In December 2022, we published our third annual Wise Therapy Spotlight after receiving submissions from among our online therapist training students and the greater therapy community.
There is always a guiding question for submissions. In 2022, it was, “How do you sustain hope and resilience?”
Enjoy this essay response from Nancy Dreyfus, Psy.D. (below) and download the full PDF publication here: Wise Therapy Spotlight December 2022 Issue
Hoping to Be Oneself
Nancy Dreyfus, Psy.D.
“All being is in a state of becoming. But this does not mean that all being is in a state of becoming perfect–but, rather, in a state of becoming more itself.” – Jane Roberts, in The Nature of Personal Reality
Sigmund Freud defined mental health as the ability to love and the ability to work. With all due respect, I’d put hope and resilience as preferable criteria because one can deeply love another and do exemplary work and–let’s face it–still be miserable. I have found I can begin instilling a sturdier, more energized outlook in another when I offer even a miserable person the possibility that being radically themselves–in this case, unabashedly miserable and even ashamed of it–has freedom and relaxation in it.
The misconception most of us have grown up with is that being radically transparent makes people uncomfortable and thereby fractures relationship and that managing others and managing audience reaction by presenting a more acceptable but less real version of oneself enhances relationship. If you think about it, many of your unhappy depressing moments have occurred when you either didn’t feel safe being yourself or felt poorly received when you tried.
I was blessed with a very fortunate experience with my own first therapist in my early 20’s. In a remarkably unguarded moment, I confided that I actually liked–prepare yourself–elevator music–that’s right–the bland background music that no hip person would ever acknowledge enjoying, let alone, seeking out. (I’m still feeling a little defensive about it, wanting to assure you that now that there’s such a thing as new age music, that’s my real preference. ;- )
Anyway, he gave me a homework assignment: to tell three people I deemed musically sophisticated that I really loved elevator music. In the scheme of things right now that may sound like small potatoes, but as a depressed 23-year-old who was convinced she was unlovable, it was like I was being asked to play loud rock-and-roll radio in a library. I was a newspaper reporter at the time and so, digging my fingernails into my palm, I shared my embarrassing secret with: 1. the rock critic of the largest paper in Philadelphia, 2. a harpsichordist in a baroque music group and 3. a guitar-playing friend of a friend who fancied herself Janis Joplin. I did not get particularly charitable responses but the sky didn’t fall either. I learned that hope and resilience are intrinsically tied to the Right to Be Oneself. I was starting to learn an essential life lesson: There is space for me here….
So, it’s been part of my therapeutic approach, even early on in treatment, to co-mastermind a moment of vulnerable self-revelation that usually wasn’t even on the client’s radar screen as a remote possibility. Some examples: telling a prospective date whose Match profile features their obvious joy romping with their labradoodle, that you are nervous around frisky animals….telling a relatively new man you’re dating that you are worried he is going to want sex before you are ready…and that you’re worried you’ll sleep with him before you really want to….telling a friend you feel embarrassed that you rushed and gave her a holiday gift that someone had given to you, and you realize there was no reason for her to like it either… telling your husband that you want him to be uber-aware of your vulnerability acknowledging something, but last week (or maybe for weeks or years) you’ve been faking orgasms. Or telling a stranger at a social gathering that you are feeling so miserable in your life right now, that you can’t believe you’ve even shown up.
I believe that when a clinician takes the client’s presenting problem and respectfully reframes it as an opportunity to have more of themselves in the soup, the client usually recognizes that what they really wanted, and always have, is true comfort just saying what’s so for them.
I’ve written a book, Talk To Me Like I’m Someone You Love: Relationship Repair in a Flash (Tarcher, Penguin; 2013) that gives readers (and now audiobook listeners) actual Flash Cards to help them drop into authenticity in the midst of a relationship rupture. Relationships that have been tense for years have been infused with hope and increased resilience when couples see that one moment of transparency can shift everything.
So often a client perceives the output of their patterned behavior as the problem, rather than the underlying need To Be, so they can never be satisfied by getting more of what they didn’t really want in the first place. Having a therapist who opens the door to this gives them hope that their deep-seated wish–not their presenting problem–might actually be achievable, and kicks in the resilience to tolerate the anxiety in making it so.
Nancy Dreyfus, Psy.D., is a psychotherapist for 25 years, former journalist and teacher and student of metaphysics. She’s a graduate of The Columbia School of Journalism and a prize-winning reporter.
Learn more about Nancy Dreyfus and her work at www.nancydreyfus.com.
If you would like to be inspired by more of the essays and artwork published in the Wise Therapy Spotlight December 2022 Issue, Click to Download the PDF now.
