by Mark Epstein
“It means being able to survive one’s child’s rage,” I would answer.
“And what does it mean to survive the rage?” they would ask.
“Not to be invasive and not to be rejecting,” I would say. “To be able to hold their anger and be open to their experience without abandoning them but without retaliating either.”
Sharon understood that I was applying mindfulness to emotional experience, not just to the physical sensations of the body or the breath. Although I did not know it at the time, despite having been her friend for years, Sharon had a special reason to be attuned to this way of working. She had suffered terribly in her childhood and had worked very hard, with the help of Buddhist teachers she’d met before I knew her, to deal with the negative self-image her suffering had engendered. In 2001, she published a book called Faith in which she courageously revealed the many losses of her childhood and described how Buddhism had helped her in their wake. Her book had a profound effect on me. Right Speech was emphasized from the beginning.
“Each of us tells ourselves some kind of story about who we are and what our life is about,” Sharon wrote in the first sentence of the book. “The story I told myself for years was that I didn’t deserve to be happy. Throughout my childhood I believed that something must be intrinsically wrong with me because things never seemed to change for the better.”
That was putting it mildly. Sharon’s history was difficult to hear. When she was four, her father disappeared. When she was nine, Sharon had to call an ambulance when her mother, watching TV with her while recovering from minor surgery, started bleeding uncontrollably. Sharon never saw her again; she died two weeks later in the hospital. When Sharon was eleven, her grandfather, with whom she had gone to live, passed away, and her father reappeared. Six weeks after coming home, her father took an overdose of sleeping pills and spent the rest of his life in the mental health system, never to return. Sharon lived with her grandmother until going away to college at the age of sixteen.
She was eloquent in her book about the consequences. One of the most difficult things, she said, was that no one spoke openly about all of the losses she’d endured. There was “an ambient, opaque silence” in the place of any real discussion. This is by no means rare. Patients I have seen whose parents committed suicide or died of illness when they were young almost uniformly report that no one ever spoke of it around them. Sharon described how her feelings of grief, loss, anger, confusion, and despair had to be hidden from the people in her life and from herself.
“The story I was telling myself was that what I felt didn’t matter anyway,” she wrote. “I didn’t care about anything, or so I hoped it seemed. I came to know very well the protection of distance, of a narrow, compressed world. Though it was my own act of pulling back, I felt forsaken. . . . For years, I hardly spoke. I barely allowed myself a full-blown emotion—no anger, no joy. My whole life was an effort to balance on the edge of what felt like an eroding cliff where I was stranded.”
Sharon had the good fortune—after years of misfortune—to find the inspiration in Buddhism to turn herself around. Traveling in India while still in college, she stumbled upon some wonderful Buddhist teachers. She used Buddhism to diminish her attachment to her story and began to, in essence, re-parent herself. She found refuge in the Buddha’s affirmation that suffering is an inextricable aspect of life and stopped blaming herself for what she had been through. In the place of the opaque silence that had surrounded her while growing up came a new willingness to face her feelings, not embellishing them but not retreating from them either. And she found faith in the promise that all people—even her!—were capable of happiness. In one of the most poignant parts of Faith, she confessed that the phrase she had most identified with before meditating was Lucy’s famous retort to Charlie Brown in the Peanuts cartoon, “You know what your problem is, Charlie Brown? The problem with you is that you’re you.” When Charlie Brown plaintively asks what he could do about that, Lucy comes back with her own version of advice not given. “I don’t pretend to be able to give advice,” she replies. “I merely point out the problem.”
When we first started working together, Sharon asked a psychiatrist friend what he considered the most important force for healing in the psychotherapeutic relationship. He ventured that the essential ingredient was love. Freud had once said much the same thing, although the phrase he used was more obscure. “The unobjectionable positive transference,” Freud had called it.
Sharon disagreed.
“Just showing up for their appointments,” she countered. “That’s the fundamental thing.”
Sharon’s answer impressed me. She had understood something important. When locked into her Charlie Brown story about what was wrong with her, she was locked out of her life. To get back into her life she had to repeatedly face feelings she had worked her whole life to avoid. She saw that the protective distance she had created around herself was holding her back and she made deliberate efforts to, in her words, “participate, engage,” and “link up.” In order to get off the eroding cliff on which she was stranded, she had to learn to relate to the world differently. Her story about herself gradually changed as a result. Freud had a famous quip about this in the closing line of his paper on the therapeutic relationship. “For when all is said and done,” he wrote in 1912, “it is impossible to destroy someone in absentia or in effigie.” A person has to show up before their internal monologues can be unpacked and questioned.
Sharon found special help in India from a Bengali woman named Dipa Ma, who was one of Munindra’s closest and most accomplished students. Dipa Ma, married when she was a teenager, had lost two infants, her husband, and her health by the time she was in her early forties. She turned to meditation out of desperation and depression at the age of forty-six; still residing in her unassuming Calcutta apartment in the early 1970s when Sharon met her at Munindra’s instigation, she had by then become a skilled sixty-year-old Buddhist teacher. She spent a lot of time with Sharon and predicted, to Sharon’s great surprise, that she would be a teacher, too, when she returned to the States in 1974.
