I still felt haunted at times by familiar old feelings. Getting As, winning research awards, presenting at international conferences—for the first time in years, I was feeling like a success and that my life was going somewhere. But that sense of achievement had a shadow side. I struggled with feelings of inadequacy for which no award could compensate. I could put in a grade A performance at graduate school, but at home, Miriam and I still got into arguments that left me feeling defensive, enraged, resentful, and brooding. I’d obsess for days or even weeks over actual or perceived rejections. But when my obsessive thinking and wounded feelings got unbearable, I could always go running, and it always helped. And I signed up for about four or five ultras per year, usually with a hundred-mile run in the summer. At the time, the compulsion to keep seeking out those kinds of extreme adventures was hard for me to put into words. I wasn’t consciously aware that they might offer a doorway to the feelings I was still struggling with.
I worked sixty-hour weeks for seven years to complete a doctorate in clinical psychology and two postdoctoral fellowships. I could never have imagined that the study of the mind would entail so much driving. Between the VA clinic where I saw combat veterans for trauma therapy, the hospital where I evaluated young people coping with early stage schizophrenia, the public library where I taught meditation, and the neuroimaging lab where I was researching the brain mechanisms of meditation, I sometimes drove over a hundred miles a day. One day my car broke down on the freeway, started smoking, and burst into flames. I called 911 and watched a team of first responders in special suits spray foam onto the nearby hillside, which by then was starting to smolder from the burning ruins of my Honda. I got a ride to the lab and finished an eighty-page report. There is a saying in the twelve-step world that one of the fruits of recovery is that defects become assets: after decades of chaos, a car breakdown was a bump in the road.
In the clinic, I listened to voices surrounded by the mountains. I heard voices of sorrow and despair and courage and endurance. I listened to suffering whose core wound tended to be the experience of surviving chaos that in the past had been borne alone. I saw my job as doing for others what other healers had done for me: creating an environment where people feel safe to follow the trail into the darkness. The framing perspective of the mountains in the painting reminded me where we were going: on a path toward the horizon of the known. I offered myself as a companion on that trail system of the mind. It was and remains the great honor of my life to join with others and participate in the healing that can occur when a fractured or frightened mind finds refuge within the safe horizon of an attentive consciousness. In the dead of night, it can be hard to believe that the tough spots where space and time start collapsing could ever make sense to anyone. It can feel like life has stopped in a place outside of reason. But there is a way forward. Then the trail circles round to the place you started from, but you feel safe and know the worst is behind you, that you don’t need to run anymore.
ABOUT A BILLION MILES out beyond Neptune there is a ring of misshapen lumps of rock and ice called the Kuiper Belt. Pluto resides in this realm. Pluto has a moon, Charon. According to one theory, billions of years ago Pluto and Charon were a single sphere. Something massive collided into it, and they split in two. Charon stayed in orbit around Pluto, like a loyal little brother. In Greek mythology, Charon was the ferryman of the underworld. My mother mentioned him in a poem that she wrote, entitled “Enchanted Land”:
Far away from the midnight air
A fair lady left the house.
Somebody scribbled scrawled
A message from the Enchanted Land.
Take a boat close to the docks.
Boatman, ferry me over the water
Where the fairy people dwell,
Enchanted Land away from this hell.
Like my mother, I had been in hell. I had gotten out. I knew that my mother was still suffering. She lived alone in public housing in England. She sent me emails and texts almost every day. I wrote back. I visited her with Miriam and our kids about once a year and brought her things for her flat. I wished there was more that I could do to help. I understood that I was coping with a kind of survivor’s guilt. When I ran away from the ruins, I had left people behind. Mum. Dad. Sebastian. I could remember how liberating it was to escape: The feeling of the blue sky above the Black Rock Desert. The lure of a distant horizon. The blue sky feeling had stayed with me. I felt it on the trail. After years of recovery, I carried the feeling inside me. I didn’t need to rush off somewhere far away again to find it. But there were other feelings I carried with me. The longer I stayed sober and built a stable life as a father, husband, runner, and psychology graduate student, the more I became aware of emotions underneath the surface of everyday awareness: the difficult feelings that before I got sober I’d have tried to suppress or distract myself from or self-medicate with drugs or alcohol. Fear. Shame. Grief. And most of all, anger: for me, that was the toughest feeling to tolerate, or even understand. I was afraid of it. Give voice to anger and I feared I might turn into my mother at her worst. But I knew I couldn’t run away from feeling it, or bury it forever beneath a civilized veneer. I needed to learn how to put the feeling into words. I needed a teacher. Running is powerful medicine for the mind. But it can’t heal everything.
