Imagine you stand in a courtyard, four doors equidistant from you. One leads — you hope — to some version of material prosperity: stacks of crisp greenbacks, luxury, titles, accomplishments. Are they more than you need or what you desperately need?
Behind door number two resides jealousy. Here is the personal storehouse of unfulfilled wishes. A worker stands with a brush. He paints everything with the green of envy. No objects inhabit the place, only the ideas with which you fill your head, catalogued for your review: the kind of marriage of this one, the beauty of that one, the genius and happiness of another. To enter you must speak the language of complaint.
A third portal stands in the shadows: the door of the undeserving. Those who step through believe they lack the right to speak of suffering. They’ve been told their life is good. All their externals are properly arranged. They present the world an outward show of seeming to be what is expected. Acquaintances recognize little else, but the soul knows a deeper truth. Here is a library of unexpressed grief, pages beyond counting. The books are sealed and unread. Like all libraries, no sound is permitted. The residents of this prison open their mouths as if to talk, turn around, expect someone to judge them ungrateful for what they have, and leave the pain unspoken. Theirs is the green of nausea, the self-imposed invalidation of a corked bottle filled with tears not meant to stay inside.
Beyond the final door a barren landscape stretches to the horizon. Everything is brown and gray, like a snowless, unformed winter’s day. You spy something new: tinges of green — a few mini-shoots, the color of possibilities. What could grow there? The things you can’t see, not yet, but just might increase if offered a chance — by you and circumstance.
You recognize something shiny among the shoots: the large shard of a broken mirror. The silvered glass looks back at you. And then you realize you are a thing that might grow, enhance. Still, this place is the hardest, least sure.
Four doors. Which will you choose? Or will you wait, decide not, hesitate?
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The photo is call 1green doors by psyberartist. It was sourced from Wikimedia Commons.
Funny what we remember. My wife recalls a long-ago winter day wearing high heels. A big deal for a 13 or 14-year-old young woman dressed in her holiday best for a Christmas celebration. But that isn’t why she remembers it. Instead, her recollection of stockings and hair styles is an incidental add-on to something more important — more emblematic — of how to live: her dad’s unspoken example of an honorable man in the midst of a storm: the storm of life and a brutal winter day.
December was unusually snowy. Well-organized teams of snow plows didn’t exist outside of Chicago. My wife’s dad, Thomas Henek, thought it best they all take an early train to the family gathering in LaSalle, IL. The ride, he knew, would be safer than dealing with impassable downstate roads in the car. It might take more than an hour to get to Chicago’s Union Station, but at least everyone would be comfortable from there: a two-hour train ride to his mother-in-law’s home. Better than winding up in a ditch, he reasoned, with his 14 and 11-year-old daughters and his spouse Helen.
The gathering itself was unremarkable as my wife thinks back. Soon after their morning train ride, however, the snow began to fall again. When the Heneks made ready for the after dinner departure, they prepared for the worst. Grandma Grigalunas had no place for four extra bodies, and towns without a tourist trade and little manufacturing lacked motels: the unadorned life of a barely middle-class family in middle-twentieth-century America.
Events did not cooperate. All the Christmas celebrants on the route had taken the seats long before the Henek family arrived at the train. The downpour of the heavy white stuff slowed the steam engine’s progress. Past midnight, finally, Union Station in downtown Chicago appeared. Perhaps my wife remembers her high heels because she stood in them all the way. Everyone was beat. The trip — the second excursion of the day — the standing and the time of night had done what you might imagine.
“Wait inside. I’ll grab a cab for the trip home. Then I’ll signal you to come out,” said Tom. The unaffordable ride to the suburbs couldn’t be avoided. The plan made sense, as public transportation would be missing in action even were there no blizzard.
