I Wonder If I Could Offer You a Different Interpretation
“I wonder if I could offer you a different interpretation.”
Larry said this nearly every time I went to see him. Larry was my first therapist, or at least the first I saw for any length of time. He helped me through my divorce. There are a thousand griefs in this world, and I’ve learned that they cannot be compared or measured against each other. I do know that the grief of divorcing young and not very far into your marriage is real. The self-blame and the fear of ridicule, and the endless second-guessing can take their toll.
Larry did NOT absolve me of all blame. Rare is the marriage that ends because of the failings of one person. I played my part. My therapist did NOT tell me I had done nothing wrong. Instead, he helped me better understand what I had done wrong and keep those things separate from the things I had no control over, the things that happen to a person during the course of living in this world.
Sitting in Larry’s office, every couple of weeks for the three years of that first marriage, I learned that not every thought I had was worth listening to. Sometimes the truth that I heard or the truth I told myself was not the truth at all, but merely an interpretation of events.
My first marriage ended. It was painful but right. We blessed each other and went our separate ways. Not long after, I moved to LaGrange. Saying goodbye to Larry was as difficult as saying goodbye to my friends and the people at my church. I still have a deep sense of peace when I think about the love and the wisdom I experienced in that little office in McLean, Virginia.
My own story cannot be that much different than yours. We are all human beings; we all experience loss and hurt; we all bring some of that onto ourselves, and we all have much of it brought to our doorsteps and laid down at our feet. The question is: what do we do with that loss and hurt? Come to that, what do we do with the joy and the gladness that come our way?
We pretend that the answers to these questions ought to come naturally, that we ought to just know how to live. And if we don’t know, if we can’t seem to make sense of life by ourselves, or with our family, or over a beer with a friend, then something is wrong with us, broken. We act as if going to therapy is only for the truly broken.
I wonder if I could offer you a different interpretation.
The last few weeks, I sat down with three therapists in our community: Susan Marshall of the Center for Mindful Exploration, Kristina Thurman of Restore Counseling Service in Lanett, and Leslie Toole, who practices in Newnan and here in LaGrange. I know each of them to be people of integrity, honesty, and genuine warmth. Because of my trust in them and the good work they do, I was curious to ask them about their experiences inviting people into therapy.
As a pastor, people come to me, hoping to talk out an issue, or something comes up in conversation, and I invite them to go deeper. Pastoral conversations share much in common with the kinds of conversations you might have in therapy, but my training is different. My focus is on the health and well being of a congregation. The emotional and mental health of the individuals in my parish is of vital importance, but I lack the training of a therapist. Therefore I am limited to three sessions about any one topic. To go any deeper requires the skills and training of a therapist or counselor.
And don’t we all want to go a little deeper?
Most of us do. Most of us want to have deeper relationships with our spouse or our children or to understand why the vagaries of work seem to drag us down while our coworkers remain seemingly buoyant. And at the end of the day, most of us want to have a deeper sense of ourselves - to understand what makes us reach for the bag of chips at midnight or why we eye the bottle at 4:30 on a Tuesday afternoon. These are everyday human concerns, and a yet better understanding of them requires work and diligence, and practice, just like any skill.
In my conversation with Leslie Toole, he wondered what the world might be like if going to therapy was as commonplace as going to a movie on a Friday night. That may seem like a dream in our current reality of COVID, but the question remains. What if you took time out of your week or your month, just an hour at a time, to ask for a little help in understanding yourself, to gain a different perspective than the one you can achieve alone?
Kristina Thurman reminded me that so many people are hindered by the expectations they grew up with: we don’t share our problems; we keep them in the family; we are self-reliant. These are generational, cultural, and family-specific, but all of us might have a sense that we ought to be able to handle things. And perhaps we can; perhaps we can handle things. But what if we could go deeper? Or what if we are fooling ourselves about being able to handle things?
-https://www.restore-counseling.org/index.html
I’m lucky that Susan Marshall is an active member of my church. Before COVID, St. Mark’s partnered with her to host meditation events for the Center for Mindful Exploration, knowing that the normalization of mental health is vital to our community’s well-being. As much as any therapist I’ve met, Susan approaches her practice as just that - practice. She articulates the basic premise of therapy: rarely are we utterly broken and need to be completely put back together. Instead, most of us have the skills within us to lead meaningful lives. Often, all we need to do is identify those skills and develop them, to practice them.
-Center for Mindful Exploration Facebook
Each of the therapists I talked with acknowledged what we all already know: sometimes, people are deeply broken. Therapy is for people who are suicidal or chemically unbalanced. Yet, therapy is ALSO for people who have been anxious their whole life and just haven’t developed the skills to deal with it. Most of us fall somewhere in that range. How many of us possess every skill we need or even every skill we would like to have?
As a Christian minister, I am well aware of the brokenness of people, myself, and those around me. But so, too, I am aware that God has gifted each one of us. Very often, I find that our brokenness intimately ties our being unaware or disconnected from our giftedness. God challenges us to love God and to love neighbors as we love ourselves. God challenges us, AND God offers us the resources to do that work. Resources like a good therapist!
As we approach Christmas, especially in this season of disconnection and strangeness, I invite you to remember that you do NOT have to face the struggles of the holiday season alone. You don’t have to face any season alone. Reach out to a therapist; any of the three I’ve mentioned would be good! Reach out to your pastor; they would be happy to talk and to help you connect with the resources you need. Reach out to a friend; don’t wait on them - they are just as lonely and worried about their struggles as you are yours. They are also likely just as interested in making a connection as you are!
God has given us many gifts. Being able to see ourselves for exactly who we are is probably not one of them. We need help. I need help! Full disclosure: Leslie Toole is my own therapist. I see him every couple of weeks to dig into the emotions and distractions and curiosities of my own life and the life of being a pastor. I’ve seen other therapists and sometimes only for a few sessions: it’s always ok to leave and find the therapist that works for you! Part of the reason Leslie works for me is that he helps me to view my life, not in terms of problems but dilemmas. As I talked with him about this article, he said, “We are all confronted with dilemmas; so why wouldn’t we want help with those dilemmas?”
It’s a good question. Ask yourself some version of that question. We are not problems to be solved, but complex people, made in the image of God! Our complexity and our giftedness present us with dilemmas, difficult situations that are not easily resolved. Add to that mix the fact that every person you meet is just as gifted and just as complex as you; well, it’s no wonder we need a little help navigating the world!
Keep asking good questions! A good therapist likely won’t have all the answers, especially if you ask the perfect questions. They will help you explore your questions and help you to ask better and better questions. Questions like, “Where did that idea of mine originate? And is it necessarily true?” Therapy can save your life, if it needs saving. Therapy can also help you walk through our difficulties, which we all face from time to time.
Sometimes all we need is a different interpretation, a reminder that not having it all figured out, all by ourselves, is ok. Almighty God has poured gifts into this world: among them, the beauty of creation, the Words of scripture, our fellow human beings, and the gift of therapy!
No doubt. It’s a risk to start taking your mental health seriously. You don’t want to hide the fact that you’re going to therapy, but you might also be worried about what others will think. Several of the therapists I talked with told stories of people wanting to come after dark or enter through a side door. No doubt. It is a risk to confront your old thoughts and interpretations and to wonder what new ways might be out there for you. And it may, sometimes, feel too risky.
I wonder if I could offer you a different interpretation.