Risa Denenberg's Open Salon Blog

Therapy's Trapdoor

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 20:01:05 -0500

I found this in one of my many small notebooks, dated 12/21/01, and thought I would share it here:

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We're looking for a cure for things that have no words

Many therapy-averse people I have met explain their disdain for therapy in this way: Why should I do digging around in the past? What's the point? How is that going to help me?

There is a trapdoor in therapy, one in which the patient can become so involved in the past that she believes that restitution and healing must occur there; losing sight of the reality that the past can never be changed, rescued, or healed. There may be an outer understanding of this 'present' fact, and yet the affiliation and loyalty to the past can become so large, it can totally envelop the person. She falls into the past.

Now, of course, you could say that this was the original problem for which she comes to therapy--responding to a troubled past instead of being free to live in the present. Yet, it's different now because now the response is conscious, more elaborate and more powerfully compelling. It feels like this: If I only could go back there and fix this. I must go back there and fix this. There is no other way for me to heal. It truly becomes an obsession.

At this stage, the therapist must be willing to confront the patient. The patient will be in shock of course--she currently thinks the therapist exists in her past and can go there with here for the express purpose of supporting her as she does her work there. I say this to therapists: You too may have been drawn into her magical thinking. Be brave. Only by refusing to live in her past with her can you provide some small incentive for her to shoulder the real task of therapy: to heal the present and take responsibility for her own choices.

Being with the therapist in the room where the therapy is taking place must itself become a more compelling reality, a more attractive option, a more powerful defense, than returning over and over again to the past.

During my many years of therapy, I was continually wary of falling into a predictable stage in which I would become so self-involved as to be loathsome not just to others, but to myself. I didn't know then, of course, that it was OK for me to take my own needs at least as seriously as I take the needs of others. I vowed that I would stop therapy instantly if I started to see these traits in myself--complaining, self-involvement, entitlement, over-sensitivity, humorless assertiveness.

Thankfully, when I arrived at just that very stage, I had a hunch that it was just a stage, and furthermore, I was far too involved in the process at that point to stop. But I did find that there really is this particularly dangerous trapdoor in therapy--and it is exactly what my therapy averse friends warned me about--living in the past, blaming the past, responding to the present as if it were the past.

I would say to anyone considering therapy that if you can bypass the past and learn to live in the present--by all means do so. There is absolutely nothing that can be accomplished in the past and virtually nothing that cannot be healed in the present.

Yet most of us live in the past and need to revisit the past for months or years in therapy before we develop the legs we need to walk into the present and place our hopes and dreams solidly in the future, if not entirely in the present.

Sadly, many of us are still hoping to change the past.

Still writing

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 23:10:30 -0400

I've not disappeared, but for the past months, I've been intensely writing poems. I've written (and read) poetry all my life, but something new is happening with the work. Which makes me utterly grateful.

I have kept an eye on the blogs here though.

If you're interested, and I hope you are, check out this site to see some of my work.

http://www.soundzine.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=172:risa-denenberg&catid=34:poetry&Itemid=53

Risa's aphorisms

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 14:08:26 -0400

Life is short, no need to commit suicide.

Spending always rises to meet income.

You can’t clean anything without making something else dirty.

You can do anything you want to do. However, you can’t do everything you want to do.

A small full life is more satisfying than a large empty one.

For every loss, there is a hidden gain.

Why do I keep the refrigerator door open when I’m cooking? To save energy.

The best advice I’ve ever gotten was from a yoga teacher who told me to try to be a ‘C’ student.

I’m capable of the best and worst of human thoughts and actions. This reminds me to be forgiving and empathetic.

I’ve learned a lesson from how men do housework: never become fully competent at something you’d rather not do.

Don’t hang out with people who don’t like you as you are. Many people do like you, but if you hang out with the ones who don’t, you will start to believe you are a horrible person, and then you will become that horrible person.

Since you’ll never really know what’s best among choices, make confident decisions with little regret.

Percocet doesn’t take away pain; it just changes one’s perspective on dealing with pain.

There will never be a moment’s peace because there is so much that must be done. The undone is a major source of life’s tension and misery. Uncompleted tasks fall off the list proving that were not really so important. They are immediately replaced with urgent new things that must be done. And so on, until you die.

I once believed that it was possible to learn all that could be known about one subject and through that endeavor gain universal knowledge. It was a simplistic notion based on the premise that parallel lines converge at infinity. It was an imperfect understanding of knowledge that I now renounce.

Memory loves lies.

Love has turned out to be something quite different than I expected.

Closing Up Shop

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 13:08:05 -0400

I've been thinking for some time now about getting rid of stuff. Mostly just thinking about it. I disposed of quite a lot of furniture, books, and sundry duplicate items when I sold my home in Pennsylvania and moved to Seattle. But I carried a truckload--literally--of possessions cross-country, and now two years down the road, I have begun to re-acquire "things", especially books, which now line a whole wall in my living room. And this, despite living in a city with the world's finest libraries.

My niece, who spent a Junior semester abroad in Bolivia and Peru, told me that the people she met during her months there didn't have or use forks. "Everyone has a bowl and a spoon. That's about it. You don't need a fork, really. Forks are kind of pretentious. The people there are just not materialistic," she explained. I'm guessing there is a bit more to the story, but the idealization of living contentedly from spoon to mouth is a lovely one, to my imagination anyway.

There are two reasons for my concern with my own accumulation of things, although they do merge at a future point. First is the rational goal of simplifying my life. Having less possessions, wanting less, living a smaller life, being happy with less, eschewing acquisitiveness, spending less, preparing for a less "thing-filled" aging. Learning to live with less income is an imperative that is no longer lurking around the corner, but has come in the door to greet me. After all, I don't have the job security that I once took for granted.

