Shared Paths: For Greet

On 29 September of this year, Dr. Greet Vanaerschot, University of Antwerp, was honored with a special event celebrating her many achievements and awarding her professor emerita status.  The folks who organized the event asked me to write something, which turned out to be a poem.  (For more information: https://9b22cb4ae65947bbaf62f74d456d4286.marketingusercontent.com/m/view/IGqtSNLy4dO08KVt3mCglxxmRfxdYYxN842f8F3tuL0x#msdynttrid=i9DLTaQv5-q7J7E55YoZkgLPS-UFpHU5AVdY9A2CpE4)

 1. What is Empathy?

 What is empathy? Asked Greet.

And answered,

Letting go, tuning in, taking hold,

Letting go again.

 

These movements, like the children’s nursery rhyme,

Tiny spiders crawling up water spouts,

Found empathy in simple body movements,

Etched indelibly in our memories.

 

Letting go, tuning in, taking hold:

These images caught my metaphor-fevered

Imagination, opening up the embodied

Phenomenology of empathy for me,

 

Elaborated to this day as:

Letting go of our load of empathic baggage,

Entering the child’s playhouse of the person’s experience,

Tuning into what in us answers them,

Sifting through the many facets that are there,

Taking hold of what feels most important

… And letting go again.

 

Empathy must start here,

In this embodied place.

If not, then therapist response modes are empty,

Skill training a waste of effort,

Evidence-based treatments

so much clanging of gongs.

 

All else is nonsense!

 

 

2. Complementarity Is Not Just for Physicists

 

During my time in Leuven in 1990

While I watched, amused,

Greet and Mia argued which was greater:

Empathy (Greet) or Experiencing (Mia).

 

They were both right of course,

Arguing the two sides of the great complementarity,

As if we could have one without the other:

Wave or particle; therapist or client.

 

But I loved that there was a place in this world

Where this argument could be had,

The mystery pondered,

And could seem so natural.

           

 

3. Shared Paths

 

Somewhere, in an old box of photos,

Currently travelling between continents,

There is a record of a visit between our young families,

A third of a century ago,

Our small children playing together,

Though probably no tiny spiders were involved.

 

But beyond that

We shared other important, professional paths:

Empathy,

Person-centred-experiential therapy,

Process-experiential/emotion-focused therapy;

Research, practice, training;

A common mission of holding space

For these rare things,

Putting them forward, in apparently

Inhospitable places

Where the medical model dominates.

Finding a niche nonetheless.

 

Years later, we got to hang out again

When you invited me to teach a day on your course,

In Antwerp

To see the precious thing you were building.

 

Now I realise that for several years

I ran through your section of Antwerp,

From Berchem to Wilrijk and back.

 

Now, as we retire, our trajectories stretch away

To the horizons of our lives.

We look back and see from whence we’ve come,

All we have accomplished,

And we’re grateful for the ride

And for the company:

 

Letting go, tuning in, taking hold,

And letting go again.

 

                                    -Robert Elliott, Pleasanton, California, 3 April 2023

Fifty Years: An Anniversary Poem

 Entry for 19 August 2023:

(Diane & Robert fiftieth wedding anniversary, with notes for our grandkids)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. A Story of Us and How We Got Together

 

You

Me:

50 years

Watergate to Ukraine

Green youth to gray age

 

You

Me:

Grand Forks

Palo Alto

 

Both born in the very midst of a turbulent century

In the shadow of two great and horrid wars

Grandchildren of the Great Depression.

 

First-born to bright, educated, caring

But quite young parents

Themselves youngest, or almost youngest, children,

Dads still studying, arcane lore.

Moms doing odd bits of work and raising us

Your mom as short as my mom was tall

All of us learning as we went.

 

You

Me:

Pleasanton

Lodi

 

Raised in small, flat California towns

In the process of becoming suburbs

In the buttoned-down 1950’s.

 

Children of privilege

That we did not even recognize at the time:

WEIRD WASPs.

(Note: By WASPs we don’t mean the stinging insects

but White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant;

and WEIRD stands for Western, Educated,

Industrialized, Rich, Democratic.)

 

You

Me:

Santa Cruz

Los Angeles

 

Wearing the privilege of oldest children,

Used to responsibility for others

But ambivalent about our power,

Proud but burdened.

