In Part One of this article, I mentioned that these moments often come and go, and - like a forgotten dream - are not allowed to impart their sense of new possibilities. Often, unless we are reviewing our own sessions on videotape, with trained supervisors, we won't even know these moments have arisen, been missed and passed us by. Or else, we may not even recognize that we did play our part in altering the rhythm of the session, thereby allowing the pivotal moment to expand and deepen.
I find in these moments, we can meet our patients both implicitly (via body language, tone of voice and gaze) as well as explicitly (verbally and directly). So, changing the prosody of our delivery, we might simply state: something changed there for you, or, can you tell me more about how that feels, to have something awaken in you.
In this case, there was a great shifting of values and priorities, and a chance to allow memories of early messages from her mother to emerge. She recalled being encouraged, at a young age, to distance herself from the world of approval-seeking and of mainstream displays of success. Now, an accomplished mother herself, she was perhaps preparing to impart a similar message, refined by her own experiences, to her own children.
When I think about other pivotal moments, one that comes to mind is an old one told by Ram Dass. Back when he was Richard Alpert (not to be confused with the ageless character on the TV series Lost), he travelled through India, searching, until one day he met a man who could see him as he was. The act of being seen, of knowing that his interiority was recognizable by another, set off a radical transformation of his sense of living in the world.
Gott Mit Uns and Dieu Avec Nous
In his soldier's memoir and moral history of the Great War, Under Fire: The Story of a Squad (Le Feu: Journal d'une Escouade), Prix Goncourt recipient Henri Barbusse leaves us with an unforgettable scene. In it, he is underground, surrounded by a overflowing sea of wounded men. Near the end of a French offensive, the sleepless medics and doctors lack the manpower or resources to care for all the casualties, who endure their maiming and pain mostly quietly. One of the wounded the narrator overhears is known only as the aviator. He has been badly burned and is patiently awaiting treatment or evacuation. The aviator relates his story of flying over No Man's Land on a Sunday morning, where he can - for a moment - simultaneously view both a French and a German religious service. He is mesmerized by the fact that they are essentially identical. And yet how can God be with both sides. Isn't this impossible? Struggling with this, he briefly surmises: "But there's only one God. It's not where the prayers come from that bother's me, it's where they go."
In pivotal moments, often we are struggling with a new, more mature spiritual view of life. As it has been said, religion is for those fearful of hell, while spirituality is for those who have already endured it.
So, I can imagine that the aviator may continue to deepen his outlook as he processes this haunting image and his wounds, but instead the dugout comes under shellfire, and we are unsure if he ultimately survives.
If war is ultimately about confusion and loss, sometimes therapy can be a powerful opportunity to re-visit painful, obscured and traumatic memories, now with the support of an attuned and caring therapist and the calm of the present moment.
Yours Will Do Nicely: Writing and the Pivotal Moment
In her first collection of short stories, "death is not an option" young American writer Suzanne Rivecca seems particularly adept at creating characters who find their way to pivotal moments. Like her, they struggle with their Catholic upbringing. They also struggle with what are poignantly contemporary struggles; with belonging, identity and self-image. Near the end of the story Yours will do Nicely, the young female character confronts the recent act of lying to a man for whom she possessed a powerful attraction. This man recognized her lies and discontinued their relationship. At the same time, a male "best friend" is next door, seeking solace after she had read aloud from a sex magazine she had found in his apartment, while ostensibly helping him to move.
"It was then - sitting alone on the only remaining piece of furniture in Tom's apartment as he jerked off in his bedroom and those kids spun below me, suspended at the end of their long chains like marionettes - that I thought about, for the first time, how I'd lied to Jason. And I'd known all along, but still the knowledge felt new, and stunning. The palm-reader thing was true but none of the rest. I was never anorexic. Tactless strangers regularly asked me if I was; but I'd always been naturally skinny. And all I could remember about Catholic school were the hymns and laughing with Rachel all the time and how an ancient priest said, "Just try to be nicer", when I confessed the sin of mocking some poor girl's hair. The guy at the Rainbow Festival didn't try to rape me. Maybe he would have, but I never went into his tent with him. I would never have been that stupid. And even though I knew these things weren't the exact truth, they were a variation of it, and they felt true as I wrote them down. And they still felt like the truth - as if on some deeper, irreproachable level, those incidents hatched me like a newborn chick and I'd crawled from the wreckage of them with a bright new face. They had to have happened, because if they hadn't, how could I explain the unhappy accident of myself?"
It's a pleasure to write these words down, to sense the deepening of experience here, meaning created through shifting connections, disconnections and reconnections. We all know from hard experience in the trenches of therapy that change is neither linear nor straightforward, or at least we know that change like that never lasts or withstands the challenges of everyday life. True change emerges like this, erratic and unsteady. At first it sounds unreal and contradictory, until finally, if we can hold space, a new sense emerges, a deeper albeit less clear sense of things that can endure the challenges of life. This new sense of being and interconnectedness with life is now flexible enough to allow us to navigate what Dan Siegel calls the river of awareness, which flows between the treacherous regions of rigidity and chaos.
In Part 3, I will complete this series, providing a clinical example related by Jim Duvall in the Hincks-Dellcrest workshop.
Take some time again to reflect on your own experiences, when - in a pivotal moment - a new vista opened up before you, and you walked away with a more mature, less simplified, less rigid or less defensive attitude towards life.
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