Only one problem. Other people from the station were waiting in the flesh-slicing wind, slush, cold, and falling snow. Accumulating precipitation, by now mounds of it, was everywhere. Almost all the cab drivers knew better than to make an extra buck late at night on such a day — a day they devoted to celebrating Christmas on their own. To the bone tired females inside, the clock was stuck in place, the time as heavy as the dense, wet-white on the ground outside.
Finally an empty cab! The man of the Henek house told the driver he first had to signal his family. They began to move out of the station when a young woman appeared near Mr. Henek. She was soaked-through, as was Tom. She held an infant in her arms and a preschool girl — herself dragging an overweight suitcase — by her hand.
Tom Henek was a man’s man, the best friend to countless buddies, the kind of person you could rely on when fate had you by the shoulders. He’d been a supply truck driver in hostile territory during World War II and lived through the blood spatter of his best friend in the passenger seat beside him, killed by a sniper.
If you knew Tom Henek you understood what he would do when the lady appeared.
Afraid for the baby, Mr. Henek offered the door while the mom and her charges entered the taxi, sent them off, and turned to look behind him.
A few feet away (it is true) one might have heard a bit of groaning. Yet everyone understood: understood who Mr. Henek was, what mattered in life, and what you should and should not do.
Back in the station once again, time was frozen like the weather outside; but the family did step into a cab after another hour. They couldn’t get home to Franklin Park soon enough.
I never knew Tom Henek. He died a couple years before I met Aleta. He was imperfect, as we all are. A gambling addiction didn’t help and a smoking addiction killed him in his 50s. Still, I’ve had the luck of knowing his daughters — one the love of my life — and knowing him by who they are and who our children have become.
How do you measure a life? I wouldn’t even try. As William Bruce Cameron wrote, “not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
To me, this half-century-old story is remarkable and unremarkable, all in one. In a time of great inhumanity, civility and nobility are kept alive by men and women like Tom Henek.
We should be proud to do half as well.
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The top photo is called Miniskirts in a Snow Storm, February 10, 1969. It was sourced from the National Weather Service Collection, wea 00957 via Wikipedia Commons. This post adds some detail to one of the episodes of Mr. Henek’s life, as I wrote about it in 2014: Tom Henek’s life.
It is so easy to judge. Legions of “friends” and acquaintances evaluate your decision to enter treatment. Some signal thumbs up and applaud your courage. Others gesture thumbs down and render disapproval:
It’s not as bad as he thinks.
He needs to suck it up.
I’ve been through worse.
While many people are understanding, critical voices say you betray weakness by reaching for this “crutch.” Surprisingly, those who have experienced a similar problem are often less empathetic than the rest. If your friend also got over a traumatic accident like yours, research says he is probably less sympathetic than people who were lucky enough not to have had that piece of bad luck. The closer your experience is to one the other person triumphed over, the more likely he is to think your adversity is manageable. A pity, because when you reach out to the buddy you expect to be most soothing, you might discover he comforts you not.
Sometimes we must give up on such “friends.”
Nature fashioned us to survive. Like athletes trained to forget their failures quickly, we are more content if we get past the pain of remembrance. Thus, our own photo-shopped recollection of triumphing over the bad breaks of life can make us less sensitive to fellow-men when those traumas are akin to ones we once endured. Arm-chair chest-thumping is like the braggadocio of a political office-seeker who tells us how easily he would fix a national problem if only he were in office — condemning the effort of those who now grapple with the job. The sideline of life is a place where judgment produces cheap and imaginary victories rarely duplicated once the judge steps out of his robes and into the game himself.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes (up) short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat (Theodore Roosevelt, 1910).
Adding to our misfortune is the tendency to condemn ourselves. History offers examples of people who triumphed in extreme situations. We get the sense such folks are plentiful because they are the objects of story and song — as numerous as the apples on a fruit tree. If we buy-into the ease with which people survive and thrive we compound our already miserable state by observing the contrast with our own plodding struggle.
From the therapist’s chair, survival and persistence are, by themselves, heroic. Perhaps not the heroism of a Shakespearean tragic figure like Coriolanus, but admirable nonetheless.
