A good day

“Run your fingers through my soul. For once, just once, feel exactly what I feel, believe what I believe, perceive as I perceive, look, experience, examine, and for once; just once, understand.”

Sara Ohotto

One of my favorite patients came to see me today. He is a 25- year old musician who is struggling with pursuing a career in music and taking a job that would be more fitting with his parent’s expectations.

I have seen him play. He is extremely talented and likely has a bright future as a musician if he can make the transition from playing covers songs (which he does wonderfully) to making a connection with his audience through the passion and creative power of the music he has written himself.

So he came to me. Working with him reminds me of how much fun it can be to help put someone in touch with the creative life force we all have inside of us. This young man has a tremendous amount of this life force, but, like all of us vacillates between periods of confidence in himself and intense feelings of self-doubt.

Today we had a wonderful conversation about how one of the most powerful forces inside of people is the desire to be truly known by someone else. For creative people this is not always done verbally, but often through paining, dancing, and in my client’s case writing and performing music. I encouraged him to, with all of this passion inside of him, perform with this idea in mind. To really let his audience feel what it is he feels, and to channel all of the power and energy he has to truly connect with the people who have come to see him. This really seemed to resonate with him.

So today reminded me that sometimes, beyond the tears, the anguish, and the hopelessness that are the meat and potatoes of a psychologist’s daily routine, sometimes someone comes to us ready to truly seize the magical and mysterious assistance the universe has to offer us.

Again today I feel good. Truly rooting for someone else has made me feel better about the world. This is how it is supposed to work. Again today the universe had something powerful to remind me. Helping others is not an answer to life’s puzzles, but is in fact, for me, the only answer that has ever brought my life into balance.

And yet……There must be a way to do this without it ripping pieces of you away. I have not yet found out how. I truly experience a thrill from helping others. But change is insidious, and the slow crawl through people’s private infernos of the mind is horrifically draining, for them and for me. Undoubtedly it has a purpose, and human change is often very slow and requires mining through various levels and stages of human suffering. Along the way the therapist often gives away his emotional well-being at the expense of helping those in pain navigate their way back to their own emotional freedom.

And when we’ve given it all away, we return to our lives still holding the baggage of the horrors of what is we’ve heard. A responsible therapist will recognize this and seek therapy of his own, but even this has its limitations. Therapy with another therapist can be like two magicians doing tricks for each other. We know how our own minds can go on autopilot during therapy, and therapy in these circumstances can therefore become nothing more than an expensive poker game.

So what do we do? We drink. Many of us drink. I drink. This is a break from our thoughts, a short cessation of active consciousness. A freedom from other people’s ghosts which have now become our ghosts.

So here I am, a guy with all kinds of answers for others and a guy with no real answers for himself. But today was good, and despite my aversion to A.A, getting through each day intact is a pleasure. Today I will sleep peacefully, reminded by an aspiring musician, that, despite all of our endless stumbling, sometimes life can go the other way to.