Freedom

We are at our core, responsible for ourselves.  Sartre said that we are the authors of ourselves.  Through the choices we make and do not make; our action and inaction; we ultimately design ourselves.  The responsibility for this design is ours alone.  We are, as Sartre stated, “condemned to freedom.”

Our freedom extends beyond our individual life design.  We are the ones who provide form and meaning not only to our internal world but the external one as well.  We come face to face with outside world only as it is processed through our senses and perception and psychological filter.  Reality is not at all as we imagined in our youth—we do not enter into and (ultimately leave) a well-structured world.  Instead we play our role; our part in constituting that world.  We assign office and function to our world as though it appears to have an independent existence.

Because of this reality, the ground beneath us is not certain.  If there is no structure, then what, pray tell is beneath us?  Existentialists call it, Das Nichts—nothingness; the chasm, the abyss of freedom.  At the river’s edge of this lake of nothing are deep currents of anxiety.

While the word freedom rarely flows in the clinical relationship between client and therapist, its derivatives—responsibility, willing, wishing, deciding—are inescapable foci of attention in the therapeutic relationship.

The Power of "Us"

I had the pleasure of doing a 3 day family and parenting workshop for Allen ISD over the past 3 Wednesday evenings.  The participants were so gracious and eager.  The entire experience felt more like a conversation than a presentation.  In my profession, that is as valuable as gold.  I want to personally thank each participant and for all of the support staff who helped to make this such a special event. 

The workshop is called The Power of "Us."  This unique workshop is more than a menu of options to implement to address problematic symptoms in family relationships, it is a way of looking beyond the symptoms and seeing the resources available right now in your family and in the family relationship to heal and grow.  All of us have entered this world into a relationship with our family.  It is the first and most profound relationship we have ever been in.  It is in this relationship that we learn how to be in relationships.  We learn who we are, what our value is, and how dependaple relationships are.  In every relationship there is a me and there is a you, but when honest connection occurs the creation of a third identity occurs--"Us."  This workshop allows families to find their relational "us" and deepen the richness of this connection. 

If you are interested in being apart of this exciting workshop, please contact me for upcoming dates.  It is a resource too valuable to miss out on. 

Being and Seeming

The great philosopher and teacher Martin Buber recognized two types of human existence: “One proceeds from what one really is, the other from what one wishes to seem.” The duality of being and seeming really is the core problem in relational society today. The wish to be noticed and credited by another human is a powerful lure. It is a seductive force that intoxicates us into a world of make believe absent from who and what we really are. All of us are subject to this seductress. Self-disclosure or self-delineation is too hard; revealing who we really are to another human being is fraught with risk and potential danger. Revealing who we wish we were, what we want to appear as, is a much more protected shelter from judgment and shame.

The tension between being and seeming revolves around the struggle to find the “courage” to be versus the intrinsic flight from ourselves and others in the “cowardice” of seeming. But why? What is so scary about who we really are? I’m reminded of the children’s book The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Wilson. One of the opening passages of the book goes like this:

What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.
"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

That last line of the passage, “Once you are real, you can’t be ugly” hangs on the wall of the entry way of my office. It hangs there as a reminder that who I really am, can't be scary unless it is unknown. I’ve learned through the course of my relationships, that I have some wonderful qualities, but I’ve also learned through those same relationships that I have some really unpleasant qualities. More than that, I have some really abrasive, harsh, scary, abusive, disturbing qualities. But I am not the sum total of my disturbing qualities and I am not the sum total of my wonderful qualities. I am a totally integrated good, bad and ugly human being who transcends good or bad or ugly. To those that I have allowed to understand all of me, they have pointed out that I am lovable, I am enough and I am real.