-sabotaging experiences – flunking out of school and broken relationships – were revisited. Moments of painful sobbing intermingled with shouts of rage. The dreams that often caused me to awaken in a sweat were explored and interpreted in the context of my childhood and the present. Gradually, my defenses – a me-against-the-world rebelliousness – lessened, and my brokenness began to heal.

The journey presented me with numerous hurdles, including a session in which my overwhelming distress drove me to a picture window, in what was now his 8^th floor office, where I pounded on the glass threatening to jump. Without panic, judgment, or criticism Jim took in and “contained” the violence of the moment, then, without leaving his chair, coaxed me back to the couch.

The art and practice of psychotherapy is a gentle one, even when the journey is fraught with treacherous and unforeseen events from our past and present. Victor Frankl, the existential analyst, said, “What is to give light must endure burning.”

There is a continuous burning in my soul, one that I listen to and respect. When the embers become flames I embrace the years of Jim’s acceptance and wisdom. He taught me – “your reluctant disciple” – that to live fully I needed to be fearless, and to trust the strength that comes with insight. Though the journey has been bumpy at times, my spiritual underpinnings, however shaken, remain bent but not broken. And, the need to be psychologically tough has been replaced by an acceptance that I am a flawed but striving work-in-progress.

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