Six years sober, I went back to therapy. I was in my third year of graduate school. Therapy is different when you’re not in a state of crisis. I went deeper. I chose a psychologist trained in a kind of therapy called interpersonal psychoanalysis. His name was Dr. Carson. Interpersonal psychoanalysis was created in the 1940s by psychologist Harry Stack Sullivan. He broke with the dominant view of the talking cure that had existed since the days of Sigmund Freud and that characterized the path to understanding the mind as a journey inside the depths of an individual psyche. Sullivan believed this view was false. To understand the mind, said Sullivan, you have to understand how it formed through interactions with other minds, what he called the interpersonal field. Dr. Carson was completely different from Dr. Jensen. He didn’t just sit in silence and say, Uh-huh, and answer a question with a question or What would it mean to you if I answered that? When I asked Dr. Carson a question, he told me what he thought. He shared his own thoughts and ideas about whatever I was talking about. I had no idea therapy could be like that. Lying on the couch, week after week, I began to trust that he was right behind me, paying attention to everything I said. I didn’t feel like I needed to impress him. I didn’t feel like he was judging me. I didn’t worry that anything I wanted to share might disgust or overwhelm him. I didn’t even feel like I had to make sense all the time. I could just let my mind run free, and trust that if I needed help with anything I was saying or remembering or failing to remember, I could ask him, and he would tell me what came to his mind. He didn’t pretend to be omniscient. But after decades of working with people who had survived traumatic early life experiences, he had some solid ideas about the nature of human development and the ways that early trauma shapes a growing mind. “I see my job as helping people understand feelings they have about experiences they lived through but can’t remember,” he said. “I want you to know that you’re supposed to have all your feelings. I want you to be okay with experiencing your anger, and talking about it.”
I came to understand why it had taken me so long to make sense of my past, circling back on the same shards of memory, again and again, but never feeling as if I touched the core of whatever it was I’d been through.
In the presence of Dr. Carson, I reflected on my collapse into the Darkness when I was fifteen. How apocalyptic that moment had seemed. It hadn’t made sense at the time. With the passage of years, it made even less sense, looking back. How could two mediocre exam results feel like the end of the world? Between my unbearable feelings and the memory of the experience that appeared to evoke them, there was a gap. A void.
I reflected on other voids. The day I lay on my bed in uncontrollable tears after I hid the ca
ndy in my boots. The day I ran down the mountain. My dread of nuclear holocaust. The inexplicable sadness that followed me around India. Each time I fled the Darkness, I didn’t look back. I felt like I was running away. But I was following an unconscious path that led me around in a circle, back into the same feelings of fear and rage and despair.
I reflected on my earliest memories and stories of experiences I lived through prior to conscious memory. The day my mother left me in the van. I wondered about even earlier experiences, times perhaps as an infant when I was alone and frightened in the dark and no one heard my cry.
