Geneen Roth

A few years ago, my therapist of ten years said, “I think you’re done, Geneen. You’ve worked hard, and you can continue, but I think you’re done.”

Done? 

I sputtered and spit up the spiced tea I was drinking on my new mustard-colored sweater. It’s not that I wasn’t a little thrilled; I’d spent forty years in therapy--Gestalt, Reichian, Jungian, Primal Scream, Eye Movement and Desensitization Reprocessing, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Hypnosis, Attachment Based Somatic Experiencing and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, but I didn’t think done would look like this. 

I thought I was going to be fixed. That all I needed was to try hard, do what I was told, feel what I’d never allowed myself to feel as a child and my nervous system would be calm and fluid; I’d live in parasympathetic mode like my husband does, where everything is already and always okay. Someone used your name, address and SS # to buy a phone and charge $100 worth of calls in one day? No problem sweetheart, call Verizon, cancel the charges, take a nap, relax.

It’s not that I imagined waking up as a completely different person; it’s just that I thought I wouldn’t be the same old me. At the end of therapy, I thought my familiar obsessions and neuroses would have been scoured with quintessential Borax so only the sparkling, sane parts would remain. With the right combination of brilliant therapists (and awakened spiritual teachers), I’d be healed-- and the rest of my life would be free.  

Instead, I still [at times] feel like an exposed nerve. Although it doesn’t happen often, there are still situations — a few sleepless nights, a long illness, a series of frustrating interactions —  I find myself feeling like a three-year-old. And many mornings still find me repeating the mantra that Joseph Goldstein, my first Buddhist teacher once uttered, “Oy vey, another day. Didn’t we just have one yesterday?” 

And yet, being in therapy was, at times, like having a dream mother, like being transported from frozen tundra to a balmy tropical island. Sometimes, as in working with the shock and trauma of physical and sexual abuse, it was horribly painful. But it was also lifesaving, and mostly effective (except for the therapist who charged me when I went on vacation because she said she was sitting in her chair and thinking about me. Each time I go away now, my husband threatens to charge me a hundred dollars for thinking about me). 

In therapy, I learned that no is a complete sentence, that being nice is overrated, and that no feeling is intolerable. I learned that when I feel hurt or angry, it’s always because one of my top three tunes is playing in the background of my mind: I’m a victim, I’m unworthy, and there’s never enough. 

I thought therapy would delete those songs. It hasn’t. Every time an old part is triggered, it feels exactly the same as it has for years. When, for instance, the “I’m unworthy” part comes up, I am instantly a despondent three year old with crooked bangs, chubby legs and a platinum blond unavailable mother who is walking out the door. I act like a firecracker rolled in porcupine quills: demanding, loud, dangerous. Not someone you would invite to a dinner party. 

The most shocking part of being done with therapy is that there is no one to whom I can hand myselves and say, “Here, you do it.  You fix her. I’m not up to the task.” 

Like an infant waits in her crib, like a toddler waits to be picked up, like a twelve year old [me] waited in an empty house for someone, anyone to come home, I never stopped waiting for someone to come and get me. I knew how to go through the motions of being a good client or a good spiritual student but in the hidden secret was that I resented having to save myself. I believed, albeit unconsciously, that I’d already paid enough in sorrow and was now owed being saved by someone else.

For forty years, there was always the next person, the next hope. A future in which I could dream myself whole without taking full responsibility for that wholeness, in the same way that my students keep pinning their hopes on the next diet (that will save them) and the next. 

 ”When,” I sometimes ask my students, “does it become non-negotiable to stop turning to food when you are not hungry?” 

“When,” I ask myself, “does it become non-negotiable to refuse to swoon to my top three looping songs? 

It’s the same question in different forms. As long as we keep hoping that someone is coming, we keep waiting. As long as we believe the answer is out there, we don’t have to turn around, discover it now. 

Every good-enough mother teaches her child that no matter how bad it seems—no matter how many rejections or scraped knees or broken bones there are—it is going to be okay. Maybe not the way we wanted or hoped it would be, but still okay. A good parent returns a child to the place where she can trust that it’s not the end of the world. There is love here. There is light and quiet here. There is rest here. 

At some point -- I think this is it -- therapy meets spirituality and fixing ourselves meets the realization that there is nothing more to fix. There are always going to be challenges on this body-personality dimension: plane flights will be missed, people will reject me, what/who thrilled me last year will disappoint me this year. Just when I think I’ve got it all together, an earthquake occurs. Someone dies. I get very ill. When I take myself to be the sum of what happened to me as a child or is happening at this very moment, I can never get it right for very long. When I take myself to be the unending always-forgiving space in which the drama is unfolding, I am already always fine. 

Finally we have to fall on the sword of knowing what we know and stop pretending that we don’t know it. Until that moment—and I seem to be a slow learner because it took forty years of therapy and forty-five years of spiritual practice to get me here—we act like children who are stuck on the wrong planet, in the wrong bodies, with the wrong families and we spend our time searching for more, better, loving parents and ever more creative/addictive ways out. And when we forget, which happens less and less often, we keep reminding ourselves that even that from which we want to be saved most of all—death itself—is just closing our eyes.