Should Therapy Be Forever Introspective?

                                                                                                                          And then the day came,
when the risk
to remain tight
in a bud
was more painful
than the risk
it took
to Blossom.

This poem, long attributed to Anaïs Nin, but more recently to Elizabeth Appell, unwittingly touches on a therapeutic problem:

What if the person “tight in a bud” is captured by the safety of a therapeutic process: too long within the bud, not beyond its green wrapper reaching toward the light?

Does therapy sometimes risk cocooning the patient too long, uncovering and uncovering and uncovering depths of feelings and insights at the expense of progress in the world outside of the therapist’s office? Put differently, if “the unexamined life is not worth living,” as Socrates tells us, is the overexamined life unlived?

I am accustomed to self-reflection both inside my head and in my practice, but I think we do have to acknowledge each side of the question. We need self-awareness, but the place where it resides is sticky, full of creatures who grab us and hold us fast. At least, they try to.

Life is something of a leap, a challenge: a reach for love, learning, helping others, and fulfilling the “becoming” still unrevealed in us. The world offers us differing models, from arrogant, thoughtless, unreflecting leaders who are, nonetheless, men of action; to those of us whose exploration is more inward, but may be confined by that inwardness.

We are offered fictional and mythological models, too. These are all people of action. When they go underground to visit dead souls, as they do in Dante’s Inferno and Homer’s The Odyssey, they are struck by how out-of-place they feel. They must, inevitably, return to the world of the living.

One version of hell on earth is an endless preoccupation with grave feelings and haunted days; consumed with envy of those who live with abandon. How ironic that some of the externally risk-averse accept a familiar hell in a box. As Nietzsche wrote in Also Sprach Zarathustra, “Verily I do not want to be like the ropemakers: they drag out their threads and always walk backwards.”

I helped many untangle themselves from the grip of dead or distant childhood abusers. I learned, too, by examining my own history from an over-the-shoulder perspective. We must be careful, however, to avoid an endless backward look; especially if one already has an inward bent. Walking backwards will then be the only direction available.

Action, usually taking the form of work, is an antidote for brooding. Passive distraction such as video watching is not the answer. The mind is like a device attached to rubber band: unless engaged (or retrained by a serious meditation practice) we are subject to the pull of the elastic, snapping back to troublesome preoccupations and general discontent.

Insight comes not only from focusing on the past, but experience in the present. You will never resolve everything in your history. You can resolve enough to free yourself – enough to act. Sometimes therapy does require years. Know, however, what your goal is. Consider a move toward it at the earliest appropriate time even if the bulk of your therapeutic process is still dealing with yesterday’s wounds. Work with your therapist to fashion a path down and in as needed – yes – but also identify and step into the road up and out.

A good therapist can be your guide in both places. A more limited one may lead a fine tour of Rembrandt, the seventeenth-century Dutch painter, but ignore the glories of contemporary art.

Each one is a worthy escort, properly placed and timed.

Don’t stay in either gallery longer than you have to.

—

The top photo is Grand Central Station – (1957) by Brassai. Next comes Alberto Baumann’s Introspection (2003) and then Rembrandt’s Man in a Golden Helmet (1669). All are sourced from Wikiarts.org.