Sometimes late at night, running in the mountains, seventy or eighty miles into a hundred-mile run, a feeling of depletion would seep through my soul that reminded me of the hell I had suffered in my downward slide toward the psychic death of severe depression. One of those nights I found myself walking slowly on a snowy trail thousands of feet above Lake Tahoe. I had been awake and moving through the mountains for twenty hours. There had been record snowfall in the Sierra Nevada. I shivered in the cold. I shuffled forward on bandaged feet, wincing with pain from blisters. I couldn’t remember why I had ever set forth on such a futile and arbitrary ritual of self-punishment. I’m done, I thought. At the next aid station, I’m bailing. My mind was made up. As the aid station got closer, I announced my decision to my pacer, a veteran ultrarunner by the name of Rajeev. He tried to talk me out of quitting. “But it’s only twenty miles to go!” he said. “You’re so close! You can do it!” He tried telling me stories of ultrarunners plumbing similar depths of overwhelm and dejection and finding their way forward to redemption in the dawn. He recited verse by the Indian poet Ghalib. I was long past the persuasive reach of positivity, via verse or fable. All I could think about was getting into a hot bath and seeing Miriam. I hobbled down the mountain to a ski lodge near the lake. I took off my race bib and got a ride to my lodgings. I had my hot bath and went to bed. Miriam had gone out somewhere. Following a couple of hours of dreamless sleep I awoke with feelings of despair and thoughts that I had failed in some profound way. The intensity of those feelings seemed disproportionate even at the time to the ostensible fact of an unfinished mountain run. I felt like an unfinished person. In the results on ultrarunning websites the acronym for those who do not finish is DNF: did not finish. I had finished plenty of ultras in the past. I could finish plenty more in the future, if I chose to do so. But will that take away this unfinished feeling? Or am I a spiritual DNF?
My life in many respects remained a stable one. I loved being a dad. I loved being married to Miriam, building a life and family together. And I loved graduate school. I loved learning how to listen and respond with care and skill to patients in psychotherapy, integrating everything I had learned about the body and the mind from books and hard-won life experience. And I loved exploring deep scientific questions about the neurology of self-awareness. To me those questions weren’t abstract: they were matters of life and death.
But the unfinished feeling stayed with me. A vague sense of lack. Being in graduate school certainly compounded that perception. Psychology training was like a mountain with a hundred false summits before you reach the actual peak. I was always applying for something. A position in a research lab. A clinical placement. An internship. Then a postdoctoral fellowship. Then another postdoctoral fellowship: You know, just because. Because I could never be smart enough. Good enough. Because I was never enough. On an emotional level, I hadn’t moved on from who I was in Mrs. Mahon’s class at St. Peter’s Primary School, the little boy with all the right answers.
And there were things I still didn’t know, a kind of knowledge that I sensed I wouldn’t acquire no matter how many fancy fellowships I pursued: the kind of insights that bubbled up as if from nowhere in a long run, when the thinking mind shuts down, beyond the threshold of reason.
One day I was sitting in the office, on a break between patients. I had finished seven years of clinical training, passed the state and national exams for licensure as a psychologist, and gotten a job as a psychotherapist in a community clinic in a high-poverty neighborhood in the Bay Area. Scrolling through an ultrarunning website, looking for my next adventure, I came across a listing for the Tahoe 200. As I pictured the lake in the mountains, a memory of meeting Miriam there almost twenty years before flashed into my mind. Then I remembered my first fifty-mile ultramarathon on the Tahoe Rim Trail, and the transformative moment in that run that propelled me on the forward path that sent me running another ten thousand miles toward the life I now had as a happy father and husband and psychologist. I wondered what might happen if I went back there.
I sensed that it might be time to look back again. I hadn’t done so in a while. After I had finished the twelve steps, the following decade had been all about moving forward. Sobriety frees up an astounding amount of energetic bandwidth. Between taking my kids to school, cooking, cleaning, reading bedtime stories, cramming for exams, sitting with patients in session, writing academic papers, traveling to conferences, and running trails, every day was a sort of multidisciplinary ultramarathon. Meanwhile Miriam was working just as hard, if not harder, as a parent and in her work as an industrial designer. By the time we curled up together in bed at night for a few minutes of Netflix before we zonked out, my heart was full of gratitude. But days as full as that didn’t leave much time for looking back at the steps that led up to the present, to make sense of the shape of the trail. The view from where I was in the present, looking forward a couple of steps, was more than enough.
