The Dark, Long Night

Note: This poem is my first political poem after over 50 years of poetry-writing about personal and psychological processes. It is an attempt to face and address our current political polarization through an act of radical empathy. The opening image of the poem came to me in a dream, which then seeded the rest of the poem, with the two sides portrayed like opposing choruses in an ancient Greek play or in two dialoguing aspects of a person in a piece of psychotherapeutic two-chair work.

  

1. Blow it Up!

In my dream we are milling around

In the torch-lit night,

Full of crowds of people chanting his name,

Playing dice with dictatorship.

 

Democracy is a distant abstraction

Dying a death of despair,

Heedless, unhearing,

Its promises bankrupted by greed

Broken by promises not kept

By wrongs, ancient and modern,

Allowed to fester,

Shot up with the heroin of false hopes.

 

But the people in this party are celebrating,

A carnival atmosphere,

Exciting, full of lights and illusions.

And the people cry out,

In furious jubilation:

 

We have this feeling that

We used to be the center

Of the universe.

But we’ve lost so much;

It hurts so much.

If this is how things are going to be, then:

Blow it up!

 

We’re sick all those fancy people

Looking down on us,

They think they know better than us;

But they know nothing.

Blow it up!

 

He gets us, when no one else does.

He cares about us, when no one does.

He makes us feel good, when no one else does,

And everything else in our life feels like crap.

Blow it up!

 

When everyone hates him

And thinks he’s a dangerous fool,

An autocrat or a narcissist,

We know how he feels.

We are his, and he is ours:

When everyone else looks down on us for loving him,

Blow it up!

 

All I know is: Every year

Is worse than the last.

We’ll never get out of this ever-deepening pit,

And our children: It will be worse for them.

Blow it up!

 

At least he will do something, anything;

He’s going to break things that need to be broken.

So we can rejoice in the chaos and carnage,

Because we have no illusions:

What could be worse than how things have been?

Blow it up!

 

Our only hope of getting

Where we need to be

Is going to be

To keep our faith in him

And to fight his enemies, who are our enemies,

To force the new dawn of OUR new day.

But to get there: First, we must:

Blow it up!

 

 

2. Let’s Raise Each Other Up!

 

This is bad enough,

But I can’t seem to wake up

From this bad dream.

And I have a feeling that

It is going to be

A dark, long night.

 

Yet there is one thing I do know:

I need to look around me,

For friends, for company

To get me through the dark, long night.

And there they are,

In a chorus of still, small voices,

Singing this:

 

We have no illusions:

We know this night is just beginning

And will be dark and long. So:

Let’s raise each other up!

 

For so long, we’ve lived in the margins

We didn’t have much,

But we did have hope

That things were finally

Turning for the better,

When everyone could say,

Let’s raise each other up!

 

So we look out and see

All these other lonely, different,

Marginalized people, looking back at us,

Hoping for a friend.

Lost and confused,

We don’t know everything,

But at least we know this:

Let’s raise each other up!

 

They get me, and I get them.

They want to know about me

And I want to know about them;

We can care about each other

And help each other feel good

When things feel like crap. So:

Let’s raise each other up!

 

When the people who are

Going to run things now

Despise us for being woke, or gay, or trans,

Or different, or foreign or undocumented,

And for loving each other,

Wise, each in our own ways,

Let’s raise each other up!

 

It’s scary and painful,

With every year likely

To be worse than the last

In this ever-deepening pit. So:

Let’s raise each other up!

 

And the other-Others,

Our siblings in pain:

Even those who sing his praises

And hope for their special dawn,

It will be worse for them, also. So:

Let’s raise them up, too!

 

If we join together,

And don’t give in to despair or hate,

And don’t other, each other,

At least we can do something

To raise each other up!

 

Our only hope of getting through this,

Is going to be holding on

To our faith in each other

Through this dark, long night,

Believing in the possibility of dawn,

Where things can be better for all of us,

Than they are now,

If only we don’t forget:

Let’s raise each other up!

