I’ve been thinking about times when I frightened children, and times when I now get frightened.
Hi, I’m Rick Thyne and I’m grateful that you found your way to these pages. Perhaps in these conversations we’ll find our way to more of the common good that is - for me - our best hope for a future in which all of us thrive. If you've found this column and would like to get my latest column delivered, free, to your inbox every two weeks, you can subscribe at the bottom of this page.
I’m well over six feet tall, weigh well over 200 pounds, and I have a deep voice that intensifies my intimidating presence. I learned as a boy with much younger sisters and a brother, and with smaller classmates, that I could frighten them just by extending to my full height, moving my body close to them, and ever-so-lightly raising my voice. I prevailed by terrorizing them.
When I had children of my own and, later, grandchildren, I knew I was done with letting my size and my voice threaten them; I wanted them to love me rather than fear me, to feel safe crawling onto my lap. So when they were babies and toddlers, I learned to communicate with them by getting down on the carpet or the grass with them. I couldn’t get smaller but I could get lower, so they could look me in the eye without straining to look so far up. I mostly succeeded in my commitment never to yell at them. Instead, I lowered my voice, speaking barely above a whisper, so they’d lean in closer to hear me.
It worked. My grown children and their partners are close friends now. My grandchildren, ages fifteen, thirteen and nine, often sit with me over a board game or a meal, one-on-one or as a group, talking comfortably about whatever is going on in their lives.
They’re not afraid of me.
When I became a psychotherapist, I discovered, ever so slowly, that what works with children works with adults as well - except in this case it was my fear that I needed to deal with.
For ten years or more, until my therapeutic confidence matured, I set myself apart – no, actually above – my clients in our therapeutic conversations. My mentors had taught me to keep my personal distance, so I wouldn’t confuse my clients with my own human foibles as I helped them work through theirs. They were confused, I would be the wise counsellor. They shared a problem to which I had the wise answer. I stayed in charge of the conversation and dealt out the insights that came from our imbalanced relationship. For me, it was a comfortable and safe therapeutic arrangement.
Then twenty years ago, a colleague gave me a book with a title that seemed too sentimental: A GENERAL THEORY OF LOVE. But it turned out to be one of the few books that has dramatically altered my life. Its principal author, Thomas Lewis, led me through an explanation of the biology of relationships – how our brains react to one another and how love alters these reactions – and then into a definition of a therapeutic relationship that is the exact opposite of my role as the wise authority.
Here’s a sentence that is typical of what he taught me: A therapist loosens his grip on his own world and drifts, eyes open, into whatever relationship the patient has in mind – even a connection so dark that it touches the worst in [the therapist]. [A GENERAL THEORY OF LOVE, p.178.]
I realized that if clients could climb out of their pain on their own, they would have done so long ago and avoided their nervous first phone call to a therapist. But as I know from my own experience, the crippling wounds many of us bring from our childhood and adolescence are beyond our ability to heal on our own. So at some point we pick up the phone, find our way to an office, and tell our story.
In the past, when I met a new client, I was comfortable and confident because I knew I was in charge and had nothing to be afraid of. That’s no longer the case. I now know that what I’m in store for is much more than getting close to a new person; together, we’re going deep into an experience that is foreign and often frightening.
Eyes open, I drift into a patient’s darkness, which they’ve been too frightened to explore on their own and which I initially find too complex to understand. I’m clearly not in charge here. I allow myself to be emotionally and spiritually absorbed by stories that are often terrifying, not just to my client but to me.
I certainly don’t enjoy it. It often leaves me feeling bruised from participating in the emotional wrestling match my clients live in. I wince at their stories of inflicted damage, am often reduced to silence by their suffering, bow my head and close my eyes to avoid seeing their shame. For weeks, months, this is the structure of our conversations: our mutual willingness to open ourselves to the pain that is so crippling.
I know now that I don’t have answers to their questions, balm for their wounds. In our search together for the truth, I can lean in close and listen, letting them know I’m present with them, for them - just as I learned to do with my grandchildren. I drift into their pain because it’s only when I’m there over time that they will trust me to understand them; and it's only when they trust me that they may find the courage to take my hand and begin the slow climb up out of their suffering.
That's just what I've been thinking - what scares you?
Blessings,
– Rick