“You can do anything you want to do,” Dipa Ma told her. “It’s only your thought that you can’t do it that’s holding you back. You should teach because you really understand suffering.”
I have taken much inspiration from Sharon’s experience. Her willingness to look into herself in meditation the way we do in psychotherapy, showing up for her appointments even though it was painful, affirmed the connection I have made between the two worlds. Troubling emotions are valuable objects of meditation too, just as physical sensations can be. People are often more comfortable treating their emotions as obstacles than they are in cultivating an open, accepting, and inquisitive attitude toward their inner lives. But to treat an emotion as a problem is to remain stuck. Even if it is seen as such, what can be done about it? Can it be eliminated so simply? Pretending to eliminate it just leads to falseness. And treating it as a contaminant only reinforces people’s negative inclinations. They use the incontrovertible presence of their emotions as further evidence of their failures, as another reason to beat themselves up.
Such feelings, like the ones Sharon was trying to ward off in her young adulthood, often rise to the surface at inopportune moments and derail us. Right Speech means being willing to loosen the attachment we have to the long-standing explanations we have been giving ourselves about them while facing these emotions head-on. This means accepting discomfort, relaxing into it, breathing through it, and asking ourselves what stories we are telling ourselves about it, rather than simply reacting in a conditioned, and all too often self-flagellating, way. I think Sharon was speaking very personally when she said that the most important thing in psychotherapy is showing up for one’s appointments. In therapy, when we show up, we look for feelings, bring them out, and make them the subject of inquiry. We talk emotions over, examine them, wonder about them, and explore aro
und their edges. This willingness to separate the raw material of emotion from the story we have built up around it is a critical aspect of Right Speech. It allows us to speak more gently to ourselves in the face of our most intense suffering, not just in the midst of meditation or in a therapist’s office but in real life, in the middle of the night when we lie awake wondering what is wrong with us.
When I first heard Dipa Ma’s prediction that Sharon would teach because she really understood suffering, I assumed she meant that because Sharon had suffered so much in her life, she would be a good teacher. It was not until years into working with Sharon that I began to see the statement differently. I now think that Dipa Ma meant something else. Sharon understood suffering, I believe, because she had investigated it on a granular level: exploring and naming the various components she had previously shied away from while holding her premature conclusions up to meditative scrutiny. Sharon really understood suffering because she had investigated it within herself from every possible angle, rather than rushing, as she had in her youth, to the default position of “the problem with you is you.”
While Sharon’s childhood was beset by very real and concrete losses, the way she explained things to herself is widespread even among people with no such overtly devastating history. Many people feel inadequate without having had traumas on the order of Sharon’s. She could remember the various losses she had to endure. Other people can only infer what might have gone wrong. One of the things I focus on most resolutely is the way people are explaining things to themselves. Therapy works when the discussion one has with one’s therapist changes the conversation one has with oneself.
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A good example of this comes from a patient named Miranda, a respected professor of French literature who came to therapy several years ago. Miranda was an expert in the work of Samuel Beckett. She had chosen him because of her comfort with his understanding of the bleak underpinnings of human existence. Making him into her intimate companion over a twenty-year period, she took refuge in his genius and in the compassion she felt from him in his writings.
At a critical point in her treatment, Miranda had an episode of acute and inexplicable anxiety. She had gone to a friend’s empty painting studio in Greenwich Village early on a springlike Monday morning. It was a beautiful studio—private with a view of a little park resplendent with blossoming trees and colorful flowers—and Miranda was excited to go there to write without being disturbed by her family or neighbors. She liked to read Beckett aloud when she could; it helped her concentrate and gave her a deeper feeling for his work. But this morning she began to feel trapped, an invisible wall holding her at bay. An intense fear came upon her, a recurrent and not entirely unfamiliar feeling but one that had not bothered her in a long while.
Miranda had no idea where her pain came from that day, but she was terribly uncomfortable and could not focus. The serene studio took on a malignant air. She spiraled downward and left, consumed by darkness and dread, and spent much of the day wandering the streets of the city.
When we spoke about it the following day, Miranda had one association. She remembered being sure she was going to die when she was ten years old. Her parents did what they could to convince her otherwise, but she then became certain that they were going to die and she could not be comforted. In an effort to make her feel better, her parents took her to her grandparents’ house, a place she had always loved, and left her there. But this was the first time she had been left alone with her grandparents. She had loved it at their home because the whole family would always gather together there. Now she was separated from her parents, still convinced that they would die. She woke screaming in the night worried that she would never see them again.
