And Now She Turns Again
At some point you stop calling them dark nights of the soul. This doesn’t mean they’re not dark, or nights, or of the soul, but I’m pretty sure they’re not supposed to be a regular occurrence, and it gets awkward when you tell your friends for the third time before your thirties that you’re having some kind of midlife crisis. Eventually you just say you’re having a rough time. That’s what I said during this last one, and now I feel as if I’m finally over a multi-year flu, and by God, the sun feels good on my face.
It’s been a more than a year since I’ve spoken to my therapist. In the last year I spoke to him, it was only every few months or so, but before that, he was my weekly therapist for a long time. Toward the beginning, working with him was clarifying, educational, helpful- even revelatory, cathartic. Toward the end he mostly stared at me empathetically as I plodded toward ever more refined articulations of where and how I was stuck. At some point, you have to call it.
It’s also been more than a year since I did any non-spontaneous meditation longer than 20 or so minutes. I still do/am done by something that can be called meditation when the moment strikes me, and still engage in a lot of mystical/spiritual activity, but the kind of ‘serious meditation practice’ stuff I was doing before has been largely shelved for now. I haven't been doing or any organized circling or similar group therapeutic modality of any kind, or attended any sort of spiritual community gathering. Until last month, I hadn’t tripped in years either. And now I’m turning a corner, rocketing towards and even past my goals for the first time in a long time. I'm dancing for hours, catching myself singing at random, and my creative output is exploding. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
Part of it was severe disillusionment. None of the above provided the kind of help I needed most in the challenges I faced in the last three years (most of which stemmed from health issues and whatever comes downstream of that), which, for someone who has been so profoundly aided by these things in so many other situations, was a bit shocking.
Part of it was just that some things can only be done from the inside, some things no one could have helped me with. But another substantial part of it was deep disappointment in many teachers and professionals, not just at their inability to help me, but their failure to help themselves. I felt upset at a lot of them, and I simply stopped thinking about most.
Some examples of what disappointed me:
A highly qualified and expensive IFS coach, after being told multiple times that a good portion of my childhood troubles were religious in nature, being unable to stop himself from inserting new age religious stuff into my head while guiding me through parts work at my most vulnerable. I told him not to do that anymore, he kept doing it. Also the IFS went nowhere (I’ve gotten much further on my own)
At the peak of a guided therapeutic intravenous ketamine session, I was deep in my shit, shaking and sobbing and feeling the horror of it all. The guide put her hand on my leg and said with a well-intentioned but sickly sweetness “oh sweety. Remember; everything happens for a reason!”.
A meditation retreat I attended years ago where the teacher spent an upsetting amount of time validating people's delusions instead of helping with seeing through them. I stormed out halfway through (an expensive move) and wrote an angry poem about it.
Kerfuffles involving a spiritual organizations I am or was fond of, and every other story/scandal/bummer coming from just about every other spiritual institution/community ever created.
A close friend went to a therapist to deal with her deep depression. She told him that she was sure a lot of it was due to the recent passing of her mother. “When did she die?” the therapist asked. My friend responded with the date. “Oh my God :)” the therapist responded. “That's like two days from my birthday :):):)” “Ok.” My friend responded.
My therapist of many years telling me his training doesn't cover my situation and not seeming to make a real effort to learn something new, try something different, take initiative to help in a way that might have been new or at the edge of his abilities. He also started feeling kinda LLM-y, in the sense that I could easily argue him into reversing and un-reversing positions he took with minimal effort.
I tried a potpourri of new highly recommended therapists in search of something new, but in the majority of cases, they either relied heavily on basic emotional education (“Here is how to regulate your nervous system! Do you know about breathing?”) instead of therapy, or obsessively hit me with their modality of choice in a way that felt like checking boxes rather than helping me specifically.
I'd get pointed back at the rough spots in my childhood or some such in an effort to address problems in the present that I could feel at a deep bone-and-gut level were not hauntings from my past but rather real threats in the present moment that could only be addressed there. At best this kind of work felt like looking clearly at the problem and then not doing anything about it. At worst it felt like re-traumatization.
Watching people I respect engage with therapy in a kind of doing-it-instead-of-doing-life kind of way. It can become the only frame through which you see things, the place you go to for meaning and a sense of progress, and as the balance between it and life gets worse, it eats into the thing it's supposed to be supporting.
My own failures in relationship to a formerly close friend of mine, as well as his. We overestimated our own emotional maturity, self-knowledge, and communicative acumen, under-estimated the risks of transformational relationships, and failed to salvage what was really cool about what we had going. The entire project we embarked on together was about increasing our capacity for connection and we lost ours in a shitty way.
A different coach/therapist I considered to be in the small minority of therapists who do more good than harm ghosted me after a few sessions for two full months, then reappeared to tell me they had gotten triggered during a session with me, then got triggered about being triggered, so just didn’t respond to my emails asking where they’d gone/what had happened.
But most importantly, the whole project just stopped being helpful at some point.
For a time, this was scary. I was pretty close to devoting myself to a career in therapy/meditation/etc. I went to school for it. I spent countless hours researching and working at it. If that’s not my thing, who am I?
Turns out I’m me. Dropping that stuff did very little to change what that means. There’s tons of things about me that remain the same or are invigorated by dropping a few special interests and world-frames. It’s actually fine. At times painful, terrifying, and overwhelming, but fine.
One example recently has been humor. To some extent I think I was engaging with humor as a means to other ends- ‘a joke can really help drive home an insight’ or some such. but lately I’ve been embracing humor for its own sake, and it’s been lovely. I got a job training AI to be funnier, mostly via joke writing. I leaned away from insight porn in my writing in general and toward a higher percentage of just straight jokes. I tried my hand at standup comedy, twice- and it went great! I also leaned toward humor in conversations and in my own thoughts for no reason other than it’s something I love, and I got better at it, and it helped me more than any stab at therapy has in a long time.
I changed my relationship to ‘purging’ and ‘processing’ etc. I thought that if I could just get some critical level of grief and frustration and trauma out of my body it would unlock some functioning or health I was missing, and that was just not true. Every time I went to therapy or whatnot and opened myself up to the oceans of grief I was feeling, I’d shake and cry and moan and it would feel relieving for all of an hour before the cup would immediately refill. I think it actively made things worse. less like taking a shit, more like tazing a dead frog. I’m done doing that to myself. If it wants to happen, it will make itself known and I won’t fight it. I’m done calling it up though. Even ‘making space for it’. Not helpful, the way things currently stand.1
I probably wouldn’t have believed you if you told me I’d end up taking a 3 year break from psychedelics, in my 20s no less. But I did, and now in my 30th year I’ve finally returned to them, and they are lovely, and will keep doing that for sure, albeit in a different way. I notice I’m far less ‘intentional’ and ‘formal’ and ‘ceremonial’ and ‘precious’ about them than I used to be.
Now I’m back- so back my spine is playing itself like a xylophone. So back I have to go sideways through doors. I’m backer than linebacker. I’m more back then humpback whale. It is an affront, how back I am.
Maybe it’s just a cycle I’ll need to do every decade or so- I had the really big one when I was 18, dropping God and Country and Community and all that, and maybe this is just another turn of the same wheel. That’s fine. I’m glad I can still change my mind, and change course. And looking back, the other side of the wheel contains a surprising amount of the first side- I feel closer to God and Country and Community than I did ten years ago. I won’t be surprised if I say the same about therapy and meditation and all that in ten years. But that certainly won’t mean nothing has changed.
Things have definitely changed.
