Removing pain’s barriers to healing

How do we open the window to let the air in?

Katherine Amphlett

Katherine is a counsellor based in the West Midlands.

A window sheds light through locked bars into a dusty and dark room,

Denny Müller on Unsplash.

One of the trickiest situations you can encounter if you’re a counsellor is having a client you can’t reach. They sit there in front of you, pain in their eyes, but somehow every approach you make meets with resistance. It’s like trying to touch someone through a closed window – you can see them, but you keep bumping into the glass.

I have two at the moment. One is Cypriot; I’ll call her Androulla, and she scares me rather as she is a doctor and never smiles and knows everything. ‘Yes, I have tried that,’ she says. ‘Yes, I am familiar with that book/ line of thinking/ philosophical method – it hasn’t worked for me.’

And I know that we’ve found the poisonous plant in the heart of her heart and pulled it up by the roots. I am as sure as I can be that she will get better now.

Yet she is dreadfully sad. Her mother died out in Cyprus, and she couldn’t get there in time. Her grief is eating her. She glares at me, desperate to be helped but bristling with gun turrets. Hmm.

Eventually I remember something Jane Goodall said. Jane Goodall is one of the world’s wonderful people… her work with chimpanzees back in the 60s dramatically changed our relationship with animals, and she still travels the world at the age of nearly 90 encouraging young people to take action on climate change. In her lovely Book of Hope she describes how when she’s completely knackered or stuck with something, she sort of hands herself over to an outside power. ‘I just relax and decide to appeal to the source of hidden strength,’ she writes. ‘There’s a wisdom that’s far, far, far greater than my own.’ When she surrenders in this way, she often gives her best lectures she says.

I think I might give it a try with Androulla. As a gradually-learning-to-be-more-trusting Christian, it seems most appropriate to follow in the footsteps of St Francis. So just before our next session I shut my eyes and say, ‘Help Lord, I don’t know what to say to her. Please take over and use me as a channel – she could really do with your peace and grace, and I seem to be in the way’. I’m quite a controlling person normally so I feel a bit reluctant… but if it works for Jane Goodall and for St Francis, I’m not going to argue!

To my surprise, I find myself asking Androulla what her understanding of the word ‘mercy’ might be – not a very usual counselling question. Even more surprising, her eyes fill with tears and suddenly she says that the last time she saw her mother, she told her she hated her, and had a physical fight with her and hurt the skin on her old arms. Crying properly now, the poor woman says she doesn’t deserve forgiveness after that, and I find myself telling her how mercy sees everything with utter clarity and loves and accepts it whatever is deserved or not deserved. And I know that we’ve found the poisonous plant in the heart of her heart and pulled it up by the roots. I am as sure as I can be that she will get better now.

Something compassionate has breathed on these locks, and the stuck windows have suddenly yielded and opened to let the air in.

Then today the same thing happens again – with Bella, my other client who cannot forgive herself, in this case for the fact that her violent alcoholic husband drank even more after she finally left him and died of organ failure in a homeless shelter. We’ve gone over and over her guilt for weeks, and she has remained shiny and brittle and artificially bright and fine. We’ve got nowhere. Until now. ‘Dear Lord,’ I say before I ring her, ‘help me find a way through to her. Let me remove myself and all my assumptions, so that your healing can flow through to her and give her some rest.’ I do my best to relax into our conversation, just to let what wants to come, come. And out of nowhere, I am suddenly inspired to ask her whether she’d feel guilty if her husband had died of some terrible illness like cancer.

‘No,’ she says.

‘Well… you’re a medical secretary. You’ll know better than me that alcoholism is an illness,’ I say.

There’s a very long silence.

‘Doesn’t that mean you’ve both been suffering from this terrible illness?’ I ask eventually. ‘Dave because it drove him crazy and then killed him; you because it blighted your life, and is blighting it still? Isn’t it time you said, “No, enough!” to this pestilence?’

I can see it in my mind’s eye, the alcoholism, like a swarm of red locusts or a scarlet dragon, devouring both Bella and Dave. I don’t feel that’s an image I came up with, it’s just there in my mind. I can feel this lodging in Bella’s mind too… a whole new way of thinking, a great big shift in emphasis, a transfer of responsibility from her to the monster.

I don’t know whether the idea is fully rooted yet, whether we can rely on it to grow and flourish and bear good fruit. But I sense that it is at least planted and watered. A bit more sunshine, some careful tending… and probably a lot more trusting would seem to be the way forward.

It’s not in the training manual, this technique. You won’t hear the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy recommending that therapists hand themselves over to Jane Goodall’s ‘outside power’. But something compassionate has breathed on these locks, and the stuck windows have suddenly yielded and opened to let the air in.

Article

Change

Psychology

27 August 2024

5 min read

Recovery came softly

A vision of grace amid an eating disorder.