I treated just such people in my therapy practice. For a time, sometimes for months or years, they were immobilized by the hammer blows of fate. Signs of resilience and the will to fight slowly emerged. Not always, but often.
The art of life is more like the wrestler’s art than the dancer’s … it should stand ready and firm to meet onsets which are sudden and unexpected.” (Marcus Aurelius, VII, 61).
Like the athlete thrown to the floor, in time you must get up.
The moment of resurrection is different for each of us. On the wrestling platform of life no referee demands a speedy rise. Ah, some in the audience will criticize, but they do not writhe in your anguish or see the torn sinews beneath your skin.
The effort to stand again is not over until you say so. Those who judge are unaware (or have forgotten) how they would react in a similar situation. Some resort to a kind of cheap self-flattery to quell anxiety at the possibility of themselves experiencing your adversity. “Oh, I would have been able to handle that” is soothing to say and makes them believe they are resilient and brave, but is lots easier from the grandstand than on the field.
Your misfortune is also a cruel opportunity, but an opportunity nonetheless: to triumph over fate. Sometimes victory is just persevering.
When Shakespeare’s flawed hero Coriolanus was banished from Rome, his mother lamented his departure. He attempted to console her with words she taught him. The perspective he learned from her was that a crisis was a chance to distinguish himself as better — more heroic — than the average person:
Where is your ancient courage? you … used
to say extremity was the trier of spirits;
That common chances common men could bear;
That when the sea was calm all boats alike
Show’d mastership in floating …
In other words, it is easy for us to sail along without concern when the water is smooth.
You who are in pain would give up the suffering if only you could. Now, however, you will find out who you really are. The rest of us are waiting for whatever challenge drops on us for the chance at such knowledge. I am not suggesting we seek it. Yet, once fate arrives, do battle in whatever form you can however weak you feel. Even if taking a breath is, for now, all you can muster.
For those of you in the fight of your lives, I salute you.
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The Wikipedia “Fight Back!” logo is the work of Kasuga-commonswiki.
My mother used to say, “Regret is a painkiller for fools.” Her early life was tragic and her words were — I think — a way to justify her decision never to look back. But mom’s aphorism does raise a question: how much attention must one pay to those who tell us about their poor life choices as they reflect on their past? Are we smart to use their experience — what they wish they did or didn’t do — to change our plans?
Not necessarily.
Here is an example of the kind of “wisdom” I’m talking about. A palliative care nurse, Bronnie Ware, wrote, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.* Her list comes from her work with those near death:
I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
I wish that I had let myself be happier.
Let’s look at these and see if we agree.
I’ll combine regrets 1, 3, and 5. The courage to take risks is the link among them. Indeed, the word courage appears in two of the three regrets I’m talking about.
Ware heard patients lament giving-in to others, doing what was expected, and failing to push back when pushed around. In order to be true to yourself you must take charge of your life and disappoint or anger some others. True, “the courage to express (our) feelings” is dangerous, since most of us find disapproval unpleasant, and vulnerability an invitation to attack. The reward, however, can be great. As to letting yourself “be happier,” Ware observed that many of her patients — only too late — recognized the need to break out of safe routines and travel outside of their zone of comfort. This, they believed, was the road not taken: the path to happiness.
Oscar Wilde’s witticism encapsulates much of the last paragraph: “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
I applaud Ware’s odd-numbered reminders to lead a courageous, assertive life. I’m less sure, however, about regret #2: “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”
Here is what she wrote:
This (regret) came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship. Women also spoke of this regret, but as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.”
One important consideration eludes nurse Ware: regrets can also pertain to a less work-driven life: “Gee, I should have accomplished more. I ought to have been a better provider for my family. I might have made a name for myself.”
Marlon Brando said something similar in the 1954 movie On the Waterfront, playing a washed-up boxer:
I could’a had class. I could have been a contender. I could have been somebody — instead of a bum — which is what I am.