 

Glad to escape to university

As soon as we could

We happily exchanged

The small uptight inland places

For a counter-cultural beach town

That we were almost too square for.

 

Looking back, it’s striking

We could have shared so much:

But it’s no surprise we immediately

During orientation week

Recognized each other as fellow refugees.

 

And then remained friends for years

As we grew, experimented,

had other crushes and connections,

Began to learn who we were,

And eventually, in a time of transition,

found our way back to each other.

 

And thence to the big city and marriage

Full of the usual sorts of contradictions

Shy extraverts

Traditionally heterosexual

But androgenous, tolerant and curious

Sheltered from major loss and trauma

But acquainted with sorrow and failure.

 

Optimistic pessimists (or is it the other way round?)

Blending acceptance and pickiness,

Stubbornness and flexibility.

We like a good laugh but do not suffer fools gladly;

We do not insist on our way

But do not like at all to be pushed around.

 

We did not imagine that our shared background

And rampant contradictions would turn out to be

Just what we needed for a fifty-year journey together.

2. Fifty Years Passes

 Like the time-lapse photos

our granddaughter Mizuki took

Of her flight here from Seattle,

Or a magical version

of our living room gliding love seat

which our grandson Yuki immediately takes to

Rocking it vigorously as he tries

to reach the land of his imagination,

We now play back the past fifty years

Since our wedding:

They flash by in our minds,

Rocking us repeatedly back

To places and people

Both remembered and (until now) forgotten.

 

Days, years; beginnings, endings;

A rhythm of repetition

And each moment unique:

Toledo, Sheffield,

Toledo, Leuven,

Toledo, Toronto,

Toledo, Melbourne,

Toledo, (sons to Cleveland),

Glasgow.

Pleasanton.

 

Over these many years,

The elder generations pass:

The last remaining grandparents, then parents,

Aunts, uncles, teachers,

Friends timely and untimely lost,

Until we are the elders,

And our passing, still unknown

Is nevertheless not that far away.

 

In the meantime, we’ve been looking

Through old photos of us

Excavating the layers of the years:

We wonder at our younger selves,

When was this?

Who were those people?

Were they really us?

 

Yet we know the answer:

Yes, they are all still in there

Mizuki’s time lapse

Of flickering faces and places

This crowd of us

Wildly varying hairstyles

Strange, but not strangers to us,

In all these different places

Exotic and mundane

With all these different people

Who we have loved

And who have loved us.

            *          *          *

Yuki’s commandeered our rocking sofa;

It’s now a time machine

Swinging us creakily through the years.

“Don’t swing too hard!”

We tell him repeatedly

For we fear It will break us

And our old-but-young-at-hearts hearts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 (Link to Mizuki's airplane timelapse movie)

 

3. The Secret of a Long Marriage

 

It appears that being married for 50 years or more

Is unusual enough these days

That people want to know what our secret is.

 

The fact is, we don’t know

And fear to look too closely

As if that might jinx the whole thing

Like the poor centipede trying to figure

How it walks and falling

Into a ditch instead.

 

Nevertheless, friends have pressed us

With questions and pet theories:

One said the secret was “Inertia”;

Another, “Failure of Imagination.”

To these I’m inclined to add

“Insecure Attachment” and “Stubbornness”.

 

But I think all of these miss the point:

We know that close relationships

Are inherently unstable

And difficult to maintain.

 

Stability is either an illusion,

A skewed family system (psychobabble

for one person having too much power),

Or the result of hard work.

 

As in the universe itself

Entropy is the law.

 

We learned this in the tenth year of our marriage

When I had survived my tenure vote

(Following years of severe workaholism),

When our first child was two

(Sorry, kids and grandkids,

But having kids

Is a huge stressor for couples),

Only to face the abyss between us.

 

A year of couples therapy helped us through this

And from that experience

We took two essential things:

One: A microwave oven, which lasted 34 years

(we gave up on it, before it gave up on us);

Two: Not taking ourselves too seriously,

Which is timeless.

 

The fact is, we are both very aware of the other’s

annoying habits, limitations and emotional allergies,

Which we constantly try to correct

Even though we know perfectly well

that this is impossible

And would make the other

A perfect person,

who we wouldn’t even recognize

… And might even feel inferior to.

 

And we know all too well

that even though other people

Might see us as caring,

thoughtful, good-hearted and so on,

We can each at times

“In our present imperfection”

act like jerks toward the other,

Especially when stressed, ill or emotionally injured.

