On becoming a therapist, James Hillman, and unfinished thoughts on childhood
The interviewee of a podcast I recently listened to mentioned toward the end of the session what he had been reading, and he mentioned James Hillman.
This brought me back to when I was about 16 years old, and my mom checked out 100 Years of Psychotherapy and the World is Getting Worse by Hillman and Michael Ventura from the library. I vividly remember sitting in the living room reading the book and my mom coming in and calling me an intellectual. I enjoyed the book, and I am sure I would enjoy it now.
In reflecting on what made me become a counselor, I often wonder what the roots of my decision were. In my teenage years, I was fascinated by what made women so depressed. I saw both my mom and stepmom begin to take antidepressants. I sat with my best friend as she sat with her head in her hands while on a bad trip. I saw her struggle with depression.
I went to therapy for a time growing up. I was probably 11 or so, and I was arguing with my mom a lot. Today I probably would have been diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder as I acted out at home, sometimes at school, and by age 12 and 13, was shoplifting, sneaking out, skipping school, smoking cigarettes, trying alcohol, and I even vandalized a McDonald's bathroom. I had reasons to be mad but I didn’t understand them.
I remember going to a counselor sometime during that period, in what I would now call a community mental health care facility. My mom made me go. I don’t think I wanted to. I remember the calm office space and that the therapist was a kind, well-dressed woman who gave me a small felt purple and pink bear that I kept for a long time. I don’t recall the content or tenor of the conversations but I do remember the bear.
My rebelliousness came to an end when we moved away from the city to the country when I was 13, right before my eighth grade year, and there were no neighborhood friends to be had, no streets to run, no place to ride my bike to like the mall, no corner stores where I could shoplift cigarettes, and more importantly, no friends who would do all of this with me. I ended up feeling like an outcast with the girls who had been going to school together for years and who all seemed so good and well-dressed, while I, if I was lucky, got my hands on one good purse or Salty Dog t-shirt.
I started doing better in school and running track in part because there were no other options, and running became my outlet for my pent up frustration and anger. Things slowly began to quiet down between my mom and I, though we still continued to argue until I was at least 16. I read books, wrote in my journal, and later found trouble again, but by then I was taking AP courses, succeeding in track, and on my way to going to college.
In college, I had no idea what I wanted to study and changed my major several times–from natural resources, to third world studies, to fine arts, back to natural resources because I loved learning about geology, forestry, and ecology. At the same time, I loved philosophy, classical mythology and environmental ethics. I liked writing papers and researching. At the same time, I explored psychedelics, partying, traveling, and figuring out who I was.
Close to the end of college, right before turning 22, I got pregnant. This was not a good time to be pregnant. I had an old pickup truck on its last leg, worked as a server part-time, and lived on campus. I had next to no money and no plan. I decided to have my son, not without going on a backpacking trip to Utah and living in Honduras for two months while I was pregnant. If there was one thing that I was sure of, it was that I wanted to have the most experiences possible and that has stuck with me to this day. I would later call myself a dilettante, hopping from subject to subject, place to place.
In my 20s, I focused on being a mom, trying to make a living, and by about age 26, I got really into writing. I began going to writing workshops, classes in which everyone would share what they wrote with the group and get critiqued. My writing was born out of journaling and turned to stories of my own life. I dabbled a bit in poetry and started a couple of short stories, but my genre was essay and memoir. Looking back, I would say that rather than going to therapy to process my experiences, I processed them on the page. I told, edited, and retold the stories of my life. I returned to themes. I speculated. I wrote about ideas. I filled containers with notebooks and drafts of essays. I watched multiple women tearfully read aloud stories of childhood sexual abuse in the writing workshops, another woman share the story of her son who died of an overdose. Sadly, I lost most of what I wrote to multiple laptops that later died, my files not backed up anywhere.
At 29, I went to grad school to pursue my MFA in creative nonfiction. I thought at the time that this was something I was doing for me, apart from being a mother. Being honest, I’ve always been a little selfish. I wanted to experience so much, and when looking back it would have been wiser to stay put rather than move around. I was living in Asheville, North Carolina with my son and we packed up to move close to the beach in Wilmington, North Carolina–far away from my family and his father–so I could complete my MFA, a degree in something that was not going to guarantee me anything financially.
Throughout that period I wrote a lot, and was critiqued harshly at times, yet supported as well. It was hard. I wrote as much as I could, worked multiple jobs, and parented mostly solo. It was there that I came to my thesis that stress can cause depression. It was 2006, a particularly busy time. I had begun working on my thesis, a book-length memoir. I found myself by the end of the year waking up in tears regularly. I left with my son for Christmas break, first to spend time with his paternal grandparents in Asheville, where we stayed at a nice hotel. I woke up each morning in tears. I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t be a mother. I thought that I needed to leave my son with my dad and stepmom and go far away somewhere. The pressure had gotten to be too much.
