It’s fair to say the physically strongest physicians are not the best doctors and the strongest woodworkers do no craft the most beautiful furniture. Being the strongest doesn’t produce excellence in most tasks.
Even jobs requiring brute strength often also require many other elements to facilitate the success of the task. Digging a ditch, for example, requires creating the correct path and depth, using the right tools for this particular ditch with this soil. If they use a mechanical assist like a front-end loader, finesse at the controls is infinitely more useful than raw strength.
Strength, while valuable, seems to be an odd characteristic for Western society to value above all others.
The second idea: Is there a different way of understanding strength?
I went to the memorial service of my husband Jim’s late wife, Car. She was a friend of mine. I hardly knew him then. The large church was packed with friends, colleagues, classmates of her sons and so on. At the onset of the service, the hundreds of us in the pews of that church rose in silent vigil, as the family filed in behind the pastor and walked to the front.
Can you imagine the strength required to walk into the service? As hundreds of people looked on, Jim and his sons lined up with Car’s sisters and her mother to walk down the aisle.
It was painful to watch them file in, feeling their agony. The collective audience could readily acknowledge the raw strength required to be grieving, and yet so present publicly. They were emotionally vulnerable and yet were visible to honor the life of the woman whom they loved so dearly.
I remember watching Jim walk to the pulpit in the large sanctuary and to speak to us about his wife. He talked about her—what he loved about her, what he would miss, what he hoped his children would remember about her and carry on as her legacy. He stood up and began to speak in front of hundreds of people. He didn’t know how he would do, if he would cry or not, if he would remember his speech at such an emotional time. He took the risk and showed up. He honored his wife in incredible ways.
I remember thinking that for him to take such risks, to be bold when he was so very vulnerable was so very strong.
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It takes strength to:
Cry when you are not known to be a crier.
Tell a story of how someone hurt you as a child when you have never dared to unpack that story
Explore a painful feeling when you have never wrapped language around it before.
Trust a therapist who is working with you when you have never had this conversation before with anybody.
Don’t let anybody tell you it doesn’t take strength to turn to your wife and tell her how scared you are to lose her. It’s a real strength to let your your son know you love him when you’ve never dared tell him before. It’s a mighty strength needed to be vulnerable and show tender spots that you regularly keep hidden.
It takes strength to let someone in. It takes strength to be vulnerable and connect with another. That strength is something I admire. And I get to witness that kind of fortitude regularly.
It never gets old to watch. Often, after I witness that sort of courage, and the person walks down the hall after that session, and I hear the door close, I will exclaim: “I love being a therapist!” Because having a front-row seat to that style of strength and courage is a privilege to witness. It makes me a stronger and better person myself.
Section IV Real reasons to Choose Counseling
It’s a lot easier to put up reasons you should not do something than to speak effectively for something. People can easily complain about the problems. It’s more challenging to speak positively about constructive solutions.
When you ask someone if they are interested in going to therapy, they can give you a half dozen reasons why it makes sense not go. Some might feel like reasons, while others will actually be excuses. We’ve looked at both reasons and excuses to avoid therapy.
If you ask a person for the rationale for choosing therapy, they will have more of a challenge. It's hard to explain why, at some level, it makes sense to bare the parts of your soul that, mostly, you choose not to expose to others.
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I was at a banquet last month and I met a fellow. We introduced ourselves. Once he heard my name, he confirmed that I was “the Carolyn Klassen” from Conexus Counselling. Then he told me that his brother was a client of mine years ago and that his brother had often recited a line from a counseling session to himself over the years, as a lifeline to reassure himself. The fellow could easily recite this line, having heard his brother declare it repeatedly. I don’t remember saying it, but it sounded like something I might have said.
The memory of a moment in a session, long forgotten by me, had helped him through a tough season.
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Early in my years as a therapist, I was finishing a course of therapy with a client. She was one of the first clients with whom I was ending therapy. She had reached the goals we had set when she first came, and now we were just wrapping up.
I was feeling rather proud of myself as a new therapist. She had done so well, and I asked her what she took from the sessions. What would she remember? Was it one of my brilliant insights, a clever comment, a wonderful reframe on my part? What about therapy had made the difference?
She responded that she had the feeling in her body during therapy sessions like she felt when she was with her grandma—a warm, safe, secure feeling. She had forgotten about that feeling, and it was good to feel it again.
Oh, and she also walked taller now. That feeling taller as she moved through about her world changed everything, although she couldn’t put her finger on why that shift had happened. She just knew that it had developed over the sessions and that she was grateful. It changed how she talked to people and that changed how people responded to her.
