Invitation From My Soul: An Open Letter to My Therapist

Is it okay if what I want from our time together, what I want from you, isn't what you imagine yourself to be offering?

Yet the word "offering" feels obscene in a certain sense to me.  It feels transactional.

Is it okay that to me, the only possible sense of a transaction is a trading of time?  

My wife offers her time to her employer and gives me a tiny fragment I get to spend with you. In one sense, it's a trade of time, and we pin down that trade with money.  

But even still, every choice contains the negative space of what wasn't chosen.  I do not alone pay "for" our time.  It has costs to both of us, and I don't pay for what it costs you, nor you, me.  In a sense, all costs are always externalized to the networks to which we belong.

The extent to which I stress you out or dysregulate you (not saying I do, but it's a "cost" of showing up for another human being deeply from your heart, is it not?), this "cost" isn't one I pay for; it's distributed throughout your life: your trainings, your mentors, your support system, your past, your future, your other clients, your family & friends.  

And what I offer is not just the way I grow your bank account.  Would you be here if that were all I had to offer?  That's not nearly enough.  You are worth so much more.  We both are.  

Looking at what we both bring to the convening that we do, you can't even really quantify it.  It's really so much beyond an exchange or a transaction.  

But if we've got to call something a trade, let's say we are trading time.  You've given up time you might have spent in some other way, so you can spend it with me, and I do the same with you.

But then, what we are doing in that room, it's not transactional at all, not in the slightest.

Not to me.

In order for that to even be possible, from the frame of, I'm entitled to something as the client, we'd have to enter that room where you are indebted to me in some way.  Are we not psychically, spiritually, indebted to one another in a way more grand and important and worthwhile so as to dwarf any notions of the monetary portions of our contract?  Are we not embarking on a soul contract that transcends these limited notions? 

What about, I choose you, and you choose me, and if we stop choosing one another, then we do? 

But this brings me back to the original question: what am I choosing?  Am I choosing what you're "offering"? 

Or do I return to that room again and again and whatever arises, I choose to return to that arising?  Well, always a new arising, because with each passing session, I'm more enthralled with and more trusting of the potential of what may arise next time.  In one sense trust may be seen as me coming to feel safe with you.  But what if I need more than that?  (And sometimes not that?)  What if I need to trust that I can look forward to having experiences that are worthwhile to my soul journey?

And so this question… which may not have an answer. Bayo Akomolafe has said "sometimes questions are not instrumental to answers"; sometimes it's the living with, holding, inhabiting the question, that is what we are doing. What if what I sense, what I feel, what I value, may not match what you had imagined, what you're striving for, what you want for me?  Then what?

Maybe if the "then what" is that's perfectly fine, then we don't need to talk about this at all. 

Maybe we just keep on, and we keep seeing if we keep choosing this.  But also I hear your question—I even chafe at your question—your plea (it feels sometimes), to “take you inside”.  I, like Miriam Greenspan, "chafe at the language of boundaries", but not because I don't have a sense of my impulses toward advance and retreat.  I feel them very clearly.  

When you’ve asked me to look around the room, and I say no; when I choose to stay in the space so often labeled "dissociation", I am inhabiting my retreat with intention, and attention—and even reverence.  But the chafing comes also from the implication that for you to enter my world, I must extend a certain type of invitation (and perhaps I must, in some practical sense where our skin-bound bodies inhabit a physical space inside the bounds of a room, the same way you can’t describe where the bathroom is without using certain words that disambiguate).  

But I hold that feeling of chafing not as a refutation of your worth, or any attempt to keep you “outside”.  There's just the sting of noticing you not feeling invited, when the feeling inside of me is all invitation, all longing, all advance—no retreat.  Which doesn't make your request wrong, or my modes of invitation (or, silent unbounded, unspecified, unclear longings?) wrong.  There's just a noticing of how our conceptual differences, and how we're calling on different perceptual modalities to engage in a merging (is that an intention we share?  a form of merging?) and to notice these differences carries a certain grief. 

And you don't want me to hold that grief alone, right? ;)

How do we use language, and use it well—fruitfully, indulgently, with delight, with celebration—even in the way that it creates trouble for us?  Perhaps I am a bit too obsessed with this concept right now, but nothing is ever just one thing, and no matter whether our words make it seem so.  You see me hopping between resisting words, losing access to words, drowning in words, vomiting words, getting certain about them, excited to say them, insistent with them, regretting them, ashamed of them.  But nothing is one thing.

The very roads (literally, as in freeways, but all the figurative roads as well) that I have available to travel between the nodes where I obtain sustenance, experience beauty, develop into my wholeness in this world, they were built by the capitalist machine.  So I'm inseparable—my process is inseparable—from this machine.  Even my resistance is, in a very real sense, co-created by—an apparatus of—the machine that I imagine myself to resist.  (Especially when the wife works for The Mouse.)

