The Schopenhauer Cure(97)
Visible endings always cause us to brake. Readers zip through the thousand pages of The Brothers Karamazov until there are only a dozen remaining pages, and then they suddenly decelerate, savoring each paragraph slowly, sucking the nectar from each phrase, each word. Scarcity of days caused Julius to treasure time; more and more he fell into astonished contemplation of the miraculous flow of everyday events.
Recently, he had read a piece by an entomologist who explored the cosmos existing in a roped-off, two-by-two piece of turf. Digging deeply, he described his sense of awe at the dynamic, teeming world of predators and prey, nematodes, millipedes, springtails, armor-plated beetles, and spiderlings. If perspective is attuned, attention rapt, and knowledge vast, then one enters everydayness in a perpetual state of wonderment.
So it was for Julius in the group. His fears about the recurrence of his melanoma had receded, and his panics grew less frequent. Perhaps his greater comfort stemmed from taking his doctor’s estimate of “one good year” too literally, almost as a guarantee. More likely, though, his mode of life was the active emollient. Following Zarathustra’s path, he had shared his ripeness, transcended himself by reaching out to others, and lived in a manner that he would be willing to repeat perpetually throughout eternity.
He had always remained curious about the direction the therapy groups would take the following week. Now, with his last good year visibly shrinking, all feelings were intensified: his curiosity had evolved into an eager childlike anticipation of the next meeting. He remembered how, years ago, when he taught group therapy the beginning students complained of boredom as they observed ninety minutes of talking heads. Later, when they learned how to listen to the drama of each patient’s life and to appreciate the exquisitely complex interaction between members, boredom dissolved and every student was in place early awaiting the next installment.
The looming end of the group propelled members to address their core issues with increased ardor. A visible end to therapy always has that result; for that reason pioneer practitioners like Otto Rank and Carl Rogers often set a termination date at the very onset of therapy.
Stuart did more work in those months than in three previous years of therapy. Perhaps Philip had jump-started Stuart by serving as a mirror. He saw parts of himself in Philip’s misanthropy and realized that every member of the group, except the two of them, took pleasure in the meetings and considered the group a refuge, a place of support and caring. Only he and Philip attended under duress—Philip in order to obtain supervision from Julius, and he because of his wife’s ultimatum.
At one meeting Pam commented that the group never formed a true circle because Stuart’s chair was invariably set back a bit, sometimes only a couple of inches, but big inches. Others agreed; they had all felt the seating asymmetry but never connected it to Stuart’s avoidance of closeness.
In another meeting Stuart launched into a familiar grievance as he described his wife’s attachment to her father, a physician who rose from chairman of a surgery department, to medical school dean, to president of a university. When Stuart continued, as he had in previous meetings, to discuss the impossibility of ever winning his wife’s regard because she continually compared him to her father, Julius interrupted to inquire whether he was aware that he had often told this story before.
After Stuart responded, “But surely we should be bringing up issues that continue to be bothersome. Shouldn’t we?” Julius then asked a powerful question: “How did you think we would feel about your repetition?”
“I imagine you’d find it tedious or boring.”
“Think about that, Stuart. What’s the payoff for you in being tedious or boring? And then think about why you’ve never developed empathy for your listeners.”
Stuart did think about that a great deal during the following week and reported feeling astonished to realize how little he ever considered that question. “I know my wife often finds me tedious; her favorite term for me is absent, and I guess the group is telling me the same thing. You know, I think I’ve put my empathy into deep storage.”
A short time later Stuart opened up a central problem: his ongoing inexplicable anger toward his twelve-year-old son. Tony opened a Pandora’s box by asking, “What were you like when you were your son’s age?”
Stuart described growing up in poverty; his father had died when he was eight, and his mother, who worked two jobs, was never home when he returned from school. Hence, he had been a latch-key child, preparing his own dinner, wearing the same soiled clothes to school day after day. For the most part, he had succeeded in suppressing the memory of his childhood, but his son’s presence propelled him back to horrors long forgotten.
“Blaming my son is crazy,” he said, “but I just keep feeling envy and resentment when I see his privileged life.” It was Tony who helped crack Stuart’s anger with an effective reframing intervention: “What about spending some time feeling proud at providing that better life for your son?”
Almost everyone made progress. Julius had seen this before; when groups reach a state of ripeness, all the members seem to get better at once. Bonnie struggled to come to terms with a central paradox: her rage toward her ex-husband for having left her and her relief that she was out of a relationship with a man she so thoroughly disliked.
Gill attended daily AA meetings—seventy meetings in seventy days—but his marital difficulties increased, rather than decreased, with his sobriety. That, of course, was no mystery to Julius: whenever one spouse improves in therapy, the homeostasis of the marital relationship is upset and, if the marriage is to stay solvent, the other spouse must change as well. Gill and Rose had begun couples’ therapy, but Gill wasn’t convinced that Rose could change. However, he was no longer terrified at the thought of ending the marriage; for the first time he truly understood one of Julius’s favorite bon mots: “The only way you can save your marriage is to be willing (and able) to leave it.”