by Nicholas Hack, Psy.D.

RUNNING INTO MYSELF

One of the things I appreciate about this work – and yes, one of the things that sometimes drives me crazy – is just how often working deeply with others causes me to run into myself. Or, more specifically, how often it causes me to run into something-within-me that I wasn’t really aware of.

A patient is telling me about a moment from childhood. Through their tone and posture, I can tell the story is building to something big. I’m not sure yet if it’s “little-t” or “Big-T”, but it feels like there’s trauma in the room. I’m listening closely, mentally moving to the edge of my seat…

… and then they’re just… done talking? I’m primed, ready and waiting for a big reveal, but the story is suddenly over and I didn’t register anything. Alarm bells go off. I feel myself scramble and think, “What did I miss?”

These experiences feel like walking into an invisible wall. In one moment, we’re moving along next to each other, in sync, on the same-enough page. In the next moment there’s a great distance between us; I’m confused at the separation and wondering what I ran into.

I play the tape back in my head. Okay, I think. They said “A” happened, then “B” happened, and then “C” happened, and that’s when they stopped talking. But “C” happened to me a bunch growing up and… oooooh.

This realization causes something to click, but I’m still having trouble thinking. Despite my years as a therapist and having said some very smart things, in this moment I don’t even know where to begin. Inanely, I wonder to myself, “What would a therapist say?” and eventually I find my mental footing with the simple touchstone of, “and how did that feel?”

Later, I’ll be able to think. I’ll be able to locate each of us and close the distance. I’ll be able to use my embodied experience to tune into the moments when their emotional self seems completely outside of their awareness. We’ll even get to wonder together about what they can do when they realize a vital part of them has gone missing. But that’s later. In the initial moments I’m left in a daze.

In the quote that inspired this year’s Potential Space theme, James Baldwin writes, “The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through” (1962). When working with others causes me to run into myself like this, I believe I’ve stumbled into something that’s existed as “an event” within me, but that’s remained unknown to me in some essential way. My patient’s reaction to their own experiences allows me to run headfirst into this see-through unknowingness, and that impact may create a small crack within me. What grows within that crack is a task for my own therapy, but it’s something that now at least has an opportunity to become known.