 

                                                            (version: November 2024, Pleasanton)

Interview with Me on the Experiential Psychotherapy Training YouTube Channel

Sam Robinson interviewed me a couple of weeks ago for the "Experiential Practitioners" series for the Experiential Psychotherapy Institute (available on the Experiential Psychotherapy Training channel on YouTube). It was a fun, free-flowing interview and the hour just seemed to fly by. We covered a range of topics including basic EFT theory and the challenges of learning EFT, but most importantly the central role of empathy and presence in EFT and psychotherapy practice more generally.

This interview has just been released; you can find it on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQCxaM8spKc  . For more from the Experiential Psychotherapy Institute, check out their website: https://www.experiential-psychotherapies.com/

Larry Beutler Passes

[Note: I heard today on the listserver of the Society for Psychotherapy Research that Larry E. Beutler died a couple of days ago.  I'm posting this little piece to mark his passing.]

 

 

This news reaches me on a gray morning,

Losing yet another of the tall trees

Of psychotherapy research.

 

For decades, Larry was deeply rooted in the heart of SPR.

He believed in and searched long and hard

For the key to psychotherapeutic change

In a set of principles that would unlock

the gnarly intersectionality of client presenting problems,

Personality and therapeutic approach.

He was unflagging in his pursuit

Of the seemingly impossible,

Unearthing enticing possibilities,

Paths that we still trace today.

 

But following the sadness and shock,

I find a smile in me as I remember Larry,

Near-constant presence in SPR,

Enthusing over his latest findings,

Loving psychotherapy research with all of his heart.

 

Not many of us now remember how in 2002

He took out a second mortgage on his house

To save the Santa Barbara SPR conference

From financial ruin.  But that was Larry.

 

Perhaps you will join me today

To raise a glass and to remember

Larry’s cheerful energy, his generosity,

And passion for sciencing psychotherapy,

Along with his cowboy boots, his leprechaun charm,

And wide, welcoming smile.

 

========

 For more about Larry Beutler (1941- 2024), see the obituary produced by his family at:  https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/8xpg0tluei2t01zhodbou/Larry-Edward-Beutler-Obit.docx?rlkey=rfsd756o0xkqyy7z8kul4vs3y&dl=0 

 

In addition, an extended biography can be found in:

Machado, P. P. P., Fernández-Álvarez, H., & Clarkin, J. F. (2010). Larry E. Beutler: A matter of principles. In L. G. Castonguay, J. C. Muran, L. Angus, J. A. Hayes, N. Ladany, & T. Anderson (Eds.), Bringing psychotherapy research to life: Understanding change through the work of leading clinical researchers (pp. 319–328). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/12137-027

Postscript (2024)

New, autobiographical poem about my first serious relationship, looking back more than 50 years and described aptly by an early reader as about "love, loss, regret, and learning". There's a fair amount of EFT content also, making it one of a series of EFT poems I've been percolating.

 1  Unfinished Business Marker

Jet-lagged from Greece,

I wake in the middle of the night

Haunted by the feeling of something unfinished

Between us.

 

After so much time,

You’ve appeared to me in a dream.

But all I can do is foolishly

To try to impress you

And your friends

In a callow, callous way.

 

Something is wrong

In the great web

In which my little life lives.

I lay awake for hours.

 

On our morning walk,

I tell some of this to my 51-year life partner,

With half-century of experience

Of people being confused

That I had married her and not you.

 

“Do you regret not marrying her?”, she says,

(A fair question, I think.)

“No”, I say, “But it does feel like

There is something

Unfinished with her.”

 

And just like that, I’ve suddenly crossed

My professional life

as therapist, trainer etc.

With my personal life

As an aging 74-year-old nonbinary person

Dealing with a lifetime of uncertainty and shame

About my gender.

 

In my supervision session later

I talk to Gordon about the dream

And the unfinished business marker,

Unable to say what felt unfinished,

Beyond the sense

That we had injured each other.

 

When I cautiously say,

“I think I may need to put her in the empty chair…”

He asks,

“Is this something you feel you can do on your own?”

(Another fair question)

I say: “I’m not sure.”

After a small pause, he says,

“I could do that with you, if you want…

I’d be happy to do that.”

“Thank you”, I say.

“Let me think about it.”

 

But what comes instead

Is this poem,

Postscript to an earlier, painful, piece.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2  Apologia Pro Vita Mea

 

Last year I plowed through all my files

Of the letters I’d saved

From the important people

In my life.

