{"id":23,"date":"2012-08-25T15:37:40","date_gmt":"2012-08-25T15:37:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/?p=23"},"modified":"2012-12-29T01:38:12","modified_gmt":"2012-12-29T01:38:12","slug":"why-all-this-get-in-touch-stuff-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/why-all-this-get-in-touch-stuff-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Why “get in touch” – 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week I wrote an entry entitled “Why All This ‘Get in Touch’ Stuff?\u201d<\/a>.\u00a0 This past week I had a session with different patient which again illustrates the benefits of finding out what\u2019s really going on inside you, but also shows the pain involved and therefore why we tend so much to resist it.\u00a0 And as I described in the main website,\u00a0resistance<\/a> is central to psychotherapy and to life.<\/p>\n

When Jack started with me, he was an extremely successful businessman, not yet 30, utterly unable to enjoy his many successes, on the verge of ruining his marriage.\u00a0 He could participate in a party or dinner with his wife for perhaps 10 minutes before feeling deeply, intensely compelled either to rush off to another social event or to jump up and check e-mails he\u2019d checked scarcely an hour earlier.\u00a0 During our sessions it was difficult for me to get a word in.\u00a0 He spoke rapidly, with a pleading quality, and almost nonstop.\u00a0 He had a beautiful, bright, sensitive, and aware wife \u2013 I met her for several sessions as well \u2013 on whom he often depended to prevent his anxieties from escalating into panic; she was very helpful to him, for example, as he agonized over how best to cope with a client, colleague, or employee.\u00a0 And yes, their sex life was great.\u00a0 Still, he obsessively thought about other women.<\/p>\n

Things are much better now.\u00a0 He no longer works 25 hours a day, he enjoys his wife and friends, his marriage is better, he is an attentive father, and when facing or finishing a task or decision he no longer agonizes as he used to do.\u00a0 His business continues to thrive and grow, despite his somewhat more relaxed approach to everything.<\/p>\n

But dealing with people still triggers his old problems and sometimes he astounds both of us with the degree to which he distorts things.\u00a0 For example, an important CEO client \u00a0forwarded a copy to Jack of an e-mail this CEO had sent to colleagues praising Jack and encouraging other large companies to use his services; in response, Jack felt only intense anxiety that he was about to be exposed as a worthless fraud.\u00a0 Similarly, Jack describes himself almost drowning in uncertainty and rage when one of his employees spoke to him with a rather sarcastic and an entirely inappropriate tone.\u00a0 Despite Jack’s position as the owner\/manager of his own company, his years of experience compared with this underling, and the feedback from me and his wife that indeed the employee was quite out of line, Jack worries that he has no right to object or that he will overreact; he finds himself raging, “burning” with frustration that he realizes is far beyond a reasonable response to such a minor slight. \u00a0 (When Jack eventually confronted this employee, the latter apologized profusely and has since gone out of his way to be more respectful and cooperative.)<\/p>\n

What is going on with Jack?\u00a0 As with all of us, when the current situation cannot account for his reactions we can be sure he is enacting forgotten or barely remembered scenarios from his past.\u00a0 This is where \u201cgetting in touch\u201d comes in.\u00a0 First, he has to articulate just what he is feeling, not rehash the particulars of the employee\u2019s behavior, his own options for responding, or the surface reactions such as \u201cI was pissed\u201d.\u00a0 Jack described “burning fear, terrified someone’s got a gun in my face, like I have to run for my life” all triggered by this awkward moment with his underling.\u00a0 Then \u2013 and with most patients this seems to happen almost automatically, without much guidance from me \u2013 Jack must begin to notice from where else he knows such intense feelings.<\/p>\n

Jack has become adept at this.\u00a0 Over the years we have worked together, he has vividly described earlier experiences in his life which\u00a0– unlike the episode with his employee – account entirely for his bouts of intense indecision, anxiety, and rage.\u00a0 The rejection, humiliation, and baffling inconsistency to which he was subjected as a child and young man are beyond what I can describe in this blog entry; the case examples in the main website<\/a> go into such histories in more detail.\u00a0 The important point here is that when Jack is able to focus on and articulate the feelings aroused by whatever triggering event started things, e.g. his employee\u2019s sarcasm, he suddenly remembers and recounts to me something from his childhood or from more recent experience with his family \u2013 and in those stories, the intensity of his feelings always seems entirely justified!\u00a0 \u00a0By contrast, such strong reactions to the minor triggering events he describes (such as the snide employee) do not match up and thus we label them \u201csymptoms\u201d of deeper problems.\u00a0 In his conscious daily life, then, Jack was reenacting those intense experiences in more current and trivial situations.\u00a0 If all this sounds a bit theoretic or speculative, hang on for a few paragraphs!<\/p>\n

People do this \u2013 displace painful experiences onto trivial events \u2013 because it is safer and easier.\u00a0 It is easier to obsess about handwashing, a door lock, an insult from a friend or lover, or some minor decision, than it is to face the more frightening and unwieldy causes of one\u2019s unhappiness such as having perhaps married the wrong person, chosen the wrong career, or grown up feeling unwanted or worse.\u00a0 When people begin to face those issues, they do feel better and they function better \u2013 see next paragraph \u2013 but it hurts.\u00a0 Remember, Jack felt not just \u201cpissed\u201d but “burning fear\u201d, terror for his life, panic, all triggered by this awkward moment with his underling.\u00a0 Then once he articulated those feelings, he immediately remembered other times he felt that way \u2013 times when such feelings were justified by the circumstances and scary people involved.\u00a0 Those are the half buried experiences that people resist “getting in touch” with, events they’ve completely forgotten or which they may remember but claim to have no feeling about.\u00a0 But those memories hurt.<\/p>\n

A quick digression to provide an example of this kind of resistance:\u00a0 Fred is a lawyer who saw me for about three years.\u00a0 One day he began telling me a story from when he was seven years old in which he was publicly humiliated and punished by his father for misbehaving at a large family gathering.\u00a0 Halfway through the telling, to his considerable surprise, Fred became tearful; he described how painful, humiliating, frightening the experience was. \u00a0He’d told this story many times to friends and dates, but it always felt like an entertaining and mildly amusing anecdote.\u00a0 It was only in the context of our session that the buried part of the story emerged \u2013 the pain of it.\u00a0 And again why is this pain important?\u00a0 Why \u201cget in touch\u201d?\u00a0 Because that buried pain was never really gone.\u00a0 It was something that I and others who know Fred could always see in his tense, overly apologetic, even tortured speech, and in his social demeanor in general; and although he did not know why, Fred did indeed know that he was an unhappy, tense guy.<\/p>\n

Now to return to Jack, how do we know anything I said about him is true?\u00a0 Because \u2013 and again this point is made more explicitly and with more illustrations in the main website \u2013 when he would remember, discuss, and feel the pain of the memories that arose as we spoke, he would afterwards feel “calmer, lighter\u201d, sadder \u201cbut saner\u201d; this is now the pattern in many of our sessions.\u00a0 And most importantly outside of our sessions, as described above, facing those experiences has already resulted in a marked decrease in the many symptoms that originally drove him to seek treatment with me (as we saw with Fred, too.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week I wrote an entry entitled “Why All This ‘Get in Touch’ Stuff?\u201d.\u00a0 This past week I had a session with different patient which again illustrates the benefits of finding out what\u2019s really going on inside you, but also … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25,"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions\/25"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aboutpsychotherapy.com\/aboutpsych-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}