 

And so from time to time

One or the other of us

Realizes that there’s a problem:

Something’s gotten out of balance between us,

One of us has begun to disengage.

 

This means:

There is an unattended-to injury

That must be addressed,

Painful truths spoken,

New understandings to surprise us,

New accommodations to be forged.

 

The result:

We muddle through,

For better or for worse

Helped by friends and family

Deeply grateful for the time we’ve had together,

Knowing it to be completely mundane

And at the same time completely amazing,

Treasuring the times we’ve had with each other

And the times that remain to us

Knowing that it’s all temporary

And therefore infinitely precious.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4. Coda

 

(Note: A Coda is a part

Near the end of something

Where you review

The main points of the whole thing,

so you can finish.)

 

We are two people with many similarities,

And just as many inner contradictions

As most people.

 

We found each other when we were still pretty young,

Thought it would cool to get married,

Then found out how hard it is

To make a life together.

 

If we wanted to stay together

(Which we did),

We had to figure out

How to make our little family

Work over a long time.

 

But we didn’t do this on our own,

Because we had a lot of support

From the people who loved and surrounded us

And who we loved and still love.

 

Eventually, we reached a point where

There is more happiness than pain,

And many shared moments

Of joy and connection,

Built on all

we’ve been given by life.

 

And we know that these moments,

Won by hard work and stubbornness,

These moments will always be

And will always have been.

 

For this we thank you,

Our family, our friends, our community.

 

                                    -Robert Elliott, 18/19 August 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Drawing by Mizuki Elliott, (c) 2023) 

 

 (Link to 50-year slideshow of Diane & Robert, created by Brendan Elliott)

 

(Link to Robert reading this poem) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I’m Shy”: Emotion Processes in Social Anxiety

Entry for 8 June 2023:

 

Background: I’ve just recorded another episode for the Emotion-Focused Podcast, hosted by Lou Cooper of the Australian Institute for Emotion-Focused Therapy in Melbourne, Australia.  The previous episode, which I recorded with Lou in November 2022, was on empathy and whether it can be learned.  This previous episode can be found at: https://www.emotionfocused.com/  I invite readers of this blog to sample the other fascinating episodes of this podcast, which is primarily aimed at lay people but is also relevant to professionals.

 

The title of the new episode is “I’m Shy”; I don’t know exactly when it will go up, but it should appear in the next month or so; in the meantime there is plenty to listen to on Lou’s fun podcast. As I did for my previous episode with her, I wrote a detailed script for the interview, but then used almost none of it, as I instead talked more about my own experiences of shyness and social anxiety.  If you want to hear more about that, look out the podcast.  In the meantime, here is the script I wrote:

 

1. Language: Shyness, Social Anxiety, and Introversion

 

The word “shy” originally came from ancient words having to do with fear and avoidance (“gun-shy”, “The horse shied away from the fire”).

 

As an adjective, shy means “nervous or embarrassed about meeting and speaking to other people”.  Synonyms include: bashful, diffident, timid, introverted and so on.  Shy specifically implies a basic tendency to shrink “from contact or close association with others, together with a wish to escape notice”.

 

On the other hand, being introverted can be something quite distinct from being shy or socially anxious. An introvert can be defined as “a person who prefers calm environments, limits social engagement, or embraces a greater than average preference for solitude.” Psychologically, following Carl Jung, introverts are people who are concerned “primarily with their own thoughts and feelings,” in other words, their inner world rather than the outer world of other people. A critical issue might therefore whether a person genuinely prefers their own company out of a basic inclination, or whether they do so out of fear of other people, while deep-down longing for more connection to others. For this reason, I wouldn’t want to say that introversion and shyness are the same thing, and want to hold out for the possibility a person could an introvert and not be shy.

 

In any case, while I wouldn’t want to say that all shy people are socially anxious, there is certainly a lot of overlap, and shyness does seem to generally involve fear and avoidance, especially of situations with other people.

 

So: We want to be careful to recognise the possibility that some shy/introverted folks might be perfectly happy with being on their own.  On the other hand, my experience (in my own life and with my clients) is that socially anxious folks generally long for connection to other people, and are miserable both in the company of other people and on their own.  As an emotion-focused therapist and former miserable shy person, it’s that misery that concerns me.  I’m also not interested in diagnosing people, so I want to be guided by the person’s own sense of whether their dis-preference for being around others is a problem for them, or not.