The dominant feeling in Miranda’s story was one of loneliness, but it was not the fully felt loneliness of someone who has suffered a concrete loss of a loved one. It was a barely tolerated loneliness, more like my fear of abandonment than Sharon’s actual feeling of forsakenness, that felt so intimidating—so frightening, so shameful—that the only solution was to banish the feeling altogether. It had erupted unexpectedly in the painting studio, but it was too intense for Miranda to deal with by herself. She found it humiliating and she was loath to investigate it further. Too scared of the pain, she needed a lot of encouragement to examine it further.
In a bout of self-loathing that came pouring out in our session, Miranda insisted that her true nature was needy, depressed, and worthless. I think it was Miranda’s use of the term “true nature” that caught my attention. She was not particularly schooled in Buddhist culture, and I do not know if she was consciously referring to a Buddhist concept, but I felt obligated to disagree with her. I did not think the Buddha would agree that her true nature was worthless, or needy, and I did not agree either. I felt her to be more truly herself when laughing than when feeling empty or hopeless.
“All this self-loathing is extra,” I tried to explain. “You are laying it on yourself, repeating the same story over and over again. You think you are being honest with me, showing me the real you. But all you are showing me is your self-hatred. Try just releasing it. Right now. For this moment. You don’t know your true nature yet. You haven’t even begun to make room for it.” I thought of Dipa Ma telling Sharon she could do anything she wanted, that it was only her thoughts that held her back. Miranda was not holding her difficult feelings the way Dipa Ma would have hoped. There was a rush to judgment that had led to intensifying mental gyrations. I wanted Miranda to take responsibility for the way she was talking to herself, not to give her thoughts a free pass.
This notion was a revelation for Miranda. I backed it up with some meditation instruction, giving her a concrete way of disidentifying with her repetitive thoughts while listening more deeply to her mind. Miranda could move away from her self-loathing if she tried. She did not have to indulge it as she had been doing. Her true nature did not lie in her suffering, in her story, in her hopelessness, or in her need. Her true nature was there to be discovered if she could just question the way she was speaking to herself.
In making Right Speech relevant for my patients, I am inevitably drawn to this notion. I wanted Miranda to see that she could be with her feelings without the self-deprecating story she had created in response to them. Was she the vertiginous vortex of harmful energy she thought she was, sucking and spewing negativity and need? Or was she . . . something else? Worn down by my prodding, or enticed by my faith, she became a little more open. Temporarily willing to question her low self-esteem, to treat it as a thought instead of a truth, she looked at me with a sparkle in her eyes and smiled.
“I can try for this,” she said.
In subsequent weeks and months, Miranda faced these feelings again. Still troubled by loneliness, she acknowledged it with a more relaxed attentiveness, allowing it to rise and fall as it wished. She noted her fear and accepted her anxiety and did not flee from the feeling. She treated it as something to be beheld, as theater in its own right. While she did precious little writing when the loneliness was strong, she made significant headway in the investigation of her inner life. And some kind of lightness emerged in her. If Right Speech meant progress in her writing, she failed. But if it meant changing the way she spoke to herself, she found inklings of success.
In my work with Miranda, I had an unexpected ally in Samuel Beckett. In his most prodigious creative burst, beginning in 1946, Beckett wrote his novels Molloy and Malone Dies as well as his most famous play, Waiting for Godot. He spent most of his time that year alone in his room in Paris writing, leaving only for midnight walks among the bars of his Montparnasse neighborhood. According to his biographer, this all began with an epiphany on the end of a Dublin pier in the midst of a winter storm:
Amid the howling wind and churning water, he suddenly realized that the “dark he had struggled to keep under” in his life—and in his writing, which had until then failed to find an audience or meet his own
aspirations—should, in fact, be the source of his creative inspiration. “I shall always be depressed,” Beckett concluded, “but what comforts me is the realization that I can now accept this dark side as the commanding side of my personality. In accepting it, I will make it work for me.”
This is the acceptance of someone willing to speak gently to himself in the face of tremendous agony, the acceptance of someone no longer struggling to suppress his darkness. This is something essential to both therapy and Buddhism, something that can be applied not only to the blight of depression but also to the inevitable sadness of grief that is an inextricable part of life. All too often, people react to such feelings in much the same way as Sharon described. The effort to push them away, to return to “normal,” leaves an ambient, opaque silence in their wake.
I was given additional insight into this when, talking with my eighty-eight-year-old mother four and a half years after my father died from a brain tumor, I was surprised to hear her questioning herself. “You’d think I would be over it by now,” she said, speaking of the pain of losing my father, her husband of almost sixty years. “It’s been more than four years, and I’m still upset.”
I’m not sure if I became a psychiatrist because my mother liked to talk to me in this way when I was young or if she talks to me this way now because I became a psychiatrist, but I was pleased to be having this conversation with her. Grief needs to be talked about, I thought. When held too privately, it tends to eat away at its own support.
“Trauma never goes away completely,” I responded. “It changes perhaps, softens some with time, but never completely goes away. What makes you think you should be over it? I don’t think it works that way.”
There was a palpable sense of relief as my mother considered my opinion.