I went home, to visit my mom and my dad and stepmom. I told both my mom and my stepmom what was going on with me and both seriously suggested I needed to get on medication. So, I did. After Christmas break, we went back to Wilmington and I set up an appointment with a primary care doctor, who was my friend’s boyfriend, who gave me a bunch of samples of Lexapro, and I began taking them. A couple of weeks later, as I was working out in the campus gym, I noticed that I was feeling better. Feeling happy.
I wrote an essay about what I now consider a short-lived depressive episode and shared it in my creative nonfiction class. I was astounded to find out how many others had gone through similar experiences. The professor, a widely published author and incredible teacher, said he struggled with the same, and often thought of running away and working at a grocery store. For me, escape was where I went when I got sad, when things weren’t working out. I felt validated that I wasn’t the only one. We speculated about why writers were depressed, why creative people often carry the burden of mental illness.
I finished my thesis, gave public readings of sections of it, and defended it. I got feedback that it could be published. But for reasons that I understand better now, I never sought to publish it and never shared it beyond those workshops and readings in Wilmington. I felt it would have been hurtful to others to share it, and that I needed to respect the privacy of those stories. I don’t regret that decision.
That is the trouble with memoir; it is never just the writer’s story that is shared. However, through those years of writing, telling, and retelling my stories, I think I grew to understand myself and my life a bit more. It was therapeutic.
During grad school and after graduating, I worked as a freelance writer and editor, and did so until the economy crashed in 2008-2009 and I moved to Ohio–another long story and one which changed the direction of my life. I started teaching college English and ended up doing so for years, and still do. I tried to focus my classes as much as I could on creative nonfiction–so students could tell their own stories. This career served me well as my son continued his education and ultimately finished school and moved out on his own.
At that point in 2018, I was ready for a career change, but I didn’t know what that would look like. I had attended my own therapy beginning in about 2010 to about 2013 and it got me through some trying times. I think the biggest benefit for me was similar to writing and sharing it with others–telling my story again and again until I made some sense of it.
In 2018, I began searching for a new career. I was single, I had an empty nest, and that fall, my dog died. I also had what I now look back on as experience being a therapist in another aspect of my life, with many conversations behind me. I also had my continued intellectual interest in the cause of depression–what I saw when I was a teen and what I later experienced myself. I also had years of self-examination in the form of stacks of journals.
That fall, I was watching the Netflix show Wanderlust, starring Toni Collette as a marriage counselor. In one episode she goes to her own therapist, Angela, who basically slays her and lays all of Collette’s issues/secrets out. As I was watching the episode, I thought, that is what I want to do, be like Angela.
Little did I know that is not what actually goes on in therapy.
So, because of that episode and encouragement from someone I had recently begun dating, I applied to grad school (just one school) and told myself that if I could go for free, I would do it. A few months later, I got an assistantship that covered tuition and began school for clinical mental health counseling.
On the surface, I can say that the show sparked my interest, but when I look deeper I can see other reasons, not all of which I share here. I have a lot of curiosity and working as a counselor and continuously learning fills that curiosity.
I also think that I definitely could not do this job until now. I didn’t start working in the field until my 40s, and I know that I would have been nowhere near ready to do so as a younger person. I was putting my energy into being a mom and figuring out who I wanted to be in the world. I don’t regret starting this work until later. I had the time, energy, and ability to focus on it that I would not have had prior. I also had a lot of life experiences that made it easier for me to understand where clients were coming from. I have also throughout my life, done a lot of my own work, which is still not finished.
Childhood
After listening to that podcast in which the interviewee mentioned James Hillman, I listened to part of a talk Hillman gave onYoutube called Abandoning the Child. Beginning to listen to that talk gave me a lot of insight.
Harkening back to Donald Winicott’s idea of the good enough mother, mothers on their own have a natural propensity to nurture their children, but they will never be the “perfect” mother, and if they were the child would never leave home. I first encountered Winicott’s idea of the good-enough mother in The Argonauts, a memoir by Maggie Nelson, that I read in a tent in Idaho in the summer of 2018. I am reading Pete Walker’s CPTSD From Surviving to Thriving and he expands the idea of a good-enough mother to good-enough relationships in general. He discusses how the key to recovering from childhood trauma is to begin to develop good-enough relationships, not perfect, but for the most part caring and consistent. He discusses how often this starts by being in relationship with a good-enough therapist and from there real healing occurs with good enough friends and a good-enough partner.
Ultimately, suffering is built into life, into childhood. No matter what. Even though most every mother believes this will not be the case. Nevertheless, the mother learns she cannot control life’s circumstances and that even she herself may damage her children. Then we carry these wounds from childhood into adulthood. And even the ones who thought their children come out unscathed, life has a way of turning itself upside down and no human to date has escaped the suffering built into this experience.
Hillman talks about the differing views of childhood, from Freud to Jung to Dickens to early Christianity. The takeaway that I got is that our childhood experience is mythical and the memories we have are not exact replicas of what we experienced as a child. I believe he quotes Jung in saying that a child does not have the experience to understand their experience and instead reaches into archetypes/ancestral history to make meaning of a completely unknowable situation. What we remember as our childhoods are informed by who we are today and the stories we tell ourselves about our experiences.