 

2. Definition of Social Anxiety

 

So what is the formal definition of social anxiety?

-It’s a fear of other people or social situations, a fear that the person finds unreasonable.

-This fear is pretty consistent over situations of a particular type, like public speaking or informal social situations, like hanging out with one’s friends.

-This fear is unwanted; the person doesn’t like being afraid of other people, because it causes them a lot of distress and/or messes their life up, that is, gets in the way things that are important to them, like finding meaningful, fulfilling work, or develop caring relationships.

 

Note that social anxiety can vary in severity from being miserable in social situations (that was me as a young person) to having my fear of other people essentially destroy the possibility of having a successful life.

 

3. Origins and nature of social anxiety

 

In our research and clinical work, my research team and I at the University of Strathclyde found that severe social anxiety (as opposed to more garden variety shyness) almost always involves some kind of social trauma/humiliation/degradation, at the hands of family, friends or peers. This is then internalised as a sense of being basically defective, accompanied by a part of self that continually beats us up (in internal humiliation), possibly in attempt to prevent the external humiliation from happening again.

 

The result of this process is a deep sense of shame over one’s defectiveness, which further results in a fear of other people and social situations, motivating the person to avoid situations in which they might again be shamed, by having their defectiveness seen by other people.  Another part of the person comes to act like a kind of guard, trying to keep the person safe for humiliation by reminding them of their defects, pushing them to prepare for social situations, and generally scaring them into avoiding those situations.  This coach-critic-guard part becomes so good at its job that it frequently overwhelms the person with fear, freaking them out or creating an anxiety attack or panic. 

 

This all sounds more or less straightforward, but in fact everyone’s social anxiety is unique, tied to different social traumas, experienced differently in the body, although there are common body feelings, like tightness or butterflies in the throat, chest or stomach, and fuzziness in the head during anxiety episodes.  Each person also symbolises their core defective sense of self in their own way, the thing they are most afraid of other people seeing about them.

 

4. Therapy for social anxiety

 

Common sense, including everyone from Freud to our grandmother, tells us that when we are unreasonably afraid of something we should face our fears in order to overcome them.  This is the basis of most CBT treatments of social anxiety.  The problem is, it’s not so easy to face one’s fears, especially when they are deep-seated and based on a history of trauma.  In done poorly or insensitively, this approach can easily become re-traumatising, and some clients hate such treatments. 

 

Instead, in EFT, we find it’s important to first create an atmosphere of safety and trust in which the person can feel genuinely understood and accepted.

 

Then, there is a period of exploration, in which we want to hear the person’s story of their fear of other people.  We also want to hear how they experience this fear in their body.  Going a bit further, we want to hear what is it that they are most afraid others will see in them, their core defective sense of self.

 

After that, we ask the person bring in examples of times when they found themselves afraid of other people, so that we can experience these episodes in imagination along with them.  As we help them unfold these times, we begin to hear the voice of the coach-critic guard scaring them, and we suggest that they show us what this inner conversation looks like by enacting it in the therapy room.  (We usually use chairs to represent the parts of self, but it’s not absolutely necessary.)

 

Acting out this inner conversation makes it clear to the person that their fear of other people is not primarily something that happens to them but is instead an internally-generated process that they do to themselves, with the best of intentions, trying to be helpful.  They also come to see how this inner dialogue sometimes overwhelms them, causing the very thing it’s trying to prevent. 

 

As we work with this process it becomes clear that there is also a harsh internal critical part of self that continually reinforces and feeds the sense of defectiveness, even now in their life.  This critical voice doesn’t soften, even when confronted with the damage it does.  So we begin to wonder with the client where this voice comes from.  Because it’s generally so obvious to them at this point, clients don’t really need our help to see the connection to past social trauma such as bullying.  From here, we can then move on to exploring the unresolved feelings left over from these past traumas, often by having clients confront the bullying others in imagination (usually using an chairs to represent these others).

 

This process of confrontation helps the person reach the thing that hurts the most about what they’ve been through, what we call the core pain, and once they’ve reached that we offer genuine validation and compassion to the parts of the person that still carry this pain.  At this point we can ask these parts what this pain needs; the answer turns out to be connection, validation, recognition, protection and compassion.  We then ask the person if they can offer these things to the wounded parts of themselves, which releases a set of powerful, useful emotions:  connecting sadness, protective anger, and self-compassion.

