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 comments:
Post a Comment