A Session with Laura

 

It is an early Friday morning.  Not yet the end of winter, the marine layer hovers above the Pacific Ocean, concealing the sun.  Though I am wearing a light sweater, I find myself still a bit chilled as I listen to Laura*, a psychotherapy patient I have been working with for several months, as she tells me about her life.

 

A highly-educated, successful business executive in her early 40s, Laura has been unable to secure a viable, fulfilling relationship with a man.  Additionally, while her career trajectory has been decorated with accolades and substantial achievements, in recent years she has tolerated the reportedly harsh and unfair feedback of a demanding manager without putting forth a concerted effort to secure a new position.  She explains that, day to day, she finds herself feeling empty, despairing; she characterizes her life as stalled, stagnant.

 

Thus far, the origins of Laura’s stasis, what is inhibiting her from moving in new directions that may hold better odds for her to actually get what she wants, or at least abandon what she does not want, have eluded us, though I have been feeling in the last few sessions that some important insight may be emerging.  For now, this insight seems to lie just below the surface, out of reach.

 

After describing a first date she had the previous evening with an enigmatic man that was especially awkward and deflating for her, Laura acknowledges that, like so many others in her past, this man, too, will not be “the one.”  She then moves away from the topic of her date, casually peers out the window of my office to a secluded patio dimmed by the overcast, and says to me, “My life seems to change every 8 years, dramatically and unexpectedly.  After a long period of inertia.  It’s like an earthquake.  It’s been 7 years since the last major change in my life, so something big is probably on its way.”

 

Equilibrium and Flux

 

The marine layer.  The chill of the foggy morning.  A soft rain.  And now, this: earthquakes.  As Laura’s comments linger, I find myself thinking of the powerful forces of nature, how states of equilibrium are suddenly punctured by clamor and flux, an organic cycle of harmony and unrest.

 

I recall an article I had read years ago on the tectonic shifts that occur as the nearly dozen major plates comprising the earth’s crust move across time.  The article described how the earth is in a constant state of change, its enveloping tectonic plates fitting together like puzzle pieces until radioactive forces at the earth’s center induce a sudden, dramatic disassembly.  Scientists have yet to discover the factors and dynamics that determine which specific plates unhinge from one another, fracture, and ultimately arrive at their next resting place, tethered to new plate components in a mass configuration that can span a continent.

 

I share with Laura my association to this article, hoping it will somehow inspire her to elaborate on the inevitability of upheaval she has just introduced, the interruptions of the static junctures of her life that seem to arrive suddenly from some place outside of herself.

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* Personal characteristics and identifying information have been altered to protect client confidentiality and privacy.

 

After the session I realize that my mention of the article to Laura was also an attempt on my part, albeit unconscious, to induce a kind of entropy in our own process together, a way to encourage, advance, and transform the stasis that seemed to be emerging in the familiar routine we had arrived at in our therapeutic relationship.  Perhaps, I wondered, what Laura may have needed from me the most was a mild wind, a gentle clamor that would shift, re-configure and make visible what she could not yet identify and understand about the paralysis she felt, the unalterable quality she perceived in the circumstances in which she found herself embedded, and the antidote for her obstinate despair.

 

Signals

 

What emerged in subsequent sessions was Laura’s realization that “signals” pointing toward necessary refinements in her professional life and relationships had availed themselves to her often in her life, but, curiously, these signals had been denied or ignored.

 

She described various instances in which her intuition about emerging circumstances of a person or situation had been palpable, ushering her to a decision or action she knew, in her gut, was “right” and needed to occur, but that would of course alter how things had been.  Yet, for one reason or another, she bypassed her own discernment.  As we explored the reasons why this had been the case, Laura recalled her parents often saying to her when she was a little girl, feel with your heart but think and act with your head.

 

In one session, Laura tearfully remarked that what would have actually been more helpful for her would have been the capacity to access her inner rumblings and concede to the imperatives they unveiled, the prudent alterations of course they suggested.  She commented that she had over-invested in her intellectual strength and in her ability to accommodate to adverse situations.  But, in turn, what she had devalued was her own emotional life.  This imbalance thwarted Laura’s capacity to marshal from situations of tension, discontent, and conflict the conviction to act effectively on her own behalf and in ways that would deepen and extend her potential to advocate for herself and her own needs and preferences.

 

Being vs. Becoming

 

What drives persons to resist change has been a central topic in psychology beginning with Freud.  Stalling or avoiding what we realize we need or want to do is a universal dynamic of the human condition, Freud argued.  He theorized that remaining “in the familiar” by suppressing the acknowledgment and pursuit of our true desires maintains emotional and psychological safety despite the often unfavorable and aberrant circumstances we grow accustomed to, the standard fare that constitutes our lives.

 

In essence, we are programmed to be what we assume we are, thereby foreclosing on the possibility of what we could become.  It’s as if, as another patient once said to me, “we do not allow ourselves to read the writing on the wall.”  As with Laura, this tendency insidiously matures into a kind of automaticity that neutralizes and stymies any real effort to overcome the status quo.  What ensues in our lives are scenarios that, once previously experienced as desirous and fulfilling, gradually transform into predicaments we passively accept but long to alter.

 

Over the years, my work as a psychologist has become more highly attuned to the ties that bind people to circumstances they realize they must change but choose to avoid or circumvent.  These ties are formidable, indeed, as are the psychological forces of the mind at play that championing being over becoming.

 

Pressure, Implosion, Destruction

 

What Laura has taught me is that delaying or denying the small but necessary changes we realize we must make activates an inner tension, a pressure, we either attend to or resist.  The more the pressure is evaded, the more likely it seems it will ultimately implode.  Like the earth’s deepest inner chambers intensifying, heating up as geological pressures subsist unrelieved, the rising tension inevitably results in a cataclysmic destruction and realignment.

 

Unfortunately, this was the case for Laura.  About a year into her therapy, she announced that she had been demoted by her manager, an event which subsequently led to her leaving her job and having to endure a 9-month search for a new position.  The emotional and financial fallout of this crisis significantly impacted Laura.  The tectonic plates that organized her life shifted violently, throwing Laura into a freefall she could not control.

 

Laura’s situation is not unusual.  Many individuals who wash ashore and begin therapy often do so in the aftermath of being cast adrift by a portentous sequence of factors and events that, in the end, implode.  They begin psychotherapy, many for the first time in their lives, wanting to understand how and why they failed to extricate themselves from the destruction that seemed, now in hindsight, fated.  They often marvel at what actions they could have taken earlier, right when they sensed that things were beginning to go awry.

 

Postscript

 

Laura has made significant advancements in her capacity to use her thoughts and feelings synergistically in order to affect situations that are not longer viable or that she no longer wishes to sustain.  She has come to appreciate and honor her own inner compass.  Now, she is more adept at relinquishing what she would have previously held onto.  In her increasing attunement to that which is uncomfortable or no longer satisfying for her, she sees an inflexion point rather than a dilemma to be avoided.

 

These emerging capacities and realizations have helped Laura navigate challenging situations more efficiently and confidently.  And as she has gradually experienced a greater degree of self-assuredness and trust in her own internal world, she no longer seems to anticipate an earthquake in her future.  Using her instincts, insights, and self-initiative, Laura is notably more able to transition and create new and more viable opportunities that safeguard her from being helplessly stalemated on a tectonic plate suddenly mobilized beneath her feet.