Psychotherapy & Snowdrops

what happens?

Writing seamlessly out of a thing called a Psychotherapy session. Utterly helpless to do justice to where I have been for an hour with another human by using such technical language.

I used to do this thing I do very differently.
I’ve been ‘doing’ it for three decades so I am not the same – my work is not the same.

In the long and winding pilgrimage to my own truest nature, and the courage and faith that trusting myself to be myself has asked of me – well, that is where I live and work from now. I have no sense that movement stops, of having arrived at any final destination, but I can say I found my way home, and trust that.

I have been on zoom, and of course now I am typing into a word document on my laptop. When I am done, I’ll trust my words and post them on my Substack.

I feel a wave of gratitude for this very basic technology, given the current incomprehensible continents of tech moving at the speed of light. This – the internet, a revolution that now we mostly don’t think about much in the demographic that just uses the wide but basic functionality. The internet opened up everything to everyone, with the caveat that privilege and lack of privilege make everything to everyone, not actually true on the ground.

I write about the ways I feel about the brutality of capitalism and global politics, as it separates the have and the have nots, but for this small riff I am bracketing that and staying with Grace.

What am I offering this particular human man that I meet every Friday in a room that doesn’t actually exist? I show up. That is a simple sentence, but I think one of those from the deceptive and radically simple.

I show up.
I open up my zoom room and ‘admit’ which is a zoom term, my Friday at noon man to the room that is both everywhere and nowhere.

I also do the same exact thing in the three dimensional world where the showing up and inviting in happens in my home.

In the realms of radical simplicity it is the same room.

I show up.
That could mean I am there, but not really there.
It could mean I am there in a very intentional being a psychotherapist position; something like here I am with my expertise and there you are with your problem. You are giving me some money and I am going help you with your problem in exchange.

That’s crude I know, but I lay out the crude to make the point that however skilful, compassionate, human centred, experienced in a particular field of specialism a psychotherapist might be, there cannot, not be a distance in that configuration. I know and respect the ocean of psychotherapy delivered by people with so much of value, so much to offer that is truly life changing for their people. People called patients in some modalities, clients across the more broad arch of these days.

In my, ‘these days’ I’m finding even the baseline language for what I offer, feeling more and more like it doesn’t quite fit. I don’t make it a problem, it is just me noticing, and then deep in the recesses of my practice, or offering, or whatever it is I am actually doing, I don’t use those words in my private thoughts. I don’t say, Caro, you are a psychotherapist with clients, even though both those things are true. It’s actually a little bit strange, and again, strange is not a problem, just an observation.

I am writing from the immediacy of just the other side of being inside one hour with one precious man. The meeting ended. I find myself in my zoom room configuration, which is in fact a beautifully arranged position of comfort in my bedroom – it is day Bed-World – what you see is me in front of my window, always plants and flowers behind me, colours, a sense of space. What you don’t see is that I have built a bespoke support system out of various pillows, bolsters, orthopaedic and yoga items that in combination make sitting in the truth of having a body that is never pain free, as brilliant as it can be.

If you come in the real world, I invite you into a different room, a room full of high-end bean bags, and a daybed sofa. In that room there’s a place full of options to feel support and comfort.

This moment.
Sitting in the reverb of being with my Friday at noon human.
Feeling him.
Feeling me.

What did I do – well not to be disingenuous, I didn’t do much doing. Nevertheless, I do take showing up very seriously. It is a distinct dimensional shift from being wherever I am before into the service position. I guess I ‘do’ that. I make that shift, or more accurately the shift happens because I have fallen out of effort and into something like trust, so I trust the shift. I also trust that if I am not in a condition where that is possible, I know. If I am not well enough in any-which way, I do know, and I will cancel and reschedule that meeting.