Rational or not, men, in particular, live with the genetic drive to make their way in the world. Many do regret having worked too much, too hard, too long — regret the loss of time with spouse and children. A different life, however, might have caused them not only end-of-life regrets, but disappointment in themselves for most of the preceding years.
Ware’s last item describes the elderly who told her, “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”
Philosophers as far back as Aristotle would say Ware hit the target here, and are supported by psychological research on what brings life satisfaction. Nonetheless, maintaining friends is a time-consuming task: making phone calls, writing email, traveling to those chums who don’t live nearby, remembering work buddies when you leave the job, and sending birthday cards. Your vocation, as well as the spouse, children, and laundry contend for the hours available on the clock. We are never permitted more than the usual 24.
A couple of additional considerations: Bronnie Ware’s dying patients were living in a different body with a different agenda than their younger selves. The seniors looked back and judged from a once-in-a-lifetime perspective — literally. When they weighed their life experience on the equivalent of a bathroom scale, did they get an accurate result?
Here is what Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman wrote on how we think about past experiences when we reflect on our memories of those experiences: “Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion … The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living … ”
Kahneman gives an illustration of this phenomenon:
(A man) told (me) of listening raptly to a long symphony on a disc that was (damaged) near the end, producing a shocking sound, and he reported that the bad ending ‘ruined the whole experience.’ But the experience was not actually ruined, only the memory of it. The experiencing self had had an experience that was almost entirely good, and the bad end could not undo it, because it had already happened. My questioner had assigned the entire episode a failing grade because it had ended badly, but that grade effectively ignored 40 minutes of musical bliss. Does the actual experience count for nothing?
Which self should count? The self who lived the experience or the one who recalls the events through the imperfect, sometimes warped lens of time?
You can answer Kahneman’s question for yourself. To me, the notion of 25-year-olds being subjected to the “wisdom” of 75-year-olds cannot always result in proper guidance for the young. The same caution applies if the 25-year-old and the 75-year-old are different versions of one person. Your 75-year-old judgment cannot do justice to your 25-year-old’s life choices any more than your 25-year-old self can anticipate the manner in which he will judge his life at 75. If you are in life’s first half, then you must live by what counts as wisdom for the body you inhabit, the instincts you have, the great ideas you’ve read about, and the thoughtfulness only someone in your life-situation can possess.
Among the most perceptive observations about the human experience comes from the Stoic philosopher Seneca in his treatise, On the Shortness of Life:
Small is the part of life that we really live. All that remains of our existence is not actually life but merely time.
If Seneca is right then the best advice is easy: live.
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*Thanks to my wise buddy John Kain for calling Bronnie Ware’s work to my attention. The top photo is called Mood Disorder, by Specialtoyoutoyou. It is sourced from Wikimedia Commons.
What follows might not be what you want to hear. Therapists don’t talk about it publicly. I hope, however, this gets you thinking about your counselor’s aims, what you might want him to do, and what is reasonable to expect of her or him in the effort to be the best possible healer.
This thing, let’s call it a pet hate, is email sign-offs. You know the thing people write just before their name? And more specifically, the way my therapist signs off on an email or text.
She “hates” such closings as “kind regards” and “best wishes.” The blogger wants something different from her therapist than the equivalent of “a warmed-up, just vomited fur ball that I’ve stood on in bare feet in the middle of the night.” She is both funny and serious. Sirena (her name) desires the parting portion of a missive to acknowledge the intimacy and importance of the relationship. At least, that’s how her plea sounds to me.
Quite understandable and, based on comments to the two bloggers I mentioned, she has lots of company. The easy “solution” for a shrink called out on this point is to be more creative. Fashioning personal words is simple enough. We can all do with some small tenderness. A thoughtful parting sentiment touches the heart.