Returning momentarily to this concept of choice, payment, trading, time, indebtedness... how about this?:  I choose to "pay" you as part of the machinery I operate within that makes it possible for me to be there, and you choose to "pay" me in your ways.  And either of us could at any time choose something different.  You have never once owed me anything.  If I don't like spending my time in that room, spending time with you, I will stop coming to that room, stop paying you.  There's no entitlement, only a choosing.

But, euww, there's that capitalist language again.—"spending" time?  Uggghhh.

Language really breaks down, not only because this language I speak is itself so crafted by the machinery of capitalism (even Lisa Feldman Barrett's concept of the "body budget")!  But also because everything that is, is always so much more than what it is.  I'm "working on" (by which I mean, I am brewing) an article about how every parental intervention is more than one thing.  Praise can be connection and can soothe the child's nervous system—at the same time it is judgment and conditionality (I accept you in this moment, but may not in the next) and is so often felt by the child as manipulation.  When talking about black bodies who are at risk of so much violence, a lot of parental control, which may at times feel like shame coming from the parent, can be an instrument of protection coming from deep love and devotion.  Nothing is one thing.

As a side note, this is really one of the deepest roots of why I struggle to find words in that room with you, why I can feel I'm drowning in the offering up of words that flood into my conscious process during the act of attempting sentence creation.  As I allow myself to feel into, contemplate, consider, I expand into the multiplicity of each moment and find that words are beyond inadequate.  No sooner have I thought of an answer than seventeen more ask for their chance to be spoken.  My mouth cannot line up seventeen coherent linear sentences in the space available for an answer, and by the time I finish one, I've lost the others, because already thirteen new ones have lined up.

Sometimes I sense you assume there's some place I should arrive, and it's located in some sense in that room, bound within those walls, which you want me to scan for safety.  What if I'm not looking for safety in those moments?  What if my way of feeling connected with you is happening in a lot of dimensions we're not able to share in the ways you're asking me?

And here I want to pause, because THIS is yet another reason it meant so very much to me when you shared with me recently that you could feel me loving you through your hands—AND—why that meaningfulness was interrupted by the question that followed (something like, what was it like for me to hear you say that).

But, to answer your question (in case I haven't yet), in the simplest terms I can right now?  I felt, K is joining me in my world, rather than asking me to join her in hers.  That's what it was like to hear you say that.  And no, obviously, that's not a feeling, that's a description of what it was like that isn't rooted in the body.  I don't remember your actual question.  Did you ask me specifically about the body?  Maybe you want to know. Okay. When you said you could feel me loving you, I felt a pulsing, alive, radiant interconnectedness like a beautiful, glowing, vibrant mycelial network of being together, seen, acknowledged, felt, and I was attempting to bask.  And then your metatherapeutic question interrupted that experience.

So, maybe this is where our concepts could use some alignment? 

Maybe you'll say, that experience you were having, that wasn't the intention of our time, nor was my sharing how I felt your love through my hands, so that's beside the point. 

And I might say, the intention of my time in that moment WAS that experience, so to me your question was beside the point. 

But then, does it become about who is right?  I don't see that as a fruitful way to explore this difference.  Instead I guess I want more connection here, to feel into what each of us is wanting from these moments. Yes, both of us.  I really don't see it only as being about what I'm wanting. 

What makes those moments worthwhile for you to engage in?  If they're not worthwhile for you, I can't feel right participating in them.  So I find myself wanting to understand more. 

And that's sometimes when I think you perceive me as trying to "cross your boundaries" or us as entering into a "power struggle". But I'm just trying to understand what's happening on a deeper level and find a deeper meaning and purpose—beyond the sterile concept of entitlement as your client.

And that vibrant, glowing mycelial network?  I feel it in our eye contact sometimes, too.  Or just in the space between us.  But I’m sure you must already know this.  I can't possibly believe you don't feel it. 

Well, and then you finally told me that you did feel it, through your hands. 

Are these moments important to you?  Do you treasure them?  Long for them?  Are they part of what draws you to this way of being with people (being a therapist)?  What else am I there for?  How can we notice that stuff?

In some of the western literature, there's a template you're helping me form inside of my being.  Something like, you will teach me about new ways of being in relationship and I will carry those into my "real" life.  But I spend more time with you than I spend with many—if not most—people in this so-called "real" part of my life.  I don't see my relationship or my time with you as any less real a part of my meaning and soul purpose than the other ways I exist in my life.  But even if we start from this premise, this idea of a template?  What if the learning to feel into reciprocity along the many subtle and nuanced ways of relating and connecting with another soul are part of what I'm there to experience, learn and embed into my way of being?

