The Therapeutic Journey and Our Problematic Concern with Destinations

We are an impatient race. Tasks don’t get done fast enough, the wait in line is too long, the computer too slow. Our destination looms like a slave-driver of our own creation, craving full speed to the end of our journey and the imagined prize awaiting us there.

What are we missing?

Many of those in long-term therapy are ambivalent about the inevitable end of the journey. They correctly recognize that accomplishment of one’s therapeutic goals means the terminus of the walk through the mine field of the psyche, the regular sessions, and the severing of the therapeutic relationship.

The mine field traipse is the only one they hope to dispense with. Indeed, most would say removal of unexploded emotional bombs caused their enlistment in treatment in the first place. By contrast, the absence of session-bound, intimate time with the therapist is dreaded, like ejection from a cocoon.

The story is even more complex, however; both for those who fear the loss of their road-trip, therapist-guide/companion and those who believe the journey’s end will bring nirvana, the permanent release from all suffering.

Consider: more than a relationship is forged in treatment. There is a process of struggle, self-reflection, honesty, learning. Perhaps nothing before — nothing the patient has tried or accomplished — has been so hard, but so rewarding. Each step in each session is enriching or intense — alive — even if fraught with portent and overlaid with tears. The furniture in the office stays the same, but the mental furniture gets rearranged, replaced, knocked-over, tested, taken apart, and put together. All this is “process,” not product. All this is overlooked when clients reflect on their ambivalence about the end of counseling and loss of the therapist.

In part, the problem is our instinctive goal-directedness. Often, however, the target — whatever it might be — is not as special as anticipated. Heaven does not exist on earth. We get used to even a transformed life, no matter how worthy. We become accustomed to our new, higher cruising altitude of emotional stability. The background activities — the daily maintenance of clothes, body, and living surroundings — still must be done. As the Zen proverb goes, “After enlightenment, the laundry.”

Therapy becomes a road traveled-well only if we try to notice everything, absorb everything along the way. It is not like pursuing a diploma: trudging through courses in philosophy or calculus that are endured, not enjoyed. The treatment isn’t like having an ice cream cone in its pleasure, but absorbs our entire being as a fount of learning. The engagement is total, the preoccupation remains in mind even after the session ends, the effort is important, the risks great. You are reaching for the next handhold on the mountain. Yes, you are doing so to reach the top, but you will be on summit for just a few minutes, a static place no one can live. You soon must move below. Life is in the movement. What you took away was the experience, the incremental achievement of all the concentration and self-surpassing courage you could muster.

Cervantes’s Don Quixote reminds us, “The road is always better than the inn.”

The post-war circumstances of military veterans add to the discussion. None of them want to relive the horror. Yet, some will say it was the most intense experience of their lives. Moreover, the intensity is missed, if not what created it. Thus, the therapy journey brings not only pain, but something of value in its dedicated, focused, life-on-the-line process. Not a deadened, dull, inert state of being.

Elite athletes, similarly, don’t enjoy every moment of their competition. The combination of actions and emotions includes strain, focus, effort, and fear of failure, as well as elation. We tend to think of goals and the pleasure associated with their achievement without full recognition of the other experiences they live while in motion, in process, and in the moment. Yet this is what any journey worth taking entails.

If you are currently in long-term treatment and agree with my description of the journey’s value, you might say: “Well, then. Now I’m not just fearful of losing my therapist, but the journey, too!”

Fear not.

If the treatment has been successful, a wider world has gradually opened to you outside the counselor’s consulting room. Many journeys beckon, inward and outward, outside your comfort zone, where all journeys live: more and different friendships, travel, new vocations and hobbies, increased openness to art or music, spiritual awakenings, returning to school; and, too, “thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”*

You will embrace some of what once frightened you or found you closed off. Not all things, but some things. Even from the defacing hand of age, a man of thieving heart, will you wrest unexpected gifts.

You never become indestructible, but you can move along in life more confident in the ability to manage most of the hurts; accepting that, they too are a part of the human experience, the beautiful/terrible richness of life.

You will not become everything you could be. No one does. But you will be alive to the world.

You cannot ask for more.

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* The last words of Wordsworth’s poem, Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.

The top photo includes Remains of the Via Appia in Rome, ner Quarto Miglio, by Kleuske. The second image is called Roma, via Appia Antica: Arco di Druso e Porta San Sebastian by Lalupa. Both are sourced from Wikimedia Commons.