http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=776
I’ve been away since January. Away from this blog, I mean. Hence, the blank panel comic. All I can say two-dimensionally about my absence is that I was deeply involved in another writing project which left me no time to write this blog.
I do owe an apology to everyone who wondered why I stopped writing here. I didn’t expect to be away this long. Next time I need to take a break, I will try to let people know that I am taking time off. Instead of just disappearing into the blankness.
Of course, it’s absurd for me to try and convey in a few words what I experienced while I was away, as the cartoon panel suggests, but I did think of coming back and changing the format of my blog by dispensing with the introductory cartoon. I guess I was experiencing the ongoing and frustrating complexity of finding just the right picture to convey the gist of my thousand words. Sometimes this hunt takes me several hours.
But then I find the one that seems just right, the one that made my search worthwhile. Like the one above. The truth is, I love research.
I do want to tell you that I may not always be able to come up with a cartoon I want to use. If that is the case, I will simply write a blog without it.
Blankness can convey so much. It is about my absence. It is about what I hide from you. It is about what you imagine that I hide. It is also about whatever you wish to see in the blankness. Whatever you see is whatever you project into the blankness from the depths of your personality – even if you see it in me. So then, the blankness becomes you, because you construct it with your own imagination.
In essence, this is what happens in psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapy or psychoanalysis. I offer you a blank panel with each session, and what you “draw” in it becomes what you show me of who you are. Of course, we do this through exchanged words, but I have been known to ask someone to draw for me or to show me a photograph that was charged with personal meaning.
And what I see is not just what you fill the blank panel with but also what you leave out of your drawing. There are certain issues I would expect to encounter over a period of time of knowing you, even if that period is only the short time of our first meeting. So, if an issue is not there – usually because you have forgotten to mention it, I will notice, and bring it to your attention when I feel the time is right to do so. It’s my job to look everywhere I can to discover things about you that you may need to learn about.
Do you remember looking at passing clouds as a child, perhaps with a friend? Do you remember how the same cloud could look like many, many different things to both of you? That is how your imagination might work in psychotherapy, bringing many personal images into the room to construct the multi-faceted jewel that becomes more and more the complex person you are.
The same thing happens when we work with dreams (see blog entries: Dreaming your Creativity; Insomnia; Wishing and Reality). People say to me, “This dream makes no sense. It’s totally crazy.” And I say – the crazier the better. The craziest dream is like a multi-layered cloud that contains many of your essential qualities. You dreamed it to communicate something important about yourself, and then your unconscious disguised it so that it would not cause you any anxiety. People are always hiding from whatever issues cause them anxiety by burying or disguising those issues within themselves. We all do this in one way or another.
It’s safer, though, to discover the meaning of a seemingly blank and crazy dream by exploring it with a psychoanalyst who is trained to work with you to understand it.
And eventually, you will be able to fill in the blank panels yourself. Then you will be able to read your own life story.
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Perfect Love or Real Love? - Relationship Therapy Ottawa
Connected
http://xkcd.com/807/
The pure and perfect love in the cartoon above is unreal. Oh, we all recognize it – it corresponds with the honeymoon or beginning phase of many relationships when the other person seems ideal. Nothing can mar the pure joy of first love except, well, reality.
Everyone important in your life makes mistakes or exhibits less-than-endearing qualities. No one is perfect, and the secret to a happy life is to learn to tolerate ambivalence. By this, I mean that, when you care about someone, you are attached because of their positive qualities and you tolerate their negative ones. Whenever the negative ones become too much for you to handle, it would be best to confront the person, so as to try and resolve the issue. This is how to maintain long term relationships over the years with both family and friends.
Unfortunately, some people conclude that discovering negative qualities in a person means that this person is disgusting and toxic, and so they end the relationship. Good relationships are hard to find and even harder to develop and maintain. The reason some couples have such a good long-term relationship is that they have never shrunk from confronting each other about the things they don’t like, and each of them has made changes important to the other so as to be able to give themselves more lovingly to the other. Keeping one’s negative qualities in check keeps the relationship from becoming toxic and builds on the couple’s strengths.
Unfortunately, I have seen too many couples in psychotherapy who have preferred to end their relationships rather than do some dual soul-searching. And they seek out new relationships only to discover that they have traded in one set of negative qualities just to gain a different one. And their new partner is accusing them of the same negative qualities as their first partner did. Then they are in the same position of having to end that relationship as well in the pursuit of the impossibly all-good person who doesn’t exist.
We all have to come to terms with living in a less-than-perfect, good-enough world that is populated with less-than-perfect but good-enough people. And we simultaneously work on making ourselves better as individuals. This is a lifelong task.
But those people who don’t know how to negotiate their differences have a tendency to fight about them constantly. Eventually they end the relationship. Subjectively, they feel that the other person will never be able to change and meet their needs. Objectively, they are unable to recognize their own inability to change or to take responsibility for their own actions. These are the people who are never able to apologize for their own limitations because they do not recognize that they have any.
These people need to find a way to accept themselves because, without that, they cannot accept others. Only then may they find a place in their hearts to deal with others as adult equals, with love, respect, and a wish to iron out differences – both sets of differences, and not just those of the other person. They may need a professional with whom to discuss their insecurities and the anger that they use as a shield for protection. They need to discover that love is a constant between caring individuals, even though there may be things about the other that they do not like. That’s what normal ambivalence is about.
Unfortunately, the kind of person who would rather fight or leave rather than work things out is also very likely to get into an argument with her therapist or end the therapy when she hears the therapist say something about her that she is unprepared to accept. She may return to therapy when she older, more mature, and readier to deal with her own issues.