So I guess that brings me to a question, about the way I experience and long for intimacy in that room with you: is that something you're willing to do with me?  Is that part of your purpose, your intention?  Am I allowed to acknowledge that I’m there to seek that with you?  Can that be what we're doing?  Does it feel compatible with who you are and what you're becoming?  Is it okay that I'm entering into that room to explore loving you?

I don't feel we've adequately discussed your ideas about what you intend to "offer" or where you think you have the capacity to guide me.  Perhaps it's as amorphous and gaseous and mysterious as anything has ever been and even putting words here breaks it.  Maybe putting it into words bounds it and limits it, leaving us less open to serendipity and magic and being present to the moment and to our souls’ beautiful, spontaneous, co-creational becomings.  Fair enough.

And now I will acknowledge… above I bemoan the challenges I face in your asking me to pin something down in words, then in the next breath, I'm asking you to do it?  Yes, I see that!!!

But it feels like an important dimension, this question of whether what you imagine your role to be, what you imagine yourself to be here with me for, in our time together, is aligned—or at least compatible!—with my own intentions.

Some will say I am the client, so it's only my intentions that matter.  I disagree because I don't and never will feel bound by the hegemony of transactionalism.  I spoke to this above.  But, is it okay that part of what I want, as client, is not to be bound in this way?  Am I allowed to be this person, with these intentions, these longings, this soul purpose, and seeking it with you, without somehow being seen as an invader—or, worse, somehow confused about what therapy can be?

I just keep wondering what you imagine your showing up for our time together as capable of bringing to me, and whether that matches my intentions for entering that room with you?

You have at times sensed a power struggle, a collision of our edges—as if they could ever be anything more than fuzzy, porous, morphing?! 

I can't see it this way.  I see something different. 

And I want (both of us) to understand the way I hold this question, because I sense my clients grappling silently with some of the same uncertainty, and wanting to be sure that I meet them honestly.  How I come to understand these dimensions with you and me helps inform my place in this world as practitioner, as this becoming elder concept that I am settling into.  

So it's deeply personal in many ways, and continuing to seek within and hold these questions deeply feeds my soul purpose.  I hope it's okay that this is what I'm doing.  I wanted to elucidate this inquiry and this recognition and I wanted to ask you to join me, if you will. 

And this feels more intimate and more daring than anything I've ever said, anything I've ever asked, and I'm aware I may shrivel in the intensity of the moment because my body cannot hold what my soul longs to expand into.  And perhaps the same is true for you.  But this is the kind of challenge I must put myself to if I wish to become an elder, and a better mother, and wife, and friend.  And also, I've grown attached to you.  Deeply attached.  I feel that I don't honor that depth and that connection if I don't push myself to this kind of honesty and challenge.

Which is to say, I love you, and you mean too much to me not to try to deepen our intimacy in the ways of which I am capable, because not to do so would be a tragedy, and one I cannot face down. 

So I won't. 

And so, here.  This is the best I can do. 

You have asked me to invite you in, over and over and over again, with your many questions. 

This is me trying.  I hope the invitation is received, and felt.  I hope it's louder than my fear, my inabilities, my strangeness, my neurodiversity.  I'm so glad to know you, and I hope I'm making that abundantly clear.

In The Wandering, Winding Way of the Wound, Bayo Akomolafe opened the training by saying he would not announce a trigger warning, he would offer an invitation into the energy of the trickster, into the troubling of our concepts, into a radical kind of discomfortable exploration.  I'm inviting myself into this troubling of myself, because this is the space I long to inhabit, the terrain of which is still unmapped in my conscious though my soul seems to know it well and is calling me to recognize it in some deeper way.  And I feel grateful that I feel the desire to inhabit it with you—and courageous enough to say so.

Just know, I'm too often not capable of doing this kind of linear sentence-stringing—that (barely) managed to happen here in this letter—when i am speaking with you face-to-face.  My beingness is like an expansive and shape-shifting ghost that inhabits a spaciousness and multi-dimensionalness, beyond any bounds my body (the very location of my mind) wants to ask of it.  This creates pain in my being every day, while also being opportunity for delight when I can let go of the judgment of the unboundedness of it all.  Maybe you're right when you question whether "I" don't really have boundaries.  Ha! What is "I" anyway? I don't just conceive of it differently. It's not just a semantical thing.  There's something else going on there.  I'm sure one day I will write about this more, but not here today.

I'll just end by saying, I love you, my ghost loves you, my soul loves you, my everythingness loves you.  And adores and delights in you. And I am so grateful that all these parts of me get to convene with you at regular, predictable, (and yes, haha, bound), intervals.  I hope you feel the same and that we're both inviting each other into—and choosing—more.  And then more.