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There’s no telling what will happen when you go to therapy or how it
could change the way you see yourself or the world
will change the way you feel your feelings, or think your thoughts
will shift the manner in which you move about the world
could transform your relationships in terrifyingly beautiful ways
But I can tell you how it has impacted others.
Let’s review why people show up for therapy.
17
To get the bottom and deal
The landlord kept telling us, each time we called to express our concern, variations of the following:
There are no external cracks in the building’s foundation
If it was the window that was leaking, it would run down the drywall of the office underneath the window. The wall is dry, so it’s not the window.
I’ve walked around the outside of the building after a heavy rain, and there isn’t a standing water issue outside of the building.
The implication was that if there wasn’t a clear source for leaking into our basement offices, then the wet carpets against the outside wall were probably a figment of our imagination.
With no apparent and obvious deficiency, the floor couldn’t possibly be wet with a leak or so management said. But the carpet was wet annually in spring during the snowmelt and sometimes after a torrential rain.
This spring, I was done. Exasperated, I urged the building manager to come in and look at the wet spots again. We had put our wooden furniture up on blocks semi-permanently to prevent damage.
I expressed my concern again. This time they tacked the issue head on—I don’t know why they did something this year, but I’m relieved. It would be a lot of effort and inconvenience, but we would figure this out.
There were some empty offices down the hall, and we moved our furniture to the temporary location to let them figure this out properly. We made plans to be out of the offices for several weeks. My sweet family hauled all the furniture from two therapy offices into some temporary office space down the hall and into the vacant office space that was always dry. We put up signs for the cli
ents, apologizing for the disruption and hoped they would be understanding.
The first step the landlord did was to take off the bottom two feet of sheetrock on the outside wall. He did so just underneath the window on the wall next to where the wet carpet always developed—about 6 feet wide.
Nothing showed up.
The now-exposed insulation and all the construction material looked immaculate. No problem was apparent. The landlord didn’t say it explicitly, but I got the impression that he believed there was actually no problem. Was it all in our head?
(Except it was also on our wet socks.)
I wondered if they thought I was pouring jugs of water on the carpet near the wall.
Then the Concrete Expert Guy (CEG) came. The landlord, the CEG and I looked at the wall and talked at length. CEG was clear there was no way to discern what the issue was by removing only the bottom couple of feet of sheet rock just under the window. He told us he wanted to investigate his way. We gave him the green light.
CEG took down the bottom 6 feet of the wall all across the entire room. Then he pulled back the plastic vapour barrier and the pink insulation and called us back in to look.
Now it was obvious.
Now it was clear. There was a modest crack in the concrete wall. The concrete was below ground level so when the ground was saturated, the water came through the crack in the concrete, soaking the insulation and the studs. When it was wet enough, the moisture would dribble to the basement floor level and soak the carpet, creeping across the room.
When CEG reached to touch the studs with his hands to demonstrate the damage, the rotten wood crumbled. It disintegrated in his hand. The pink insulation adjacent to the wall was black with mold, with bits and pieces stuck to the wall because of the long-standing moisture. Pieces of stud had fallen off.
It was a concealed and undetected mess. But just because we couldn’t see it, didn’t mean it wasn’t affecting us from time to time with wet carpet. It was potentially impacting us all the time from molding and rotting substances.
This time, instead of using fans, dehumidifiers and carpet cleaning on the problem, CEG injected a substance into the crack. When the substance came in contact with the moisture in the crack, it expanded and then dried, creating a watertight seal. Then he
reinstalled the studs
put new insulation in place
then vapor barrier
installed sheet rock
applied dry wall tape, mudded and sanded it smooth.
Finally, they painted. The whole process took weeks.
We were camping out in the down-the-hall offices for more than a month.
It was a huge hassle for therapists and clients alike to be out of our usual space for sessions. After a session, we had to go back to the administration portion of our office for the paperwork and payment. But it was worth it.
What we were doing behind the walls of the therapy room to stop the recurring intermittent wet carpet is what our clients are doing within the walls of the therapy room. Every day, the clients within the walls of that office work at what we were doing to repair those very walls: going deep to fix it.
As humans, our first response is to judge a situation just by its surface—if there is no obvious problem, we breathe a sigh of relief and move on. If others can’t see an obvious issue, then we just wish it away. If it’s not obvious to others, maybe it doesn’t exist.
Even if underneath there are problems with rotting and erosion—and sometimes there are signs something serious is occurring—we just want to ignore the situation and desperately hope it won’t bring us down.