 

When I got to yours

I read again your journey

Through the time

Our lives overlapped.

 

And I saw how you lived the life

You needed to live,

And chronicled it for me.

You offered me that window,

And I understood your trajectory,

The parallels and divergences

From my journey.

You told me your dreams,

Even when they led you away from me.

 

But I also saw

My own meanness of spirit,

The things I said out of spite,

And even the small but pointed missile

Of a poem about Pompei,

Its title a play on your name.

 

 

 

 

 

By Abderrahman Ait Ali from Stockholm - IMG_20190316_160912, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79059068

 

 

And even now

I feel ashamed of my smallness:

That I was unwilling to resist

The pain-driven, reflexive hitting out,

And the cleverness of the metaphor,

At your expense.

 

 

I have spent much of my career as a therapist

Understanding the struggles of women

In a patriarchal, sexist world,

Supporting them as they seek

To take their power.

 

And as I have done this,

I have become ever more alienated

From my masculinity,

Seeking my own psychological androgyny,

Now, finally, renouncing “he/him/his”

And coming home to “they/them/theirs”.

 

I think these are some of the things

I’d like you to know now.

So even though our lives have since followed

Plutonian orbits of distance,

I send out this small Voyager of a poem,

Not knowing

Whether if it will find you,

But wanting to share my sorrow

For any hurt

That I may have caused.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  NASA/JPL-Caltech

 

 

3   Purple String Thing

 

Another night of jet lag:

You are still on my mind.

I awake very early

Wondering how to proceed,

And what my motives are.

 

Guilt?  Reconnection?

It just feels like piece of my life

That I need to put right.

 

From my bed, in the dark,

I can just barely make out

The Purple String Thing:

The construction of felt,

Multi-colored strings, and nails,

You made for me so many years ago,

Proud of yourself for having done something

So out of character and artistic as this.

 

Regarded ambivalently if at all

By my family,

The Purple String Thing

Has hung for decades in my study,

First in Toledo, then again here in Pleasanton.

 

This metaphor of frayed interconnection

Is now somewhat worse for the wear,

A bit moth-eaten and slightly mildewed from

Its intermittent storage in damp basements.

 

Its state led m partner to wonder,

Several times over the intervening years,

Why didn’t I just throw it away,

This reminder of a previous life?

 

And every time, I thought about it,

And found I couldn’t.

 

So when I moved it

To our hallway a year ago,

I re-secured some of the little nails

And re-attached a few of the strings

That had come loose.

And there it sits today,

A reminder of you that I stubbornly

Refuse to let go of.

 

So now in the early predawn,

As I look at its shape in the hall,

Dark against dark,

The Purple String Thing

Begins to yield it meaning to me,

And I feel a wave of gratitude,

For what you gave me:

 

 

When we met

I was a deeply self-ashamed,

Unknowingly queer person,

Unable to embrace

The culture and norms of masculinity,

Yet deeply drawn to the feminine in others

And myself.

 

Before you, I had had a series

Of one-sided crushes

On young women around me;

It felt there was no place for me,

That no one wanted me.

 

Then in late 1969,

Behind Crown College

At UC Santa Cruz,

At a Sunday evening folk mass,

Between “I will raise you up”

And “The Lord of the Dance,”

I read the two little prayer poems

I’d written for the service.

And at the Passing of the Peace,

You kissed me on the mouth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And no one had ever before shown me

That they were attracted to me,

That I might in some way be desirable,

And therefore that I did not

Have to live my life alone.

 

A small thing, perhaps,

But this changed my life,

And for that I am even now

Filled with gratitude that you saw me

And wanted me in that moment.

 

There were other gifts you gave me

Before things between us got

Complicated and came undone:

Julian Bream and concerts in San Francisco;

The pride of being your boyfriend

(My friends were jealous);

Your connections to my elders

(My grandmother and Ted Sarbin).

 

But also a view into your inner life

and the company of your female friends,

As women navigating

A time of rapid change in relationships.

 

And perhaps most importantly of all:

A sense of how hard

Relationships can be,

How they sometimes fall apart,

And how painful and terrifying that can be.

