For Only The Severely Metaphorical...

Tonight I am filled with thoughts of work, settling like smokey colors under the sea. A mind cloudied with beautiful things, like the artist's dirty paintbrush water (which is not really dirty, only lived in, only swirled in). I remember painting as a child, becoming more fascinatined with the ghost-like dance of the colors in the water cup than their stillness on the page. You could tell more about them there, in motion, in connection with some substance that moved. So perhaps I was meant to be here, to do this.

For, tonight, I think therapy is painting in a cup of water. People come to me and dip their paintbrush into the clearness of my mind, because they cannot know the color of themselves in isolation... because they need a safe space to watch their spirit float, to see the shape of things unfolding (the way the paint does, in undulous fingers through the water). Sometimes they think they come there to get clean. But I am not a priest. And I am not turpentine. The things they wish to be cleaned from are the soul-staining oil paints of this world and without them they are colorless, bland beings of no pain or joy. I have to help them love their colors (even the dark ones) and bleed from them some of the black and masks all this.

I do not believe in the tabula rosa. Freud thought therapists should be "blank slates" upon which patients wrote their secret troubles, or to use Aristotle's metaphor-- a cave wall upon which the troubled acted out the shadow-puppet dramas of their childhood. 100 years passed and then we had Carl Rogers, who said theraists should not be blank walls but mirrors-- reflecting back to the client who they really are. But they should be loving, also-- so perhaps mirrors in good light. :)

Now I am here, standing just over the precipice of the 21st century, in a field that is less than 200 years old and somehow rocketed into the forefront of society, a mismatched adolescent of a science. And all the people we read are men, and all my supervisors are men (despite the fact that most practicing therapists are women now), and the metaphors do not hold me. Perhaps that has nothing to do with them being men, but a particular brand of old, white, rich men (how cliche, I know) not from my time period.

For I have grown up from a young age feeling that the only certainty in life is uncertainty, the only constant change. I suppose there is no psychology yet built upon the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. I would be more satisfied with this-- a kind of quantum psychology--
chaos theory and the like. But the problem with those existing metaphors is that the two beings are not really connecting-- the shadow puppet and the wall, the mirror and the image. There is no contact, no actual intersection of persons and places.

So I would like to imagine that I water in a cup (not a cup of water). I am in three dimensions and have properties of my own (viscosity, tension, hue)-- some of which are innnate and constant, some of which I pick up from whatever the environment pours into me. Here, the client's emotions do not occur in a vacuum, but rather interact with who I am as a medium and as a person. I effect the way the colors move, as do a thousand things-- whatever has been dipped into me that day remains, so that blue is not always blue. If I am already pale purple from the previous client's brush (having not had time to clear my mind), then the next client's green will have a blue hint to it. But this is okay, because I will know this and I will think accordingly. The problem does not lie in a lack of clarity, but in the unawareness of this.

The point is that the client will learn, through joint observation, to develop a nonjudgmental curiosity about themselves, to become an astute observer of how their colors bleed and blend into the world's. So therapy, on the best days, is a watching of ghosts move underwater, coming to understand that mysterious movement and to use this knowledge to change the way one paints one's life in the world.

I saw a client today who used to paint everything in violent colors, because the thought the world was out to get her if she didn't get them first. Many months ago I saw Freedom Writers and thought of her, of the other world she grew up in-- a clash of red and black and burning yellow-- a place of gangs and sex and the constant threat of danger. Today she finally got to see the movie, and then I got to hear her reactions to it. She said it was so realistic it made her scared, and scared to love that life again. It made her dreadful, dread its icy grip upon her soul. Soon this girl must leave treatment and return to that neighborhood, where she must walk past the men she slept with, the women who beat her for 3 minutes straight (as an intiation into the gang). And she must not let them color her judgment, at least not too much.

Now I am lost in my own metaphor, which means this must make no sense to anyone else. Shamefully, I could go on like this forever in the land of abstracts. I could talk about what it means to clean the water, how therapists who get burned out are those that perhaps never pour out the water, and keep everything in their small cup until the world turns black and brown and too muddy to see how anything interacts. One doesn't have to change the water between every session (for some colors can add to each other and blend in a pleasing way)... but just every once in a while. I remember being a child and painting, liking the way the water grew and blended for a while, then a strong color came in and the cup became too muddied to see through, and then the water needed to be changed. It's like that with clients. And today I did not need to change the water too much, for my clients were similar in many ways... so that each color only added to my understanding of the other.

But enough rambling! I am now lost in imagery and I am not a painter. I suppose one could take from this only that I am obsessed with water and always have been. I think God is light, by the way (but not in a cliche or simplistic way, in a well thought-out exposition of the properties of light-- both particle and wave-- God being both there and not there), but people are water. At least I like to think of myself as water: I have properties of my own (though I flow to fit the container I am poured into). People cannot walk on me, but small things can rest upon the tension of my surface (like Jesus Bugs). I can take many forms, depending upon the situation-- still and calm for the timid times, a roaring current for when a loud spirit is needed. We all came from the sea (yay evolution!) and I think that's partly our obsession with returning, always, upon the first chance.

I think now of my roomate Christen who is no doubt comuning with the dark waves tonight. Please say hello to them for me, and write a poem about telephone wires and strange tides.

Buenos Suenos y bonita colores from the paintbrush cup. :)