I show up.
I offer my own capacity to trust I offer safe – you might not feel safe in every, or even many moments, but I know I’ve got you. Maybe that is the radically simple shift that has been bedding into my clean earth most palpably over these last six years or so. I have been blessed by inspirational teachers, being shown, much more than educated. There is a difference, and I’ve been able to keep finding my way, because of a crucial few exceptionally understated teachers. My own therapist, who has just stayed steady and steadfast alongside me over the last sixteen years. What she offered me was possible because she has learned in the same lineage. She is paying it forward. She was never a busy, doing therapist. In fact officially of all her training and learning she is not an actual psychotherapist. She’s mine though, and she stayed with me, listened to all my stories, gently observed some things very quietly, offering me myself, but never as a problem to solve. Being stayed with if we actually landed in a lineage of absence, is the life-changing medicine. She didn’t tell me who I am, she waited until enough being stayed with repaired enough of that original primal wound of ‘not safe- no-one here’, that I could start to tell her who I am.

I also needed groups.
Group, in the right hands changes everything – suffice to say having had the strongest, often not easy, but utterly redemptive experience in several key groups over time, I know I would just not have found some of the most tricky to include and welcome parts of myself if I had just done individual work. I’m in a group now, a group that started maybe fourteen years ago, that meets for one full day every month. Who would I be without that is an unfathomable question, because I couldn’t even ask it without all those years of steady, being shown in direct experience, rather than taught. A place and a pace that has, and continues to give me the safe that I now trust in myself to offer so simply to others.

My hour with my Friday at noon man, has brought me to the impulse to open up that blank word document, to let words happen on the screen. In some ways the very specific feeling in the pulse and beat of closing the door has passed, and yet it is still here, wanting to bow to the mystery and grace that just opens up under the best conditions. It responds to invitation, to welcome. My latent and effortless transitioning from working so hard to be the best therapist I could, into trusting that perhaps I could drop into showing up and trusting safe, that maybe if just that was my work, my offering, then I could close the distance between, and without abdicating from my accountability to hold safe, I could also not know with my person, that we could feel in together without really knowing what was here in the moment, that needed to be noticed, included, understood, loved even.

I don’t write clinical session notes anymore.
Sometimes a poem, or something like a poem happens.
Sometimes I just rest a moment in the space of afterwards.

Today, these words wanted to shape the feeling of Grace that I breathed into, that infused my entire mind, body, heart and (for lack of another word) soul, after we said goodbye for today. I just stayed with him for a bit, and then I started writing.

If it was a story, I could tell you that this man, who has trusted me to keep seeing him, sometimes parts of him he is just on the cusp of seeing in himself. He told me that tomorrow he is taking a very old friend and neighbour. Both the friendship, and the other person have longevity and age. She is old, and has advanced cancer, and happens to be a snowdrop nerd. In her time she has done many pilgrimages to bow to the snowdrops. She knows nerdy things like how many different species of snowdrops exist. She asked my Friday at noon human if he would drive to a particularly special place at this time of year. It’s a protected building in beautiful grounds. Someone in the entitled lineage of ownership of this estate, I’m not sure if that particular person is still alive, but he was (or is) a snowdrop nerd too.

A request was made that my person would take her tomorrow – she said it will probably be the last time and I’d like to do that with you, and of course the answer was: yes of course.

This unutterable tenderness infused the space between us – if I had to, in a very non-clinical fashion say a few lines about my sense of our last couple of years of Fridays, it would be something like, feeling a very subtle descent into a less binary narrative, where maybe sad could be, rather than anything resembling a problem to solve or a feeling he anticipates struggling to manage tomorrow, it could just be a river so human it cannot be avoided. Sad is always happening, grief is always with us… if we allow the love, the grace, the ordinary and sublime, to really touch us, and if we say yes to being alive, this river will always be flowing – and if sad isn’t bad, just sad, we can welcome the sad to our table, to sit amongst the other guests. As both Rumi, and my beloved Leonard Cohen wrote about, everything is alive within us, all in co-existence.

In the spirit of lyrical, this postcard was done when I placed a full-stop at the end of the above sentence – yet something else needs adding. My humanist, old school socialist heart can’t not add that we are living in terrifying times. All across the globe, political power and influence seems to be in the hands of ruthless, high-functioning psychopathology. I know that’s not all there is. I really do.

But, I am afraid for what is up ahead.
I am afraid for how overwhelming it will be for our children and our children’s children if we make it that far.

I can’t in all personal integrity sign off this piece without including the existential pull to a kind of what’s the point position, that in my humble opinion has never been so desolate, and in every individual person I welcome into my little offering of safe, I feel the impotence, the helpless, the primal terrors running through each and every separate little life.