But that day, seeing a photo of the lake on my computer screen, I reflected on the long path I’d traveled from the chaos of my teenage years in England, through the psych ward and AA meetings to the neuroscience lab and the clinic I was sitting in, waiting for my next patient to arrive. I was conscious of having reached firm ground after traveling an improbable path. My recovery from depression and addiction was never guaranteed—there were many times when I had come close to death by suicide or drug overdose—but I was more fortunate than some. I found it illuminating to consider how even slight variations in that path might have led me into permanent darkness. Swap Mrs. Mahon for someone less caring and I might never have embraced books and reading in the way that got me into Oxford and in the end my doctorate. Cancel my trip to Burning Man in 1999 and I’d never have met Miriam. Remove Dr. Jensen, Dr. Browning, Dr. Hewitt, or Mike, and I might never have gotten out of that bathtub. Swap white skin for black or brown skin when the police stopped me while driving high and I might well have wound up in prison or shot to death. Take away Jim and AA and I’d likely have relapsed on cocaine and wound up divorced and miserable or buried in a box underground. Take away Dr. Carson and I never would have understood the painful feelings that lingered from experiences I’d lived through but could only recall in fragments or not at all. Take away the mountain trails and I never would have felt the joy in early recovery that showed me life could be worth living, that provided the strength to explore new paths, and that gave me a space to dream.
What a long, strange trip it had been. It occurred to me that someone, somewhere, might feel encouraged by hearing what I’d been through. I had no illusion that my experience was universal. And I was aware that mental health professionals almost never tell their own stories. Nothing in the law or the ethical codes of the mental health professions prohibits clinician self-disclosure. It is an unspoken, informal convention that nonetheless functions with a lawlike force, restraining candid speech. The conventional wisdom used to be that in order for therapy to work, therapists needed to function as “blank slates” upon which patients could project their longings, needs, and fantasies without the interference of knowing their therapists’ actual biographies. But the blank slate is a myth: therapists can’t avoid disclosing aspects of their identities automatically, for no other reason than their existence is embodied in directly observable features like ethnicity or age. Yet the de facto prohibition against therapist self-disclosure persists, in large part
I believe because of stigma, and perhaps an overidentification by therapists in a “helper” role and corresponding anxieties around any concessions to their own experiences of human vulnerability. I believe it’s time as a society that we move forward to a more honest and open dialogue about the reality of mental health. Removing stigma won’t eliminate mental illness, but it will make it easier to talk about it without adding an extra dose of shame to an already painful experience. Nobody wants the therapist who responds to the patient’s story by saying, “Well, you think you’ve got problems . . .” The point of therapy is to heal the patient, not the doctor. But I don’t believe that any harm can come from greater clinician self-disclosure within appropriate circumstances. To the contrary, perhaps clinicians could model a compassionate and nonjudgmental attitude about mental illness by giving voice to their own experiences.
I stared at the lake on my computer screen, and I contemplated the prospect of running nonstop for days and nights the whole way around it, and I tried to picture just how exhausted I might become in the ultramarathon’s later miles, and whether I was brave enough to submit to such an ordeal, and what sort of lessons I might learn once I spent long enough in the waking dreamworld of the mountain run, once I reached the limits of reason, and stepped beyond them.
* * *
It’s around eight in the evening, Monday. My fourth straight day in the mountains. The trail’s winding downhill in the twilight. I’ve been on my feet and moving for seventy-two of the past eighty hours. Everything has hurt too much, for too long, wearing me down. I’m ready to drop. I don’t think anyone could hold it against me. I’ve run one hundred eighty miles. Climbed around thirty thousand feet of rugged mountain trail. Struggled through heat and cold and dizziness for four days and three nights on just eight hours sleep in total. The end is still twenty-four miles away, over the hardest section of the course, an extremely steep, boulder-strewn jeep track called the Rubicon Trail, followed by a two-thousand-foot climb to Barker Pass, followed by a seven-mile descent to complete the clockwise circle back at Homewood. The final cutoff for runners to complete the race is noon tomorrow. That gives me twelve hours to cover twenty-four steep, rough miles. Moving at my current glacial pace, to have any hope at all of covering the distance still ahead in the time available, I’ll need to nix my catnap and plod the whole night through. It’s a nightmarish prospect. No doubt if I drop now I’ll feel a twinge of disappointment tomorrow. But I’ll take it. At least I can stop soon. There’s only so much suffering I can bear.
Running Is a Kind of Dreaming Page 26