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The Pain of Self-Reflection by Dr. Deb Hirschhorn
Dr. Deb The Pain of Self-Exploration
By Deb Hirschhorn, Ph.D.
Icould not think of a topic for this article all day. I was wracking my brain, and nothing came to me. Finally, I thought I’d take a little break and walk over to the mikvas keilim to toivel some small glass containers I had bought. I dropped a container into the basket and reached into the icy water to fetch it. Man, it was cold. Then a second, third, and fourth. When I was finished, my right hand was numb from the cold. And as I walked out the door, the title and content of today’s article came to me.
So, there you go. The power of a mitzvah, especially one that comes at a cost, even a small cost.
But that is not the topic that came to me. I just thought the background would be interesting.
Every so often – and it’s pretty often, actually – I’ll hear from one spouse that their partner does not want to engage in therapy. The majority of the time it’s the wife who has a reluctant husband. Like the recent couple that signed up for my intensive program although the husband was saying he didn’t “need” it because knowing how to treat your spouse should be “natural.”
Well, yes, according to her, he naturally would yell and criticize her. Hmm.
So right on the spot, I offered him a refund. I certainly don’t want people working with me who resent being in the program and don’t do the homework because of it. With tears rolling down his cheeks, he said “no” to that offer and that he would do the work to prevent a divorce if that’s what it would take.
The next day he texted me that he is miserable and also very angry but couldn’t put his finger on why.
He took a two week break before starting, and when he returned, he texted me that he did not want to do the program and he was quite sure he would not benefit from it.
Well, with my IFS (Internal Family Systems) Level I course being over, I totally get it in a way I never did before. The course, like my own couples program, is a combination of didactic and experiential learning. The experiential piece means that we get to be the therapist and the client at times. But being a client is not a role play; it’s for real.
That means you have to think about something in yourself that hurts or disturbs you in some way and get down to the roots of it with another trainee being therapist and a supervisor stopping the action every once in a while to check on where the therapist is going.
Well, in general, being a therapist means that you do a lot of self-examination. Maybe too much, actually. Which led me to wonder about something that I began to realize when one of my clients teased me. The background of the tease is that within the scope of IFS, there are no bad parts. Every part of us is trying to help us in some way, and if it doesn’t look too helpful, that’s because these parts developed when we were kids. I love this philosophy; it resonates with me.
So the tease went like this: I was trying to see the positive side of something the person was saying. Finally, they said to me, “If you were talking to someone with the IQ of, say, a peach, you would just call them ‘intellectually challenged.’” In truth, I couldn’t stop laughing because they’d nailed me.
But I did start wondering about this at the training. When am I negative? Only when confronting mishaps from my computer. Am I too much of a cheerleader? Why, anyway? Isn’t there a place for negativity?
So I decided that that would be the question for one of my many “therapy” experiences in the training. Not two minutes into our session, I recalled sitting at my desk back where I grew up with my father standing next to the desk, displeased. I had done something “wrong” only I didn’t think it was wrong. My father, who was otherwise a compassionate, kindly, and loving father, took my mom’s side in everything and wouldn’t let me explain my own position.
Not only wasn’t I allowed to talk back, but I couldn’t write it down and pass the note along to them, either. I felt hurt, misunderstood, and mistreated.
For years, I recalled this scene without knowing what it was I was being accused of and how I felt. But that day, in the training, I remembered. It’s funny how the answers just kind of bubble up from within when you’re not trying to search for them. The feeling that came to me is that I was not loved.
I was also very angry. I channeled my anger into a long note that said everything I had to say, and then I tore it to shreds and threw it out.
The unloved feeling was hiding behind the anger, which was hiding in the note. And then it got torn up and thrown away. Anger wasn’t allowed, and it vanished. But I didn’t feel good. I was left with an awful feeling, in fact.
But here’s Chapter 2 of that story.
My first thought after that was “that poor kid! And my poor mother!” In my mind, I embraced them both. I know my mother wanted to feel love for me; she’d gone through so much just to have me. But the pain she carried for her reasons made love hard for her. She’d hoped I would miraculously remove her pain just by my appearance in this world and that didn’t happen (of course). Well, it never does, and it can’t.
Not knowing why nothing she did worked, she blamed little me, the one person who was “supposed” to make everything better. That’s why I wanted to hug her and soothe her. Poor mom, how she suffered. How privileged I am to have stopped the chain of suffering. And it did stop. Simply by mentally embracing them both.
So, yes, self-exploration takes you to painful places, but as a client said today, “I feel lighter because of it.” And the pain is short-lived because there’s a solution at hand, a solution that feels real. Mind you, the brain cannot tell the difference between imagined emotional interactions and real ones. And maybe my mother “knows” somewhere, where she is, that I embraced her. And forgave her totally.
