Human beings are impatient beings. And
more often than not short-sighted, both metaphorically and literally.
This reflects in the context of therapeutical work, too. Patients are
often anything but..... patient. Formed by our Zeitgeist´s
restless imprint, terapeutees (my term for people in
terapeutic processes) often hope for instant gratification. Or maybe:
instant grace- i-fication. A heaven-send therapeutic-pill that cures
the psychological headaches within half an hour. Been there
(therapy), done that. On with
the show. It could seem that psychiatry with in inflationary use
of anti-depressants bases its work on such implicit premisses.
Unfortunately and fortunately, inner
work that truly transforms the content (not just the form) of the
individual´s internal software takes its time. How long that times
takes in chronological time measurement, nobody can possibly know nor
say. It´s part of the mystery of working with the soul. It´s a
little bit like Slow Food. Really good food often takes time (and the
consciousness that goes along with it) to prepare. Which does not
mean that all good therapy necessarily needs to be snail-slow. Many
tools exist today that can greatly accellerate the therapeutic
prosess, in comparision to old school psychoanalysis- where a normal
analysis lasted something like 6 years with three sessions per week.
Much sharper and to the point tools exist today and we need to use
them if we want to be able to deal with the tsunami waves of
psychological challenges that the individual and collective soul face
in our time and space. My sense is that their primary function is to
set in motion the transformative process, the jump-starting impuls. A
bit like shooting the white billard ball in an expert way into the
other balls. Things start rolling. Balls start bouncing into each
other. The whole former order of the field rearranges itself. But
when does the first ball fall into a hole (the «whole») ? Who can
say ?
Another analogy that seems to hit the
spot and can inform us about the prosess of internal transformation
is what I call the ice-cube analogy. Think about a bunch of ice-cubes
at minus 6 degrees. Slowly the temperature is raised by one degree:
-5, -4, -3, -2, -1. Until you reach 0 degrees nothing seems to have
changed. They seem like the same old, frozen ice-cubes. Only when you
reach the critical temperature, the freezing/melting point, a
dramatic change takes place: The crystalline structure of the
ice-cubes dissolves and the water molecules start floating freely in
all directions. If one would only stare at the phenomenlogy, that is:
what is visible on the surface, one would conclude that nothing has
changed before you hit 0 degrees. All the way down from – 6 nada
happened! But that is not true. To get to the critical point where
«everything changes» one needs to go the process of -5, -4, -3,
-2, -1. Otherwise it would be possible to get there and nothing could
happen then.
The same applies for the therapeutic
transformational process. Often one may not see the immeditate
change one hopes for (still being stuck in the instant gratication
paradigm). But that is not because nothing has happened. The
happening in the psyche often happens step by step, degree by degree
in the invisible. Until suddenly -one day- it goes boom ! This can
happen both ways of course. In the therapeutic context most hopefully
as positive eureka, where old outdated inner ice finally melts and
the waters of the soul get flowing again, watering the former
internal desert soils.
But in order to see the whole picture
one also has to consider the inverse scenario, the negative version
of it: something can built up in the darkness of the unconscious
over time and at at some critical point, something goes boom – a
relationship, a bodily function, a part of the soul that collapses.
Life has it all. Individual
consciousness decides where things turn.
Prefab Sprout: The Ice Maiden