Offering: July 17, 2022

A love letter to the study of the soul

Image description: Crum Creek in Swarthmore, PA in the high green of summer. There are cut-outs of characters by Pamela Colman Smith from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot. From left to right they are King of Cups, Wheel of Fortune and The Tower.

To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.

This week’s Offering comes a little bit later than usual—I try to have them done by Friday night and out Saturday morning so that I can rest over the weekend. I had an Offering done a little later than that, yesterday, Saturday morning, but when I went to record it was just too dry. And that’s something that tends to happen when I’m not talking about the things I really want to be talking about. So I’m writing this morning, on a deadline, from scratch, and I think it’ll be better this way.

If you’ve been reading my newsletters for the last two or three years you’ve seen me go through a journey that honestly feels sort of archetypal: Of believing so strongly in something to the point of having little sense where I ended and it began, and then questioning it, and then wanting to reject it altogether, and then wanting to come home, but not the same. 

I’m talking about my relationship with the psychology field, a community which has in many ways raised me from twenty-four years old when I moved to California and was hired by New Harbinger Publications where I would go on to spend six years reading about behavioral therapies and sitting in meetings with some of the leading thinkers in the field of helping individuals get unstuck. 

In my late-2015 resignation letter, I wrote about how, when I came to the company I’d been sick with an eating disorder since my early teen years, and how my time with the books and the people had helped me grow and heal in ways that I didn’t think I would have, otherwise.

It was probably too personal for a resignation letter, looking back, but it was the truth for me that having access to those books and that information—most of which were clinical manuals for therapists about the mechanics of change—was life-changing.

I believed so much in that work and when I left I wanted to share what I’d learned. I started writing on social media about the ideas using images from the Tarot, and applied to graduate school so that I could become a therapist.

After deferring acceptances twice in a row due to fear of debt and of making the wrong choice, I did enroll in an MSW program where I completed two clinical internships; one in an eating disorder clinic and one in walk-in community mental health clinic.

School was hard, and left me with a lot of questions, especially the community work. I was doing individual therapy in a predominantly Black, poor and working class community in my second year and when I asked my white supervisor how I—a middle class white woman doing a masters degree—should address the obvious power disparities in the relationship between the Black people I was working with and myself, I was told that unless the client was bringing race into our conversations it was not my job to do so. 

I don’t remember if that was the same day I learned to do cognitive triangles. The cognitive triangle is a tool in CBT that’s meant to show clients how external events trigger our interpretations and thoughts, which then stimulate emotions, which drive behavior. But in my mind those two things went together.

On one hand, my need as a budding clinician to address power dynamics in the therapeutic relationship because I knew that it mattered to the work we were doing, and on the other, the needs of the environment to redirect that so that the focus would stay off the social context and squarely on the client.

I knew it was not out of malice on the part of the supervisor, but by the system’s design. My supervisor was someone who seemed to genuinely care about the people she worked with, but those were the tools she was given. 

That internship wrapped up with the end of the spring semester and I had one or two more classes to complete during summer, before graduation. I was able to sit for my social work licensing exam right away, and did. I graduated, passed the test, and went promptly to California for two months where I’d bike to yoga every morning, watch fog roll into the hills each night, finish my book proposal and be photographed for a profile in the New York Times Style section that would be a significant point in my career. 

During school, I’d built a following for my monthly Offerings and daily Tarot card pulls on Twitter, and the Times piece was meant to highlight that work. It was called “Behavioral Therapy, One Card at a Time,” which is a title I secretly hated for a number of reasons, but was too scared to say anything about lest it came across as ungrateful. 

The week that piece ran I went to Manhattan to meet publishers and ultimately sold my first book, Tarot for Change, before heading back to California to live and write in a treehouse apartment that Robert Oppenheimer—the creator of the atomic bomb—had apparently once lived in and that I would spend the next ten months affectionately calling The Treehouse.  

I went to graduate school because I wanted to be a therapist, but the experiences I had during my program made me wonder if therapy was for me. After finishing, I took refuge in the privilege I had—because of the book deal—to just focus on writing while I processed what I’d learned and what I’d been through. I wrote a book of Tarot interpretations that drew largely from behavioral therapies, including CBT, turned in the first draft, moved back to the east coast, did a round of revisions, and then turned in the second. 

That winter, during the third and last round of revisions, I took a four-month class with a psychologist named Mary Watkins who assigned us to read key works by liberation psychologists of the so-called global south: Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire, Ignacio Martín-Baró as well as her own book, Toward Psychologies of Liberation, which was co-authored with Helene Shulman. 

Imagine you’re putting the finishing touches on a report that’s been in the works for more than a decade only to have data introduced at the eleventh hour that feels like it blows the whole thing out of the water. Validates things you’ve suspected about the field, but, in exchange for that validation, demands you be willing to relinquish some of the very foundations you stand on.

That’s how I felt, finishing what was essentially a self-help book using skills and concepts from evidence-based behavioral therapies only to finally find words for the ways in which these therapies so often miss the mark, and arguably support the maintenance of systems that are responsible for enormous human suffering. 

I was able to weave in at the last minute a few words from Mary Watkins in the reflection on the Ten of Pentacles—a card which to me is a tapestry that depicts belonging, collectivity, and the particular security of our entanglement with each other—but the rest was a done deal.

There was no going back to say, hey, behavioral therapies are incredible technologies, but not to be taken as a suggestion that any of this is all on you. Even if I could go back, at that point—January of 2021—I was at the very beginning of this journey toward psychologies that would insist on seeing the human experience differently than I was used to. I had and have a ton to learn, still. 

I think, in part to cope with what I can frankly best describe as the terror of having my entire belief system blown apart and reorganized, I started writing weekly Offerings, beginning with seven weeks on the myth of Cupid and Psyche.