 

This might sound like common sense

(Something I’ve been told I lack)

But for one thing:

 

When, ten years later,

My main relationship began to fail,

I invested everything I could,

And discovered what you and I

Were not ready to know before:

That sometimes relationships,

Like Purple String Things,

Battered though they be,

Can be repaired.

 

 

And so at last I know,

With gratitude,

Why I’ve kept the Purple String Thing,

That you made for me,

For all these years:

 

It is the door of connection

Linking me to you,

And you to me;

And not just us,

But all of us,

Linking each to all,

And all to each.

More real than the illusion

Of all our sad separateness.

 

                                    -September/October 2024; Pleasanton, California

 

 

Two Poems About the World PCE Conference Athens 2024

Note: For me, poetry is a way of speaking truth, sometimes painful truth. In this entry, I offer two poems about my experiences of the World Person-Centred Psychotherapy and Counselling Conference in Athens, September 2024. I thank Gillian Proctor for the diffraction image used in the second poem.  I hope that readers will find something in them that resonates.

 

1  The Honouring of Ornery Elders

 

As the conference opens, I hear:

-- We honour the elders, past and present

 

But I want to protest:

-- I didn’t ask for this.

I want to go back to being

A bright younger,

Full of anxiety and promise.

 

It seems only a second ago, I complain,

-- How did I get here?

 

And answer myself:

-- Like everyone else, I guess:

One year at a time.

 

But time’s forest fire

Has burned through this community

Of the children and grandchildren of Carl Rogers,

And the remaining tall trees

Are rarer every year:

The elders are passing.

 

Those of us who are left

Are more brittle and cranky

Each time we meet.

 

We ask ourselves:

-- Is this the last time?

A final time to be heard?

 

And we reply to ourselves:

-- If few listened before,

Why should they listen now?

 

People look at me, talk about me,

As someone whose kind is in short supply,

Some kind of ghost

Of a lost, brilliant, golden age.

 

And I, newly retired, am aware

Of my own new fragility:

The osteoporosis, the fading vision,

The stiffness to stand;

I take the amphitheatre’s descending steps

Slowly, carefully.

 

Though I hate it, I inhabit the part,

The role into which

I find myself cast, unwilling.

 

 

2  The Sharp Edges of Our Differences

 

The light that shines

Through these approaches

To the healing of souls

Is split into a spectrum of colours:

Person-centred, emotion-focused, focusing-oriented, and more.

 

These make space for many ways of being

With ourselves and our clients.

Like a deep gene pool,

Filled with many waters,

To equip us to meet

The many challenging moments

That lie in front of us.

 

And yet this rich variety

Can be difficult and challenging,

Leading us to wish

For simplicity and an easier life.

 

Holding these tensions can make us tense,

Can hurt and be hurtful to each other.

 

And so, in deep conversations

With my therapeutic siblings

I hear with sadness how some

Feel diminished and pained

By my beloved ways of working,

By focusing and chair work.

 

Perhaps at times I proclaim these things,

Too loudly or too proudly,

So my fellows hear me as belittling them,

Leaving them behind, judging them,

Threatening their beloved ways of working,

 

They tell me that this

Makes them doubt themselves,

Imagining themselves from my point of view,

Imagining me as a critical audience

To their ways of working.

 

I can well understand

How this erodes

The firm ground they need

To be present to their clients:

My active, intense ways of working,

Such a function of who I am,

Are sharp edges for them…

And these sharp edges hurt.

 

Of course, it’s in our nature

To turn hurt to fear,

And thence to anger, contempt, and judgement:

More sharp edges, like broken glass,

That can hurt me and make me feel unwelcome.

 

Because of this, I have

Often tried to make myself smaller;

Hoping I’d be less threatening

If I put away my EFT hat,

And spoke instead of research:

 

Research is a thing I love

For its methods and craft,

Its findings, by turns

Enriching and perplexing.

As I tell myself yet again,

“The facts are friendly”,

I hope that this is true.

 

But for all my love of careful study

I am also an EFT therapist,

Who sometimes doubts his welcome here,

And who sometimes, without meaning to,

Makes others feel unwelcome too.