Our clients do the difficult and brave work to figure stuff out. They choose to stop pretending it’s not a problem. Clients in therapy stop denying the way they hurt themselves and others. They launch out to find the true story and to write a different ending. Clients in therapy tackle their stories at their source to allow them to write different ones. The pain and dysfunction stop dribbling into their lives at the most inconvenient moments because they source the root of the issue and address it.
Our clients get brave.
In counseling, our clients get curious.
They dig deep and they get powerful.
They don’t just accept the status quo as good enough.
He doesn’t just accept that his withdrawal from his wife is just because there is a big project at the office. He’s been busy with “the next project” for 15 years. Working hard is a good cover for whatever reason stops him from relaxing and spending quality time with his family. For years, even he wasn’t aware that he worked that hard not only to make his boss happy, but because it worked at a deeper level for him. But his boss is now taking vacations because of a newfound appreciation for family after the wake-up call of his own father’s death. He knows he could just keep working the hours he is working with the same reasons of projects and deadlines as he always has. But his doctor is encouraging him to slow down because his blood pressure is borderline high. Now he is ready to figure out what stops him from planning family vacations and being home in time for dinner a few times per week.
She isn’t content to continue to avoid dinners with girlfriends, outings with her husband, and functions of all occasions. If she’s honest, she doesn’t want to feel that uncomfortable feeling that she might do or say something embarrassing in a social setting. She is tired of staying at home to avoid all conversation of real life, knowing that she lives her life small and tries nothing new. That feeling of anxiety is well hidden when she is watching Netflix. It doesn’t look like anything is hugely wrong because she is just living a quiet life. Once you say “no” often enough, people stop asking, and so nobody even notices that she avoids social situations. However, she is bored silly and wants to start living.
He’s done with walking away from situations because that’s the only way he knows not to let his rage explode in ways that could end relationships or be criminal. Walking away prevents the explosions. When conversations get tense, the alarm goes off inside of him. He knows if he doesn’t get out of there, he will blow. So, he walks away. His wife wonders if he cares, because of the way he seems to blank out whenever the conversation gets serious and he leaves mid-conversation. His kids are convinced he doesn’t love them when they are upset. He cares deeply, of course, except that no one would even know because of his frequent departures in the middle of meaningful conversations. This pattern has taught them to only talk about sports scores (though never with high stakes play-off games), the weather, and good news stories of great school tests and funny videos on social media. It might not appear like there is a problem to the outside eye. However, his children don’t confide in him and his wife sees him more like a roommate than an intimate partner. He’s wanting to dig into this pattern and figure out how to stay engaged in important conversations, even when he starts to feel angry.
They’re digging deep to discover the root of the problem and deal with it once and for all. Clients who go to therapy aren’t willing to mop up the damage and hope it goes away anymore. Clients in therapy recognize that it’s a hassle to look for the source of the problem. They also appreciate that, in the long run, this creates a situation where repeated issues don’t keep re-occurring.
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We love being back in our offices, this time with walls that won’t leak, and carpets that will stay dry.
Being curious about what is behind the walls in your life pays off. It’s creates a disturbance to dig deep and get curious. It’s definitely an inconvenience to:
look at what is causing the shame
work through the grief
to find out in what ways you have been restricting healthy behaviors
It’s also a challenge to give yourself permission to create shifts within yourself. To talk about matters of the heart is an aggravation. But to process your stuff is profoundly helpful in moving forward without having to work around the recurring issues.
At least, that’s what our cli
ents have told us.
18
We all need a safe place to connect
For the first five or six years of my private practice, I had therapy sessions with clients in a windowless office. I put a large and beautiful picture of the outdoors in the room above the loveseat as a pseudo-window to brighten up the space.
It wasn’t just any picture. It was a special gift from my husband-at-the-time who knew how much I liked California scenery. We spent two wonderful years studying during the week and exploring the California sights and scenery on the weekends. We loved the coast of California, walking the boardwalks and the piers. Clam chowder in a sourdough bread bowl was a splurge that we would make on those weekends. We couldn’t really afford that soup (and the chocolate-covered caramel apple for dessert) on our student budget, and I still don’t have any regrets on that splurge. That soup in the sea air tasted like something they serve in heaven. We went to see a taping of The Price is Right in Los Angeles and let the sea lions entertain us in San Francisco. Both were free and fit in our budget just fine.
But it was the sequoias that took my breath away. They were an hour’s drive away from grad school. One regret I have is that we didn’t drive up to the forest more often. I loved to be in the sequoia forest.
Seriously, sequoia trees are remarkable. They are the largest living things on this whole earth of ours. Gigantic. The California Redwoods often get the sexy press because they are taller—but because of their diameter, the sequoias win the prize for the largest for sheer mass.
Hell No to Hmmm, Maybe Page 13