Psychotherapy to the Core

We dance around in a ring and suppose.
The secret sits in the middle and knows.
-Frost

We make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear. 
–Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well

Who shrinks from knowledge of his calamities aggravates his fear; troubles half seen do torture.
–Seneca

Forgiveness is when I take responsibility for the effects of others’ mistakes on my life. 
author unknown, cited by Jens Arleth

Softness triumphs over hardness, feebleness over strength. What is malleable is always superior to that which is immovable. This is the principle of controlling things by going along with them, of mastery through adaptation.
–Lao-Tzu

We dance around in a ring and suppose.
The secret sits in the middle and knows.
-Frost              

Frost’s couplet expresses the theme of body-centered therapies: that our heads get busy trying to figure things out, but we are often looking in the wrong place for the answer. It’s as if we don’t know how to communicate with the problem—don’t know how to listen properly. . . and we don’t know that we don’t know. There’s an old joke about this: A man walks up to the counter and says, “I’ll have a corned beef with mustard on rye.” The man at the counter says, “We don’t have corned beef.” The customer says, “Well then, I’ll have a roast beef, lettuce and tomato on wheat, with mayo.” The man at the counter says, “We don’t have roast beef either, sir.” The customer, growing irritated, says, “Well, how about turkey on a kaiser roll?” The man at the counter says, “Sorry, sir. We don’t have turkey either.” The customer shouts: “What kind of a deli is this?!” The man at the counter replies, “Sir, this is a hardware store.” 

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We make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear. 
Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well            

Shakespeare, the great psychologist, noted that intellectual understanding—and thought itself—is sometimes a defense against encountering the mystery and felt power of the unknown. Why should we “submit ourselves to an unknown fear”? See Frost’s couplet, above for an answer.

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Who shrinks from knowledge of his calamities aggravates his fear; troubles half seen do torture.
–Seneca

The down-side of playing ostrich: What we don’t know can really hurt us. This is the basis of depth psychotherapy: “knowing” our calamities, by connecting with how they’ve affected us, lessens our torture.

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Forgiveness is when I take responsibility for the effects of others’ mistakes on my life.
author unknown, cited by Jens Arleth

This pithy existential definition of forgiveness is very different than the usual idea of forgiveness: that we should somehow give up our resentments. This definition says that for me to forgive someone, I will not be responsible for their behavior, but for the effects of that behavior on my life. Why is this important? It shows that forgiveness requires a shift in focus from the perpetrator as the center of action to the victim as the center of action. Meaning: “I have been wounded, but I have to live with the outcome of all this; so what do I need to do, to regain my dignity or peace?” What does the word “mistakes” mean here? What if it wasn’t a mistake, but the act was done on purpose? My interpretation of the word “mistakes” is that it refers to a kind of “soul mistake”—that if the perpetrator were truly “awake” and aware of the effect of the behavior on their victim; if the perpetrator were “in touch,” conscious, and emotionally connected, then they would not have done the act. Through this definition of forgiveness, we can see that the giving up of our resentments comes later, and is the side-effect of re-taking our power in the aftermath of tragedy and letting go of our wish that the perpetrator should or will correct the problem, and realizing that the correction or healing must come from us.

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Softness triumphs over hardness, feebleness over strength. What is malleable is always superior to that which is immovable. This is the principle of controlling things by going along with them, of mastery through adaptation.
–Lao-Tzu

This is as true in relationships, psychology, and business, as it is in martial arts and nature: brittleness looks strong but is weak. Flexibility looks weak but is strong. In psychotherapy, one often fears acknowledging the ultimate feeling of weakness that comes from connecting with one’s suffering or inability to “master” their problems the way they had been taught to do. Paradoxically, from such weakness and “hitting rock bottom” comes a profound and very different feeling of strength, resilience, and even joy.

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