Where a Strange Otherness Belongs.
At a gathering last month, a friend asked, “Does therapy contribute to more navel-gazing and self-absorbed narcissism?” What an insightful question, honest and open, yet revealing an underlying fear that seems to pervade our cultural psyche. Have we become so disconnected from one another that we now need to seek out and pay someone just to listen to us, or so the question implies. For me, the inquiry was a beautiful reminder of the mystery inherent in psychotherapy and the vestiges of a lingering societal stigma. So, what actually happens in therapy?
I hold this question metaphorically, as everyone enters the room through a different doorway, be it anxiety, a desire to communicate more effectively, or an unshakeable existential malaise. How they enter the stream of consciousness matters not; what is important is that they enter. “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” This familiar quote by C.G. Jung speaks directly to the unconscious stirrings within our being that yearn for agency. For many of us, there is a sense that we are the ‘something lacking.’ We internalize that lack, and double down on what society rewards, all the while feeling further estranged from ourselves and still unable to connect meaningfully with others. For some, this inner tension emerges years into therapy; for others, it is what brings them into a psychotherapist’s office in the first place.
“Our personality is the museum of our scars” is John O’Donohue’s mellifluous description of the unease we experience when we over-index on personality at the expense of true self-knowledge. Personality can be tested, projected into the world, and assessed. Feedback comes in real-time and we adjust, making tweaks and doubling down on what hints at attaining a level of belonging. Personality provides feedback, and feedback feels certain, solid. It becomes an identity. Like a hard shell that protects, it also keeps us small—unable to grow.
Humility, on the other hand, is a willingness to not know. It is paradoxical to certainty. Humility asks and listens. Like a good therapist, it senses exactly which question might unlock the key to what lies protected in the psyche. In psychotherapy-speak: what vulnerability has retreated because it was not witnessed and empowered?
There is a beautiful quote from the biologist and ecophilosopher Paul Shepard, featured in Francis Weller’s The Four Gates of Grief, that speaks to this internalized fear. He writes, “The grief and sense of loss we attribute to a failure in our personality is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered.” That sense of emptiness at our core is a longing to belong, to be witnessed and reflected back so we can clearly see our own divine mystery reflected through the loving eyes of another. It is in relationship with others that we become. Inside the therapist’s office, something alchemical happens; we begin to shed the too-small guise of personality and become something bigger—something that has already always belonged.