 

Finally, it’s important to note that it may not be enough to go back to the core pain, find out what it needs, and help the person provide that for themselves.  Afterall, the fear of others typically has become a kind of experiential habit that will often need to be worked with, using the new, useful emotions that the person has activated: The connecting sadness points to a deep hunger for connection, which motivates the person to go out and face their habitual fear of others, while the protective anger helps them to withstand their own inner critical, undermining voices and the self-compassion helps them enhance their resilience in the face of life’s inevitable struggles and setbacks.  Working together, these adaptive, growth-oriented emotions help the person get unstuck and move forward in their life.

 

Science My Mom Taught Me

Entry for 14 May 2023 

Note: For Mother’s Day this year, I thought it would be appropriate for me to bring back the poem I wrote for my mom for her 75th birthday nearly 20 years ago, April 7 2004. (At that time, she exclaimed, delightedly, “I get a poem… and I don’t even have to be dead!”) Although she passed on eleven years ago, in 2012, and I’ve written plenty of other pieces for/about her in the meantime, this one I think best captures what she has – and continues – to mean to me. 

Further note: I’ve been going through old files lately, and last night I found the “Robert Jr” folder my mom kept about me, full of old poems and letters, along with a few photos. Amongst all this stuff about me, on small pieces of paper, I found a series of hand-written, undated affirmations that she wrote about/to/for me at one time or another. In them she wrote that she loved me, and God loved me, and that I was going to be all right and would do good things in my life. I never saw these handwritten pieces, did not even know they existed until now. Small prayers, tucked into this folder and perhaps forgotten, but still: messages, angels, blessings down the years. 

 

1. Science as Love and Relationship

 

A good place to start is that ancient photograph,

Recently rediscovered, from 1950:

 

There the two of you are, the same age

As the youngest of my grad students. 

Both of you are tall, almost toothpick thin.

He is looking at the camera, tight jeans and shirt,

Like a rebel with cause to smile.

 

But you are looking down, through large glasses,

Your face framed by billowing hair,

With toothy grin, and your arms

Awkwardly but carefully wrapped round

A very small bundle.

 

The two of you look like nothing

So much as a couple of computer nerds

From half a century in the future.

Code geeks, rolling out your first promising program,

Ready for beta-testing.

 

But the code is genetic,

The language is life,

And the program is … me.

 

2. True Science is Risky

 

Although I learned magic from my dad,

It now seems clear to me that it was you

From whom I first learned science,

To which I have now devoted so much of my life.

 

But yours was never the normal, safe kind,

Digging away at the coal face

In the mines of knowledge,

Like Disney’s happy dwarves.

 

No, not that kind, but instead

The one that goes off to Far Tortuga,

Toward distant Galapagos unknown,

In search of the evolution of the human soul.

 

For you, big ideas have never been too big:

The nature of reality; the journey of the soul;

Jung’s famous paper on flying saucers;

The archetype of the Mandala: As without, so within.

 

Instead of Aristotle … Plato’s forms;

Instead of Archimedes … Pythagorus’s numbers;

Instead of Moses’ law … the Kabbalah’s secrets;

Instead of chemistry …alchemy’s transformations.

 

Oh, you did chemistry, too, at least early on:

You would disappear for hours,

Into your laboratory at the back of the house,

Full of strange smells and odd bits:

 

Broken glass, mosaic pieces,

Rolls of wallpaper, bolts of cloth,

Cans of precursors and catalysts,

When plastics was new technology.

 

And you would emerge from your lair,

To confront your family with some new concoction,

Sometimes lovely, or quirky, or primitive;

At times, a disaster, but always something new.

 

No, for you, science has always been risky:

Working at the edge, making something new,

You have become an expert in the peril of experiment,

And I have followed you, where I could.

 

 

3. Science as Inspiration and Passion

 

Your mother (my grandmother) taught me many things:

How to travel and how to be in a new place;

The importance of hard work and getting up early;

The ninety-nine percent of sweat that makes up genius.

 

But you taught me a far more valuable lesson:

The one percent of inspiration that redeems all the rest,

The moment of epiphany, the pattern opening,

The intensity of the new connection breaking through,

 

The science of cutting to the center of the world,

Of seeing what others don’t choose to see,

Of waking to awareness when others sleep,

And the flow of following the spirit far into the night.

