Continuing bonds - part 2.

Once upon a time psychotherapists truly believed that the task of grieving was a severing; they believed, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the faster we ignore any memories of our lost loved ones - the faster we will recover. The work of grieving was understood in terms of energy, that the energy we had invested in the beloved now flowed into the grave with them. And, the more we remembered, the more we felt the loss. 

Put bluntly, in the older psychodynamic model - the dead provide us with no energy - and as our energy cannot be reciprocated by the dead, we should move on, let go, or risk depression. 

I cannot for a second, agree with this!

In the book, Continuing Bonds (1994) an example is given of psychotherapy at its most heart rending brutal worst. The concept that a refusal to let go of the loved one is a symptom of psychopathology justified a show of strength and resolution by a therapist as he metaphorically performed Chod, on a sixteen year old girl's mother.

Chod is the Tibetan ritual of cutting up the dead for the birds and dogs of the charnel ground. As wood was in short supply cremation was reserved for only the most revered Lamas, and as the ground was often frozen, grave digging would have been back breaking work - Chod was the preferred method; a  dismembering of the corpse performed by men with knives, to return the elements of the dead back to the world...

The choice of this therapist to do this in words and images, to talk in this way to a bereaved girl, breaks my heart.

Instead of talking with her about her mother as a dead person, her mother was referred to as an inanimate object consisting of degenerating anotomic structures such as skin, muscle, and bone. Such an attempt, after the phase of abreaction, serves to hasten the actual return to normal reality testing...(Volkan and Showalter, 1968. p.370)

The concepts underpinning this brutality had been described by Freud. So, no doubt the therapist who prepared himself to turn a beloved mother into a heap of muscle and bone, meant well.

Freud theorized that grief is different from depression in that he thought depression is caused by internalizing the parent. Grief, as Freud saw it, frees the ego from the attachment to the deceased (Continuing Bonds.p.5)

This concept - of the internalised parent as the cause of depression - lives on, to some extent in transactional analysis. And so, to go back to that awful, crucifying, session, after the therapist had learnt of my feelings for him - there is this snippet of dialogue:

He - And are you suggesting that me holding the boundary is another grief?

From my notes on the transcript.

And are you suggesting. It doesn't sound like a question. As I answer I am aware that I must not suggest that his holding the boundary 'is another grief''! No other option remains now...I must play the game by his rules. I describe what will happen as the task of accepting reality and letting go of potential futures  - and mourning those futures. [+]

I hadn't been suggesting. I had said that I was in grief, and knowing where his refusal to take me seriously would lead, I felt bereft and betrayed.

You could say to me that as the therapist allowed 'therapy' to continue, he respected my need for contact as a way for me to do as I'd said: to let go...But my words didn't match that aspiration because I don't believe that grief is about letting go! I needed to transform the story we were both weaving. My fall back position was to get to the truth of it, to know what had actually happened.

A failure then, on all sides.

One last thing - about Chod. 

Chod is also a Tibetan ritual practice, about feeding the demons with your own body. As it is a Tibetan practice no one should make the mistake of thinking that anything or anyone one is going to be killed. Or that demons are real. Tibetan Buddhism plays with reality and there is a vow  in place, not to kill! The practice of Chod is one of facing the worst fears imaginable, in a safe way. I'd say that Wim Hof method is a Chod practice for me.