Whether or not suffering may be redeemed largely depends on how you think it’s supposed to happen.
The traditional idea of a cure seems to have been bent out of shape. It carries connotations of illness and disease, plus the idea that it can be fixed, a notion only a step away from driving out demons. More liberal notions of healing still tend to conjure the idea that it is something that can be dispensed, the starched white coat or the ecclesiastical frock simply traded in for a mystical cape and just the right incantation.
I feel your pain…
All of which begs the question of how therapy might work and why it’s worth you spending a small fortune on someone you never met in lieu of bread and beer..
How would it be if we considered what ails you, not as sickness, or as a source of shame and failing, or the irredeemable horrors of the past, as a kind of cramp? The kind of cramp anyone is bound to get when you go adventuring. One that need not necessarily require either medication, holy cures or making better?
If we think of syndromes and disorders in terms of particular kinds of cramp then we might approach therapy with less toolkit and more wintergreen.
Physical cramp wants massage, time, hydration and electrolytic supplementation. Metaphorical cramps need the same, in a suitably symbolic way.
First your psychic cramp needs the massage of sympathetic warmth and genuine interest. The cramp wants being paid attention to and taken seriously. It hurts like hell. You have to give the cramp time and space whilst safely hydrating it with the waters of the Unconscious, dreams, fantasies, and imagination that seeks out the sacred in ordinary life.
‘The main problem with life’s conundrums is that we do not bring to them enough imagination.’ T. Moore.
Jung observes that when the cramp is particularly severe..
”often only the hands are capable of fantasy, they model or draw figures that are sometimes quite foreign to the conscious mind.”
The need for electrolytes is a delicious metaphor.
Electrolytes are chemicals that form electrically charged particles (ions) in body fluids. These ions carry the electrical energy necessary for many functions, including muscle contractions and transmission of nerve impulses.
So what they do is facilitate our capacity to respond. They allow information to flow. If information does not flow in the psyche it gets cramp. I wonder if paranoia, besides having historical roots in a childhood and something to be paranoid about, is not also exacerbated by a restricted flow of information, like an inner disjointed and stilted dinner conversation of folk who don’t get on and won’t share what they know.
If something unknown is doing I don’t know what, then you will have plenty to be paranoid about…
Electrolytes are like pathfinders, connecting up disparate parts of ourselves so they can begin to speak to each other, creating the kind of internal dialogue needed for reflection between I and me. I once asked a colleague who specialized in working with manic-depression how he went about it. He replied, ‘When they are depressed I remind them of their energy and enthusiasm. When they are delirious and excitable I remind them of how shitty life can be.’
In the Eleusinian mysteries of ancient Greece, as the initiates were reaching the ecstatic climax of their initiation, a dark cloaked figure would walk among the participants whispering quietly, ‘you’re going to die…’
Electrolytes prevent cramp by virtue of both positive and negative ions being present. There has to be a charge, some psychic tension, some sense of the interplay between different and even opposing forces in order for different parts of the whole to share their stories. Being ‘positive’ is a recipe for disaster. Half the soul gets cut away in the name of what’s best for you.
There’s no better recipe for depression than homogenization, presenting the same groundhog face to the world day after day where blended conformity becomes bland sustenance and finally, blunt instrument.
Thomas Szasz reminds us that the mind is not a noun but a verb, more of an activity than an actor. Without lubrication this activity cramps and has to resort to ‘proto-language’, ie symptoms, in order to catch our attention. Proto-language is cramped communication, having to rely on early modes of interaction that seem like madness but are actually de-contextualized pre-verbal gesture.
Szasz makes the further point that much of what we call madness is rooted in being deceived. When children are lied to the real self is cramped by the contrary injunctions to stand by one’s own experience vs the instinct to swallow parental directives as gospel..
In his ‘Etiology of Hysteria’, Freud the younger, yet to renounce his unpopular views of 1896 in favor of the later drive conflict theory in 1905, says that the damaging seal set on abuse, particularly sexual abuse, is by virtue of its subsequent denial and having to invalidate one’s own experience.
The child has to twist herself out of shape in order to amend her own reality. Restricted access to the truth means the pathways it follows become shut down and overgrown. Opening that traffic back up means truth telling and entertaining the dawning distress of trauma over the masking discomfiture of psychic cramp.
When external constraint has to be internalized as self-restriction, cramp ensues. Our movements are suddenly no longer our own. Borders have to be either narcissisticaly walled off or indiscriminately thrown open, leading to either blockage or invasive borderline chaos in the psyche’s body politic.
What this means for therapy is that specialized cleverness and mantles of office are really quite secondary to paying attention, creating space and being respectfully patient.
”If attention is directed to the unconscious, it will yield up its contents, and these in turn will fructify the conscious like a fountain of living water.” CG Jung
Cures are contingent on curiosity, healing upon the restoration of untended inner pathways and vocation upon the agonized calling out to the Other that draws attention to the fact you’re running on empty.