 

When I see these things in myself, I recognize you.

The passion of discovery is too powerful to resist,

Even if we wanted to; the daemon must be honored;

It is ours, and we must let it speak through us or die.

 

 

4. Science as Always Starting Anew

 

I find it odd that I describe my dad in a series of narratives,

But you as a set of ideas, a paradigm, a model.

There is, however, one story that is always you,

The story in which you are always re-inventing yourself:

 

Child of the Depression with a single mom;

Big city girl; prep school party-er;

Young, anxious mother and seamstress;

Small town society woman in a flat land.

 

But your life makes a strange turn: You take up philosophy;

You quit smoking just because you feel like it;

You return to religion and start teaching Sunday school;

You become a small business owner and a writer.

 

Years pass: You’re CEO of a large and raucous family,

With the habit of taking in strays (both human and animal);

And you’ve gradually evolved into a spiritual leader

Of a small but loyal group of friends.

 

Then, your life turns again:  Warned in a vision

Of the impending end of civilization, you become

A gentle survivalist and take your family

Into the mountains, like Noah waiting for her flood

 

You seal several tons of wheat into cans,

Which are still there after twenty-five years.

Well, we can’t get everything right, but now you live

In a beautiful little valley: Murray Creek.

 

Now you are matriarch to three generations and 60 acres.

A combination of Ariadne, Daedalus and Theseus,

You become a labyrinth designer and unwinder

Of ritual journey spaces of stones, words and image.

 

Reading widely and deeply, you map the interweaving

Stories of your own and humanity’s spiritual development,

Join a religious order, become a spritual director,

And finally, start a Crone Circle of wise women.

 

Curiously, all these things somehow fit together:

Clearly, you’ve never stopped starting over;

For you, science is leaving behind what no longer works,

A selfsame process of adding on, differentiating, elaborating,

 

Just as you are always the same person,

The passionate, intellectual adventurer, the one

Who keeps transforming herself, like an endless succession

Of butterflies, emerging one from the other.

 

 

The Adventure Continues…

Entry for 25 March 2023:

 

Sixteen and a half years ago we moved to Scotland for ten years.  Yes, we know that the math doesn’t add up, except in the calculus of the heart. We were exiles, living in Scotland, but we found that we were warmly welcomed.  We went on regular Saturday adventures, many, many adventures. We must have seen every standing castle in central Scotland, and a fair number that are now just piles of fallen stone. We made new friends, started new projects, made a life for ourselves there.  I wrote and posted more than 500 entries of this blog.

 

And then, as the years went on, even as our mothers died, I had surgery for prostate cancer, our children finished their PhDs, and grandchildren arrived, we found that we weren’t quite ready to go back. There was crucial work to do: meta-analyses to carry out and publish, a new course to start, a lively church community, the folk club we loved even on an off night. There were adventures we’d never gotten around to, like the islands of Skye and Lewis.  And America, with its toxic politics, self-absorption and gun violence, did not much appeal. 

 

So in 2016, instead of going back the US, we settled into a routine of commuting between Glasgow, Scotland, and Pleasanton, California, staying in each place for a month at a time.  This made a lot of sense when my mother-in-law was still alive, in that we were able to support her during our time there. However, after a year of this she suddenly died, leaving us to continue as we had done previously, on automatic pilot. In the meantime, the new MSc in Counselling started and I switched to 60% time, allowing me more time for research and writing projects while still staying involved with teaching and delivering EFT training. 

 

This went on for several years… until the pandemic arrived. At that point, we made the decision to stay in Scotland, where I could keep teaching online and where the public health policy made more sense. At the same time, the climate crisis emerged as more significant for us and led us to become more uncomfortable with the level of carbon emissions we were producing by flying so much.  At the same time, a wonderful opportunity emerged in the form of the EmpoweringEFT@EU project for developing curricula for training more EFT supervisors and trainers.  I retired from teaching in late 2021 but stayed on for yet another year on a researcher contract as part of this project. 

 

In the meantime, we set about the project of making our condo in California more carbon neutral.  We replaced our old natural gas furnace (which was leaking carbon monoxide) with a high-efficiency heat pump.  We spent a year getting a solar energy system installed on our roof; this took some doing because we were the first in our development to do so and the Board was deeply suspicious what a potpourri different solar panels would do to the look and feel of our development.  These are things that we could not do in Scotland, since we didn’t own our flat there.

