On Being With

Aliveness, deadness, and tolerating the intolerable

“Can we take a little more, let a little more intensity build and work its way through affective expressions, so that we begin to notice what calls us into life or prevents us from living?”¹

I’m reading Michael Eigen (still). It’s been a year in a half since I first picked up The Psychoanalytic Mystic on vacation in Hawaii, and it’s so dense that I’ve finally realized in order to make sense of this I’m going to have to start forming my own words for it.

To be with physical or psychical subjectivity of self or of other is a curious experience. Our world is obsessed with certainty, with answers. So often we rush to explain, to justify or rationalize. In our desire to understand, we can cut off, murder, what is actually present. To feel what needs to be felt opens possibility- but is there a freedom on the other side of this suffering, or will we get stuck? Is the abyss endless? Will I die in here?

Across the past year, I’ve found if being with whatever affective expression happening is a challenge, to be with what is not happening is even more challenging. Sometimes to acknowledge the lack of aliveness, or of expression, or of desire, is the hardest work of all. Many therapies expend so much wasted energy trying to enervate what has died off, when really what is needed is to exist a while inside of the deadness.

It’s an unfathomable ask for most people- to live in the lethargy and apathy and stuckness and suffering and grief and pain and horror of the deadness of self or other. Not many are up for it, and even fewer are good (enough)² at it. In my field, patients tell me stories of their previous therapists’ attempts to force aliveness through the mechanical application of skills training, gratitude lists, falsified cheerfulness. Stories of being absolutely missed in their pain, until they decided therapy just wasn’t for them. If we aren’t careful with our patients’ suffering, what begins as an honest attempt to resuscitate a suffocated soul can ultimately lead to the death of the therapy.

This is true in therapy as in life- we’ve all been the recipient of someone’s well-intentioned (or ill-intentioned) advice. Their communication that something about our suffering is too much for their own well-being, and it would be better (for them) if we could put it away and return to life as other normal humans do. They fear contamination, that our deadness may become their deadness, that they may be destroyed by it. And it becomes easy for us to identify with their projections- we ought not to be so poisonous, so virulent, so ruinous. Perhaps shame is the most deadening experience of all.

I’m learning, both clinically and personally, when we can find a way to survive in the midst of deadness, to allow it, even deadness can be a very enlivening experience. Alongside deadness, if we look carefully, a multitude of other emotions emerges. There is terror, there is rage, disgust, shock, perhaps intermingled with bits of hope, but the hope is quickly scorned and cut off, and ashamed, we return to deadness again. This cycle can go on indefinitely when we try to cut off the experience of deadness too quickly.

I silenced my own deadness in the same way I spent so much time trying to keep my patients at ease, shielding us both from their discomfort. Carrying the responsibility, and the sessions, I left work with a headache at the end of each day. This went on for the better part of six months when I first opened my practice as I navigated the choppy waters of this helping profession. I was not helped by my silencing, nor were my patients. The deadness endured, despite heroic efforts to resurrect.

To paraphrase Michael Eigen: When we place pressure on what we believe therapy should be, we risk precociously foreclosing what it might become.

How freeing it has been to learn to work with the deadness instead of trying to avoid it, or worse, to counteract it. To allow deadness the space to be dead. To give discomfort room to be uncomfortable. To offer it voice, and shape, and texture, to follow deadness through to life rather than continue in unconscious disavowal and silencing.

Aliveness asks us first to build a psychic structure robust enough to tolerate the intolerable. Aliveness comes through speaking what was unsayable, dreaming the undreamt, feeling all that was numbed. It’s like shaking out the limb that fell asleep, and enduring the sensation of pins and needles as the nerves re-animate.

This feels like a moment to pause and clarify- if this reads like I’m writing from my own experience, a more honest take would be that I’m writing from the experiences provided to me, namely and most recently by my psychologist.

Commenting on the work of Bion, Ogden writes, “It requires two minds to think one’s most disturbing thoughts.”³

Tolerating the intolerable is not often something we can do on our own, at least not at first. Working with the other, in the “intersubjective playground”⁴ of the therapy relationship, allows us to refine the shape of ourselves. Perhaps in being found we find ourselves, or we make room for ourselves, or we finally have enough understanding of the raw materials of our emotions to create ourselves, to breathe ourselves back to life.

I watched a beautiful video recently titled On Being a Patient, created by a local psychoanalyst, Garrick Duckler. In it, he describes symptoms as the signature of all we have needed to survive. It’s odd to think of deadness as a survival strategy, and yet it is through deadness that we learn to silence ourselves in order to appease others and maintain harmony, or to keep our expectations low so as to avoid disappointment. Deadness is an adaptive solution to a problem, maybe not even our own problem.

The antidote for psychical deadness seems to be more deadness. Let the feelings speak in their own voice. They are the raw materials from which our psychic structure is crafted. Leave the answers and intellectualizations and certainties to themselves, until they can be met with curiosity rather than frantic grasping, a desperation for knowledge.

As we broaden and expand our tolerance for the entire range of affect, as well as our capacity to shift between our changing states and selves, we enrich and enliven the texture of our existence. There’s something mystical about the way aliveness returns as we stop trying to turn away from deadness.

I’ve been laughing at myself recently, because I keep getting scared of working with insurance companies, and I end up falling into all kinds of therapist self-pay practice marketing traps that offer truly outrageous advice on manipulating people into becoming paying clients. I’m left wondering how (and to whom) do I sell themes like deadness and uncertainty and not knowing as not only measures of psychological health, but also as something worth the time and monetary investment? In today’s age, it doesn’t stand out well against the backdrop of modern wellness influencer.

***

The Lightest Touch, David Whyte

Good poetry begins with

the lightest touch,

a breeze arriving from nowhere,

a whispered healing arrival,

a word in your ear,

a settling into things,

then like a hand in the dark

it arrests the whole body,

steeling you for revelation.

In the silence that follows

a great line

you can feel Lazarus

deep inside

even the laziest, most deathly afraid

part of you,

lift up his hands and walk toward the light.

***

I draw courage and solace from this poem, hopeful that my words will land among the people who will feel their inner Lazarus stirring.

1. Quoted from Michael Eigen’s, The Psychoanalytic Mystic.

2. “Good enough,” freeing thinking from the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott.

3. For Ogden’s full commentary, see https://web.english.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Ogden_Bion_s_Four_Principles.pdf

4. Again, Michael Eigen’s, The Psychoanalytic Mystic.