That image of Psyche—exiled by Venus—isolated from her family and community felt on par with the readings I’d been doing which wanted to point out the dangers of treating the psyche as an isolated entity apart from its environment; not only its social context, but also its place inside an ecology of other-than-human relations.

About a year after I took Watkins’ class, after the publication of my book and several months of Offerings—frustrated and disillusioned and having read one too many James Hillman books in a row—I started to think maybe I’d leave psychology altogether. 

When I started reading Philip Cushman’s book, Constructing the Self, Constructing America, which presents a pretty scathing critique of the history of psychotherapy as a technology that’s used by the ruling class to establish and uphold both capitalism, and capitalism’s need for a sense of self that is defined by what it consumes—I weirdly had hope again.

I thought, because Cushman himself was a psychotherapist at the time that he wrote that book, there was hope to take a hard look at the truth about psychotherapy, and then reclaim it, identify where things went wrong and turn it back in service of liberation. 

But given where I’d been, the book was hard to read. It was emotional for me to reckon with my own complicity in things I never wanted to be a part of. And it wasn’t long before I put the book down and settled for a winter of refuge in the studies of liberation theology, religious ecology, philosophy, even poetry. I thought maybe I’d go into religious studies, do a masters in divinity, or even a PhD.

Well it’s July now, a year since I started doing these weekly Offerings. And I’m experiencing renewed hope in psychotherapy as a technology for healing. I’m grateful that I have Pamela Colman Smith’s Tarot because Tower moments like these are never easy, but a good image is a charm.

I recently picked back up a thick book called Gestalt Therapy by Frederick Perls, Ralph Hefferline and Paul Goodman, because I’m hurt, but I’m still in love. I’m not ready to give up on us, on psychology, or on psychotherapy as medicine. 

There’s a section in the first chapter titled “Destroying as part of Figure/Background Formation” and I’m not sure why I perk up at the promise of good language about destruction but that’s just my lot in life, I guess. 

The authors write that adjusting always involves destruction. You’re going along, adjusting to new situations and situations are adjusting to you. As the status quo is challenged—whether that challenge comes first from a change in you or a change in your environment—there’s fear and anxiety. 

But, there is a security there, too. And it comes from the not-yet-formed invention, “experimentally coming into being.” Experimental invention is, write the authors, the “only solution of a human problem” (1951).

And we are able to tolerate the fear that comes with experimentation and new invention not because we are courageous Spartans (to use their language), but because we can open up to the mystery. Plunk ourselves down in a river of a disruptive energy that flows toward what they call a new figure. 

And when I say that the images of Tarot are charms, I mean that when it’s time for me to plunk myself into the river that troubles the very foundation of the house I’ve been living in, King of Cups pulls up—in his throne on the water—and tells me I can. And then The Tower, who told Psyche everything she needed to know for her trip to the Underworld, promises to do the same for me, if it comes to that. 

It’s hard to let go of things that once worked, that felt safe and secure. The authors of the Gestalt book say that security sometimes involves a fear of aggression and of destruction. But in the absence of a proper outlet, these forces don’t go away. They get turned inward on oneself, and outward to the world.

So maybe a better way to work with the whole idea of security, the need for it, would be to get security from a confidence in the existence of support. But I also know that this confidence doesn’t come from nowhere; it comes from our experiences in the world. From leaping and from being caught. The latter which, sadly, is not the truth for everyone.

Confidence comes from being willing to eat the uncertain food and to risk both poison and nourishment in doing so. And from, if you’re lucky, finding out that in either case, the result is you didn’t get stuck. You let something live through to completion. 

The funny thing is, I had to go through all this in order to reach a place where I can say I’m inching toward feeling proud of my book. I don’t think the ideas are wrong, I just think there’s a lot more to be said about them.

One part that comes to mind especially in this moment as I write about letting things live through completion, as opposed to fearing the destruction that’s needed and resisting it, is the piece I wrote in the book, about King of Cups. 

It says: "Water has for so long been a symbol of birth and life, and I would argue that emotions, which are also associated with water, simply want what all other life wants: to be born, to have a safe space to express fully, and to die, eventually, as all living things do. While our human impulse is often to deny our feelings that fundamental right, the King of Cups protects it” (2021). 

Thank you for accompanying me on this journey into this Underworld of my own, this place of faithlessness and then revival. I’m really excited to be here with everything I’ve been through and learned, and I know that it’s been immensely helpful to have your witness through this process. 

There’s actually a section in Mary Watkins and Helene Shulman’s book about making meaning in times of rupture, when nothing is as it once was. They write that rather than defend against liminality, “There may be a long period when contradictory ideas contend for space and adherence” (2010).

During this time, they write “Supportive and witnessing relationships will be crucial. In liminal space, one meets the unknown, the marginalized, the synchronistic, the other, the unconscious edge of one’s former narratives. At this point, the possibility to try out new narratives, to reframe one’s story, becomes critical” (2010).  

And truly, that’s what you all have supported me in doing by reading and sharing, giving feedback and supporting these Offerings. So when I say thank you so much for being here, I mean it in a really deep sense. 

To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.

You’re reading to the Offering for July 17, 2022. Weekly Offerings are generally for paid subscribers, but this one went out to everyone.

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Thanks so much again for being here and we’ll see you next time. <3

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Sources

Dore, J. (2021). Tarot for change: Using the cards for self-care, acceptance and growth. Penguin Life.

Perls, F., Hefferline, R. & Goodman, P. (1951). Gestalt therapy: Excitement and growth in the human personality. The Gestalt Journal Press.

Watkins, M. & Shulman, H. (2010). Toward psychologies of liberation: Critical theory and practice in psychology and the human sciences. Palgrave Macmillan.