 

I don’t think this is what any of us want:

To dismiss or to be dismissed;

To hide ourselves, or to make others hide.

 

We know well what it feels like

To be sent way or overlooked

In the wider world of psychotherapy,

When all the while

We could be keeping

Each other company

And shining with all the colours of rainbow.

 

                        -Athens/Pleasanton, September 2024

No Literal Labyrinth at Knossos

 

Over the course of almost 60 years, I’ve written quite a few poems about labyrinths, first about the mythical Knossos labyrinth in ancient Crete, and later about the real labyrinth my parents built in in the late 1980’s on their property outside Santa Andreas, California. They built the Murray Creek Labyrinth after their visit to Glastonbury Tor, in Somerset, England, inspired by the set of ancient terraces on Glastonbury Tor, which form the pattern of a seven-circuit caerdroia, or turf labyrinth, of a type found in sites all over the world, from paleolithic times on. One of these earlier labyrinth poems can be found at: http://www.murraycreek.net/par50poe.htm

 

I wrote this labyrinth poem after finally visiting the ruins of the real city-palace of Knossos, just south of Heraklion, Crete. There is nothing like actually visiting a place to overturn one’s fantasies about that place.  In it I invert many of the themes of the earlier poems, while exploring the labyrinth as a living archetype of the process of emotional-psychological-spiritual transformation.

 

 

There is no literal labyrinth

at Knossos Palace:

The sun beats down on broken walls;

Arthur Evans’ phantasy reconstructed frescos

Lurk in the shadows of ancient rooms,

While the real stuff sits

In the big museum by the harbor.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But the house of the double axe, the labrys,

Is real enough, a sprawling ruin

Of tangled rooms and workshops:

Plenty of maze to get lost in.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today, not Mycenaeans

But we barbarian hordes of tourists

Trace the repaired paths,

While the ancient ghosts

Of our imaginings

Process to the central courtyard:

 

Dolphins play in the Queen's chamber

Courtiers strut, each bearing

A single twist of long black curl

In front of their ears;

And bull dancers fly over sharp horns

Like Olympic gymnasts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meanwhile, deep in the labyrinthine

Caves hidden in the Cretan countryside,

It’s obvious to me

That the snake goddess,

Jacket pushing up

Her bulging, bare breasts,

Is not just a fertility symbol,

But is also sacred to us psychologists:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Her upraised arms

And snakes held high

Form the Greek letter psi (Ψ),

Referring to the human mind,

the greatest, most tangled labyrinth of all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No literal labyrinth, then,

But plenty of metaphorical labyrinths:

The many-layered city on a hill,

Many times built, wrecked, and rebuilt;

Four dimensional maze

Of interconnected rooms,

Dancing back and forth through time

On Ariadne’s dance floor.

 

And the seven-circuit Cretan labyrinth

Mirrors our human brains, cortical folds

Of labyrinthine brain tissue,

Defying anyone to find their way through

The miraculous tangle of neuron,

axon, synapse, astrocyte.

 

 

 

Then, too, the labyrinths of our psyches,

As we trace our paths from birth to death,

Full of double-mindedness that cuts both ways.

We are torn on the horns

Of our wavering ambivalence

About the important things in our lives.

 

Here in this labyrinth of our spirits,

There are layers of emotions to be traced,

Patiently and empathically

Following the golden thread,

Dancing the dialectic of head and heart.

 

It is a journey to the centers of our hearts,

Our deepest truths,

Our most essential selves,

Our core pain and its heartfelt needs.

 

And there it sits: sad, lonely minotaur,

Pasiphaë’s abandoned child,

Torn between its two natures,

But waiting for understanding,

Compassion, and love.

 

So: this ancient place

Still lives in us:

We are the labyrinth at Knossos;

We are the sharp-horned sacred bull,

And the dancers somersaulting over its horns.

We are the double-spirited minotaur

Whom we no longer need to fear.

 

We are the open-breasted snake goddess

Arms held high;

We are abandoned Ariadne,

Finally rid of her false lover,

Colonizing Theseus;

We are heart-broken and heart-healed,

Dancing the sevenfold path to freedom.

 

                        -Crete/Athens/Pleasanton, September 2024