I remember when I began my sessions in psychotherapy nearly 30 years ago. Aside from feeling lost in my life, depressed, anxious, and angry – I was under the distinct impression at times that therapy wasn’t doing anything for me. Therapy felt like a slow glacier moving down a mountain. It was a grueling process of showing up and experiencing change in slow motion.
Over time I slowly shifted away from feeling like it was doing nothing to help my mood. Encouraged, I began to read books about psychology in my spare time. At another point, there was an internal shift, and curiosity and the need to heal became something that I owned more. I felt the need to gain insight into my life and my journey and I returned to grad school to study psychology.
At other times I felt like Sisyphus pushing my boulder uphill, only to see it roll back down the mountain.
Part of what needed to happen for me was to understand that some of my orientation toward my job as a visual effects artist, was the pressure to stay ahead. I interpreted this mission to mean dedicating my life to my work, clocking out late, and writing programs to help streamline my work. In other words, I identified as my job in an unhealthy way.
It was impossible to stay ahead at work though, not in the way I wished to anyway. New techniques and software would render my work obsolete or incompatible quickly. I would eventually come to understand my need to control chaos at work, was tied to the chaos of my childhood.
If I had to pinpoint when therapy shifted from being a vague showing up and talking about my life to feeling like I was gaining insight – it would be hard to pin down. It was happening in slow steps over time and would need to be captured in snapshots to really see the changes, like watching a timelapse.
TIMELAPSE OF NATURE
This brings to mind timelapse imagery. Imagine imagery of a flower blooming from a bud in the spring. Imagine a timelapse of mushrooms growing from a log and turning upward before releasing their spores. What we miss before us in nature can happen much more slowly in our own experience in life, and in this case in therapy.
Louie Schwartzberg is a filmmaker who uses timelapse imagery that is remarkably crafted. Here we can see some of his amazing work in this clip that features mycologist Paul Stamets.
In the below Ted Talk, Schwartzberg talks about the hidden things in nature in his film, Mysteries of the Unseen World. Scwartzberg says;
“There is movement which is too slow for our eyes to detect, and timelapse makes us discover and broaden our perspective of life. We can see how organisms emerge and grow, how a vine survives by creeping from the forest floor to look at the sunlight. And at the grand scale, timelapse allows us to see our planet in motion…”
TIMELAPSE OF OUR LIVES
In our lives though we could say much of the same thing. There is a timelapse here unfolding, and it is difficult to track. It requires some effort. There has been a trend in recent decades to take a self-portrait photograph every day for years – and this is one form of a timelapse of our lives. It however does not capture what I am talking about, which is capturing the inner state of our lives.
So how and why should we capture that inner state of our lives?
The how in this case – is to show up for our lives and to write about it. I’m not talking about sharing excessively on the interwebs or going to Reddit forums to talk about something personal in your life.
I’m talking about personal writing. There are different ways to write, some people channel their writing into memoirs, fiction, poetry, or articles. I’m talking more specifically about journaling. It doesn’t have to be clean, it can be ugly. It can be repetitive, it can be confessional, and it can involve writing about the past, and where the ghosts and demons from our past, rear their heads in our present.
I’m talking about that practice that intertwines with talk therapy, and the meditation or the yoga one may do in their lives. In this case, writing in a journal is about gaining insight, and doing some of the work that we are trying to gain momentum on in our personal lives, or in our private therapy.
How should this happen?
We can write after having a session. We can write after feeling like we are triggered by something, or if we simply meditate and feel something that comes up that we want to acknowledge.
We can write about something that happens in our lives, and also how that thing is intertwined with an emotional state. We can put words to our experience and work towards finding an insight, the self-reflection that may also come from psychotherapy.
In previous articles like, The Dance of Shiva Nataraja which I will link to here, I have talked about a specific type of meditation I do that I call a “folding meditation.”
I have talked about this “folding of the mind” that happens at different levels of meditation. This specific type of meditation means staying with something that comes up during this active type of meditation that I propose. Instead of banishing the thought, we accept that our unconscious is offering us something from our depths and we stay with it.
Whether we are writing, talking in therapy, meditating or contemplating, this is about self-reflection, which may require working past defenses, pain, or anger for instance.
WRITING AS A WAY OF HEALING
Louise DeSalvo in the book, Writing As a Way of Healing writes on this subject saying,
“Healing flashes of insight often came, too, when, during a day’s writing, trying to link current feeling with past event, I stumbled into a “moment of being” that I had forgotten. Often it was one that signified much. One—the comfort and joy of my mother reading to me in her rocking chair at the end of the day during the war, when she would take my index finger and guide it under the words she read. This was the source, I’m certain, of my deep and abiding love of reading, of why, to me, it’s as essential to my well-being as food and water.
This linking of a current feeling with a past event is part of the journey. It requires self-reflection and observation of the self though, and it may not always be nourishing like the paragraph above, instead, it may be a painful memory or observation.
DeSalvo continues;
I’d examined my feelings, linked them to something that had happened, and to my past. My feelings of loss for my mother, though I still had them, no longer overwhelmed me. Now, I felt connected to my feelings and to my life story. I was aware that I had honored my feelings of loss, but that I had transformed them into language so that I held these feelings differently. I realized, too, that I am committed to writing and the nourishment it provides me.
A key important word that DeSalvo writes here is “transformed” when she says “I had transformed them into language.” This is what we are tracking as we write, that transformation that happens over time. The timelapse of our lives that isn’t necessarily meant for anyone in the future, but is perhaps more to unburden at the very least, ourselves from our pain and the ghosts from the past.
It may be a timelapse that only we get to observe, but it is one that we can choose to observe – or leave unobserved as we wrestle with our ghosts and demons, caught between the act of creation and annihilation that is the unfolding image of our lives.
Follow Your Myth 