You know, sometimes after therapy, the world feels lighter. Sometimes it feels darker. It feels a success, and sometimes a failure. It may feel like a release, it may feel like a burden. Sometimes it feels both and all of these. But in my experience, rarely do I feel more separated from the world after therapy than before. In fact, over time, I feel the world and I integrate. The understanding moves away from opposing concepts of "this" or "that" towards the "and": “this and that”. In psychoanalysis we can call this integration. We may call it the depressive position. or, containment. Or holding. We have many terms for unifying the human experience of the soul, mind and heart.

 

In every day life we tend to split the world in good and bad, particularly when we feel threatened, backed into a corner, forgotten, useless. We help ourselves by capturing a scapegoat and slaughter it verbally: this person always is late. They never cared about me. I would never have allowed this to happen. These absolutes help ourselves to deflect pain away from us. We place it onto, even into, another object, person, time, thing. In other words, we fence the pain off. We place it behind a wall so that the pain is over there, away from me here. It is just with time, we may still feel pain, because we cannot actually lock it away. And then we may forget we have placed the wall and realise it actually blocks our path, inhibits our relationships with people, things and times. We may face this wall and wonder about it. We may see that the wall is only an image of a wall, although this image of a wall is surprisingly powerful as a wall.

​

We learn with time that we need not accept these walls as real. We have made them, and we can unmake them. We can forge a path around, above, underneath, through. We integrate. The world need not be behind there or here in front. Then we may find ourselves standing in a field. And what appeared a large brick wall turns out to be a fence, fallen over, disintegrating into the wide meadow soil. No, is it not integrating, returning to the soil? If a fungi spoke, what would it say to that, I wonder. Be that as it may, what what was once two is now one. We have more access, we have more space. One is more than two. Wait, no, two is more than one. Go figure.