From Mockingbird

Mockingbird connects the Christian faith with the realities of everyday life.

Under a tree, backlit by a sun set, two people sit in chairs outside and talk.

Harli Marten on Unsplash.

This article, by Lindsay Holifield, first appeared in Mockingbird. Published by kind permission.

I turned sixteen years old in a lavender-walled bedroom on the eating disorder unit at Texas Children’s Hospital. Surrounded by eagle-eyed nurses watching my every move and whirring machines keeping me alive, I quietly transitioned to Sweet Sixteen. The unit’s charge nurse was a gruff woman named Lupe, and despite her job, she did not particularly like children. But it was my birthday, and in an uncharacteristic act of kindness, Lupe offered me a slice of cake. She must have briefly forgotten her surroundings, because I was not a normal teenager. I was a patient on a pediatric eating disorder unit, and I broke down sobbing at the mere thought of such a high-calorie food entering my body.

This was my first birthday in a clinical treatment facility for anorexia, but it would not be the last. After receiving the initial diagnosis of anorexia nervosa as a teenager, the doctor’s pronouncement sounding like a death-knell at the time, I would admit to twenty treatment facilities on separate occasions across a period of fourteen years.

The treatment staff began to greet me knowingly when I would re-admit after only a few months out, as though I was an old friend returning from vacation. “Welcome back, Lindsay,” they would say, as they took my luggage and inserted yet another nasogastric feeding tube. Over time, I began to be labeled “chronic,” and I internalized a belief that I was one of the sufferers who was fated to live the rest of my life under the oppressive weight of this struggle.

I would have to try harder. I would have to pull myself up by my bootstraps and willpower my way into recovery. After each attempt under this approach, I would fall flat on my face.

It seemed that no matter how much motivation I mustered up, this internal drive to self-destruct would not leave me alone. I desperately wanted to wake up each day without having to submit afresh to the hellish existence of self-starvation and running till my lungs felt on the verge of collapse. But I felt chained to this destructive cycle deep into my bones, despite my best intentions.

I was often berated by various treatment providers for not having enough motivation. I didn’t necessarily want to die, but I could not find the strength within me to fight off the voice in my brain that demanded self-destruction. Doctors and mental health clinicians made it clear that if I really wanted to get better, I would have to try harder. I would have to pull myself up by my bootstraps and willpower my way into recovery. After each attempt under this approach, I would fall flat on my face. The despair of my situation began to swallow me whole: there was no way out, because I could not yell at myself enough to make myself well.

Because of the lavish softness I was shown, I began to approach myself with greater softness.

I was twenty-six years old, and I was sitting in a green folding chair in the summer on a farm in Nashville, Tennessee. The woman in the folding chair across from me is decidedly in support of my recovery, but she isn’t yelling at me or giving me a stern lecture. Instead, she is explaining with great care and tenderness how much sense my struggles make in light of my previous life experiences. “Perhaps,” she says gently, “your brain was trying to survive great pain. Perhaps you were simply trying to make the ache go away the best way you knew how.” Her compassionate words break something open within me, and I start weep like a small child. No one has ever approached me with compassion like this; they are all afraid being too soft will simply enable me to further harm my body. But they are wrong. It is precisely this compassion and sense of being witnessed that softens my armored heart.

Recovery did not come overnight, but I can unhesitatingly say that the compassion of a woman on that farm in Nashville is what radically changed the trajectory of my life. Because of the lavish softness I was shown, I began to approach myself with greater softness. The voice of condemnation quieted, and I slowly turned from self-destruction to life.

Do you not hear the gospel ringing out here? My story of recovery is simply a zoomed in image of the grander story, the beautiful truth that makes up the fabric of our existence. Admitting powerlessness to destructive forces of sin and death is important, but the condemnation of the law will not save us. It is the extravagant, one-way grace of God that resurrects the dead.

I have heard similar fears in faith communities that I continually hear in my recovery communities: if we are too extravagant with compassion, we are enabling sin and destructive behaviors. But I am a living testament that compassion is what softens hearts of stone, armored up by self-protection and attempting to earn love through behavioral perfection. I would have died many times over save for the compassion that chased me down and embraced me, and being held in such tender kindness was the only thing that could have changed my fate. I believe this for mental health, yes, but more importantly, I believe this for the rescue of all of humanity. The grace of God is the sole agent of resurrection and change.

To the surprise of those who cling tightly to rigid, white-knuckling versions of recovery, my behavioral change occurred only after I was met with a grace without strings attached. This should not be surprising to Christians, however. Here again, the gospel glaring back at us, that repentance is a response to the kindness of God. This is the God who loved us while we were dead in our sins, while we were powerless to the forces of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Against our behavior-driven moral sensibilities, God offers us grace that is a free gift, compassion in its fullest expression, and it is the only thing that will bring renewal and healing to the inhabitants of this desperately aching world: minds, hearts, and bodies included.