The target I want to address, however, is a problem reaching beyond text farewells. Sirena’s concerns lead to the general issue of a therapist’s delicacy in communicating with his client vs. the use of words that cut or fall flat, whether in session or in an email.
The counselor has lots going on in his head, as I wrote in What is Your Therapist Thinking? He needs to weigh his words and avoid frank episodes of insensitivity. And yet, there are reasons he sometimes misses the mark.
Here’s why: at the same time he is trying to help you he must not be preoccupied with a paralyzing, word-by-word self-analysis of his language. Were he to do everything in his power not to injure you (by an oh-so-careful self-scrutiny) he would risk hurting you by missing a different portion of the overall picture with which you present him. Once bereft of needed spontaneity — a slow, studied, halting treatment would be a bitter masquerade for a proper talking cure.
Self-consciousness psychotherapy by the person guiding it is useless. Your doc couldn’t do his job — the job you want him to do, the job he is trying to do — with this restriction.
Think of a surgeon terrified by a possible slip of the scalpel while he is guiding the knife. Were I his patient I wouldn’t expect ignorance of the worst medical errors, but I’d much prefer him to be “in the zone,” not fraught with the potential for a literally paralyzing surgical mistake. A doctor characterized by calm, focused attention, and control is the person I’d want. This is the reason surgeons don’t operate on their own children. This is why your counselor’s concern for you might, on occasion, seem callous or inattentive. If he were your parent and therapist — both — he’d be an emotional wreck and you’d be the worse for it.
A counselor cannot be equally burdened by the anticipated impact of his every word and simultaneously dialed-in to all the other important events happening in session. Put differently, if the surgeon or the therapist is too self-conscious he will not leave you unscathed (pun intended) by an injury much worse than an occasional, temporary hurt feeling caused by an ill-chosen expression.
I am not saying he wants to harm you. Indeed, words matter, as does your safety, but I hope you do not put his office on surveillance by the word police. His care of you and for you cannot be like holding a priceless antique Chinese porcelain doll. If the shrink must maintain perpetual alert over possible injury, he risks infantilizing you.
We all deal with a similar challenge. How much protection should we render in conversation with our friend or neighbor? Can we expect a dinner companion to acknowledge his own tendency to misinterpret or over-think what we’ve said? Are we alone to blame for misunderstandings?
Most patients make lots of allowance for an occasional undiplomatic comment, to their credit. Were the doctor’s office a place where nothing painful between the shrink and his client occurred, no patient could return to the world ready to thrive. The first step out the door would be like the shock of a newborn’s exit from the womb.
In summary, I’ve tried to explain the following:
The therapist mustn’t steal the patient’s initiative and responsibility for owning his own part in the relationship with a counselor. Yes, sometimes a problem is all the healer’s fault, but not always.
Part of growing, in and out of the treatment room, is learning what’s important, what are the little things, who is your friend (however imperfect), who the enemy, which issues will be resolved if you work at them, and those requiring only patience and time. We all need to do this. I am not immune from the obligation of trying to sift through the events of life and attempting to put everything in the proper cubby-hole, working on a few things that are my issues, setting others aside, ignoring some slights and addressing others.
Whatever your work is, you can paralyze yourself (like the the surgeon I mentioned) by a too constant internal look, especially while you are in the act of performing that work. Remember, even if the therapist utters an ill-considered phrase from time-to-time, in the long run the most important things eventually get addressed by a good practitioner.
If his words bother you, raise the alarm, especially when this is a continuing pattern. What seems obvious to you might not be clear to him. He should want to know of errors and improve himself. Be prepared, however, that whatever you say is potential grist for the treatment mill. Sometimes the issue is his, sometimes yours, and often you are co-owners. The percentages depend on you, him, and your interaction together.
These opinions are mine alone, though I’d guess I’m not the only therapist holding such beliefs.
Hope this helped.
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The top image is called Miedo-jeno by RayNata. The photo is Adolescent Sad Girl by stars alive. Each of these is sourced from Wikimedia Commons.