 

Finally, this month, it was time for the leaving of Scotland. We located a moving company and began sorting through our things: We were going to have to squeeze our two parallel lives into one life; a significant downsizing in both Scotland and California were required.  In the end, we got rid of roughly half of our stuff in Scotland, by giving much of it away to the Counselling Unit/Research Clinic (books, journals and data), to the British Heart Foundation or the Salvation Army, or to friends.  A few things we sold on Gumtree, which turned out to be amusing but time-consuming (every object sold involved some kind of little drama).. 

Moving Lorry: Bound for Far California

This week, the movers came on Monday & Tuesday and the British Heart Foundation came on Wednesday.  Thursday and Friday were taken up with cleaning and getting rid of the rest of our stuff.  Finally, on Friday afternoon we finished the cleaning of our flat and left, after 16 years in the same close, dropping our keys through the mail slot.  After a bit of drama at the Dawsholm recycling centre (Diane fell and twisted her ankle while getting rid of some of our last cardboard), we dropped our car off at the garage where we bought it 7 years ago. We are now flying back to the USA, leaving our Scottish life behind.

Robert in empty flat, with Mom's Butterfly Hanging

 

What’s next for us? Stay tuned!

On Nonbinariness: A Talk Given at Westhope Presbyterian Church, Saratoga, California

1. Introduction

 

Marjorie Pearson asked me if I’d be willing to talk here today. I’ve had lots of interesting discussions with Marjorie over the years, and really appreciate how open she has been to my issues about my gender identity.

 

She was interested in why I recently decided to add “they/them” as my preferred pronoun; before this I didn’t specify a pronoun at all.

 

My “coming out” has so far consisted of adding this information about my pronoun preferences to my email signatures on my personal and work email accounts, and to my Zoom label.

 

I’ve never really talked about my gender identity publicly before, and hardly ever privately.

 

2. Gender and Spirituality

 

Where to start?

I can remember being uncomfortable with male gender roles when I was a kid.

For a long time I was afraid to grow up, because I feared I would become a callous, hard man.  Over the years, my experiences of deeply understanding my many female clients only confirmed my fears, and as a therapist I have often felt ashamed to be a man.

 

In fact, the most important spiritual figures in my life were women: my mother, my grandmother, my childhood mentor Margaret.

 

I experienced my father as generally a kind, wise person who was not forceful, avoided conflict and was a bit distant.  Also, his wisdom was more worldly.  Although his insights were valuable and interesting, they didn’t strike me as spiritual or particularly inspiring.  In the end, for me he was more of a fellow traveller on the same or a similar road.

 

On the other hand, it was my mother, grandmother and my friend Margaret who were strong, inspiring, powerful.  I do have to say that in the case of my mother and grandmother they were also rather controlling. 

 

However, these three people deeply inspired me to do more and to be more; I went to church with all of them; they provided a strong moral compass for me; and they helped me get closer to God.

 

This was important, because from a pretty young age, I had real trouble getting my head around male images of God.  For me, God has always been female.  Nevertheless, to try to find a less extreme position, my compromise has been to adopt a gender-balanced trinity: Jesus/son = male; Holy Spirit = female & Father replaced by a gender neutral Parent.

 

In church, I’ve always been more comfortable when there was a female priest (I’m pretty much a life-long Episcopalian), although gay men will do if needed (and have done for most of the past 25 years).

 

3. Growing up Female-Identified

 

From a young age, I was pretty much always more interested in girls and women than boys and men. 

 

I can remember imagining having long hair.  In the 1950’s and early 1960’s it was always cut short, as was the custom for boys then, but I don’t think I was ever really comfortable with that.  Then around 1970 I started growing it out into a gender neutral Afro.  When that stopped working for me around 2000, I started growing what hair I had left out into a pony tail; at that point, my dad was doing the same thing with his hair, as were my two sons.  It felt good to finally be able to do that.

 

So I guess you could say that I’m “female identified”: Certainly, my main role model has been my grandmother, who was public figure (radio and TV personality) in Chicago, then retired to become a professional writer. From a young age I aspired to be like her. Also, as I was the oldest of her grandchildren, she encouraged me.