Preparing for a simpler life leads quite naturally to the impending task of preparing for my death. For many of us at death, possessions float into a world of limbo. Even the most meticulous of planners likely leave many possessions without a plan for their disposition. The piles of bills and bank statements. The duplicate herbs and spices. The broken TV set. In my case, a large file drawer of handwritten journals. I would like to relieve my son and others who may have to help him with the task of closing down my home after my death, the emotionally draining burden of going through my stuff and deciding what to do with it.

I have closed shop--so to speak--twice in my life. I've helped with this task many times, but on two occasions it fell entirely to me to close down an apartment and decide how to deal with another person's possessions. One, my best friend, the other, my mother. Both experiences were harrowing, each in its own way.

Jon lived in the East Village, NYC, and died of complications of AIDS in the summer of 1993. Although he had given explicit instructions outlining his political will regarding his death (please see Jon Greenberg's funeral procession at ACTUP NY's site on Political Funerals), he left no legal will, no advance directive, nothing to guide me in the protean after-death tasks other than an unspoken but clear understanding that I would take care of the details. In his last days in the hospital, he wrote checks to pay his bills, put them in stamped envelops, and asked me to mail them. I did so reluctantly, aware that I would need any funds he still had to help with cremation expenses and to hold on to his apartment for at least another month so that I could close it properly.

On the day after his memorial event in Thompkins Square Park, I invited his parents into his apartment to talk and share our grief. In the short version, his mother accused me of 'stealing' her rightful experience, and his father appraised his stereo speakers. Only years later have I begun to soften my feelings towards them and their private grief. Meanwhile, I had open house for two weeks, letting friends come and take what they would. I never relinquished his journals, which I was unable to read until several years later--the grief was too close. Jon came to NYC as a young gay man in 1978 and journaled about his emotional and spiritual life from 1978 to a few months before his death in 1993. I continue to struggle with these journals, and my efforts to publish a series of poems that I wrote as a result of having to handle and hold this burning treasure.

My mother's apartment was a mess at the time of her death at age 82. Thankfully, she was able to stay in her own home until the end, and we had months of really good time together as her illness progressed, but the usual well organized person she had always been dwindled over months or years so that after she was gone it was impossible to figure out what papers were important and which were decades-old bills and bank statements. It was a jumble. It was an emotional train wreck to go through, finding surprises, evidence of my own existence that startled or embarrassed me, evidence of her life that I knew nothing about. My brother was only minimally and peripherally helpful in the task and at the end, I had to pay someone a handsome sum to cart the detritus away, feeling guilty, spent, and confused.

Even the death of my sweet companion Jezebel-the-cat has left me alone with her possessions, a cupboard full of kitty treats and canned Fancy Feasts, two carry-ons (one in pink-and-green stripes), and other cat paraphernalia. I should take it to a shelter, and will some day, but don't have the heart to yet.

As for me, I am preparing to pare down, wade through, and as consciously as possible, trim the sails. Before I die.

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Here is a practical and informative blog about cleaning out a house after a death.

Seasons of Corn --- repost

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 20:08:37 -0400

People do change, although we don't change because others want us to, and we can't force others to change even when we think it would be good for them or because we wish they would. Even I can change. Do change. We change when it makes sense, when we are ready, when the benefits outweigh the hazards, when longing overcomes grief and intransigence. When we are blessed and offered a gift. When we have no other choices for survival. When we learn that it's not sinful to be happy. When we are confronted with the need to care for our own self, so that we can continue to work , continue to love, continue to care for others. When we notice things we have always ignored; suddenly see that which has been hidden or denied.

I have always had difficulty with attachment. I like living alone. I will not miss you when I don't see you for months. I don't call. You have to call me and pursue me to hold on to me. There is a history to this, it is unimportant. In some ways it's a simple fear of abandonment. In some ways I have a transcendent sense of attachment. I don't need to be in your presence to hold on to the connection. I accept that things are not lost, sometimes we just don't know where they are, what they have become. Because I am leaving, again changing my life completely (seemingly), I am having to answer to what it is I will miss here. In this place. At this job. During this epoch of my living.

Here is where I drive to work everyday along country roads where farmland is abutted by tracts of enormous new homes, many burdened with the effects of over-financing. There are these fields that have homes scattered on them with no trees in sight. Stupid for homes, right? But then there are fields and fields of corn. Mostly corn, some soybeans. It is hilly land and corn grows well on it. Sweet corn and field corn. Corn for fresh-picked, salt-buttery summer eating and corn for fuel. Corn meal, maize, mush, polenta, corn syrup. Corn.

I will miss the seasons of corn. The land tilled and reddish and ready. The short green stalks. Watching, almost day by day how high the corn grows, the ears now visible, stalks as tall as I am. That's where we are now in late July. Corn stalks shimmering in streams of hot sunlight, bending with torrential rains. Corn, corn, corn. Later--which I will miss this year--the ears will all be harvested, some yellow, some white, stalks slowly turning brown. Dying. Some farmers will plow them under in the fall, others let them stand til spring, letting snow fall over them. Finally plowed under, tiny stalks rise again. Generations of corn, parent, daughter, granddaughter, again, again, again. Seasons of corn.

I will miss these seasons of corn. As a metaphor for missing everything else that is here and won't be in Seattle, where I am heading. But of course it will be here still. As will everything else. Be here still. Be still. Watching seasons of corn. Taking nothing, taking everything, with me.

reprinted from http://risaden.blogspot.com/2008/07/seasons-of-corn.html July 28, 2008