 

It’s hard to know, but I think I might have preferred to have been born as a female.  In addition to having long hair, I think I would have liked to have been able to have children, scary and difficult as that can be.  I feel somehow incomplete as a human being for not having had that experience, and even guilty for having evaded the process.  Although I love my two boys and do not for a second regret who they are, I certainly would have been happy for us to have had girls, and to have helped to raise them as strong women. 

 

4. Finding a Balance Professionally & Personally

 

I have certainly found it fulfilling to have been a therapist for many women, who have certainly given me plenty of vicarious experiences of what complete jerks men can be.  As I noted earlier, as a therapist I have often felt ashamed to be a man, even as I worked to support my female clients in developing their own sense of personal power, helping them maintain a balance between their need to be themselves and their need for connection with the important people in their lives.  In recent years, as I’ve come to work with more people from East Asian, I have come to pride myself in being a kind of wise “auntie” to many of them, occupying the role that might have been provided by an experienced older female figure in many traditional cultures.

 

But of course I live in the body of a man. I don’t necessarily reject that, but as I’ve been saying I identify more with women and strongly value the more traditionally “feminine” parts of me: empathy, emotionality, sensitivity, poetry, and an interest in the arts and music, as well as literature. I’m not interested in dominating or “winning”. So in general I tend to feel like I have more in common with women than men, and would rather hang out with them.  I’ve always tended to have more female than male friends, and have in my career really benefitted from a succession of female mentors and therapists. 

 

5. Psychological Androgyny and the “They/them/their”

 

In the 1980’s, psychological androgyny was a big thing in academic psychology, and that always made a lot of sense to me.  Psychological androgyny is the idea that we are all mixtures of traditionally male and female characteristics, and that maybe the ideal might be a flexible balance of characteristics traditionally associated with men and women.  Thus, for me personally, the pronouns “she/her/hers” and “he/him/his” can seem too limiting; for this reason, “they/them/their” are my current preferred pronouns.

 

Nowadays, of course, I think a lot of people feel like psychological androgyny is too limiting:  Why should certain characteristics be associated with women and others with men?  Why can’t women (and men) have whatever characteristics are true and work for them? That makes sense to me, but perhaps because I was brought up with traditional gender role stereotypes, I still like the idea of psychological androgyny, even with its somewhat outdated dialectic of traditional gender roles. But here I am.

 

Lastly, like my grandmother, I have ended up a writer, although not of novels like her but of professional and scientific books and articles about psychotherapy and psychotherapy research.  And that is where I discovered the appeal of “they/them/their” to refer to generic people whose gender wasn’t known, or whose gender wasn’t relevant.  This is actually an old usage in English, going back centuries, so in spite of what most of us were taught in school, I happily abandoned the use of generic masculine pronouns and now find myself preferring gender neutral pronouns.  Long live “they/them/their”!  I’ll take them, and happily embrace myself as a slightly queer, nonbinary person.

 

After all the times we’ve said goodbye (Haiku sequence)

 

            1

 

Three weeks: we haven’t

Seen so much of you for years

But now it must end.

 

Last morning: dropping

you off at the train station:

we hope you don’t break!

 

Little suitcase rattling

Behind, you roll away on

the balls of your feet.

 

From the car we watch

between gray cement columns

as you disappear.

 

Driving away, I’m

almost blinded by tears I

cannot drive away.

 

 

            2

 

So many goodbyes,

more than thirty years; why does

this one hurt so much?

 

Like after two years

when you finally made it

to kindergarten.

 

You don’t fight, you don’t

protest; you just turn and

walk bravely away.

 

Why does it always

feel like I’m the one leaving,

and not you somehow?

 

            3

 

There’s melodrama

to this leaving, feeling I

may not see you again.

 

A part of me won’t

let go of you, so I can

hold on to myself.

 

Like saying goodbye

to you is hard because it’s

goodbye to me too.

 

 

            4

 

But more than that I

want to see you free, flying

out across the sky.

 

I imagine your

migration, the worlds you find

beyond my end.

 

To end, a blessing:

do good, take our love with you,

enjoy the journey.

 

                                                -Love, Dad, 10-17 Jan 2022, Pleasanton

 

Note: Saying goodbye again to Kenneth this year reminded me of the poem I'd written about a previous goodbye last year, so I'm taking this as an opportunity to belatedly post this piece.