Tommy and Buzz: All My Love

I recently came across this picture of Tommy and Buzz. I got to wondering what the story was behind the moment they shared together on the beach. The inscription on the back of the photo is so tantalizing and sweet:

"To Buzz, I'll always remember the times we spent together. All my love, your Tommy."

If Tommy or Buzz are still alive they are now both close to or well into their 80s. The world has totally transformed in the time that has elapsed since this moment was captured on the beach. Do you think they still remember that day?

I've carefully looked at each of the 300+ websites that this image appears on and searched for clues to their identity. There are none. It's likely neither know that their image has been populated around the internet.

Who they are and were--and what times they shared--are likely forever lost to history. If someone had not located this picture and taken the time to digitize it, the entire memory of this experience might have been erased for all times.

 I'm overwhelmed contemplating that thought. It inevitably reminds me that some day I too will be erased from the this world. All that I am will be reduced down to ever-smaller bits of data. Eventually that which is I will evaporate and return to whatever it was from which I emerged from when I became an I. It will happen to you too.

Go back and read that again slowly. 

...and now back to Buzz and Tommy

The Last Pictures by Trevor Paglen: Impermanence and Mindfulness

This morning I came across a project by Trevor Paglen. He will launch 100 images into space to serve as a lasting reminder of who were were when all that we are is gone. I'm looking forward to seeing the images--for both what is included as well as what is not. The answers to both reveal so much rich information about any given person's understandings of the world.

The project, of course, isn't really about leaving a memory of who we were. There is no permanence. While perhaps the satellite that carries these images as payload will be aloft for "billions of years," those billions of years will come to and end. The structures of the machinery will decay. The images will degrade. The light of the sun will end. All that is will some day no longer be. At least that which is, will no longer be, something that is a form that can be recognized as something that was once us.

Despite this truth of impermanence, we all struggle, in our own ways, to leave behind a memory. We wish to make some statement that we too were here. We wish to extend ourselves into the no-thing-ness and evade impermanence. We seek to quell our fears about non-existence.

Imagine for a moment a life without these fears. Imagine a life built around existence rather than fear of non-existence. I am--I am here--right now. Not--I was there. I was. Remember what I was.

So much of my work as a psychologist is about finding and recognizing those complicated moments in time where patient and therapist breathe into an experience and connect with the act of being present in a moment. It is a rare place to find--one in which we aren't what we did, we aren't what we will do, we aren't what we are doing. We are being.

Almost there. Take out the we are.

Being. That's it. That's all there is. Being. Not being now. or being later, or being before.

Just being.

Being.

Trevor Paglen - The Last Pictures from Creative Time on Vimeo.

Journey Into Self

"The question they examine is, what is it like to be oneself? What are other people like when they are themselves? All of us are pretty good at carrying the secret of our own loneliness. Now these people will try to discover the secret of being together."

This clip, the documentary called Journey Into Self, is a fascinating view showing us the brilliance that was Carl Rogers as well as the transformative power of group psychotherapy. Get some popcorn and enjoy.



For more about Carl Rogers, check out my blog post here.

Learning to Live on World AIDS Day

Unknown Source

Today I've been thinking about my very first patients. While I had worked for nearly a decade in a variety of human service agencies, it wasn't until 1997 that I sat down in my very first office with my very first patients. I remember the day very clearly. My first patient said:

"I just have three questions for you. Are you gay, are you HIV positive, and if you aren't, who the hell do you think you are trying to talk to me."

With those words, I started  my work at The Free Medical Clinic of Greater Cleveland. It was a tumultuous two years. The man who hired me quit the day I started, constant organizational upheaval nearly unraveled me, I was impaired by bad fashion sense, and thought it was a good idea to sponge paint my office in shades of pink. Most of my patients were always on the brink of death or actually died, and a suprising number of them sprang back to life as newer medicines changed the face of HIV treatment.

Most importantly, I spent two years trying to answer that patient's question: who the hell did I think I was trying to talk to people. I found my answer those two years working at the Free Clinic. My experiences there helped me weave together things that I had been thinking about and experiencing for the previous nine years. My experiences became the foundation of what I've built my entire clinical practice on.

I learned that most people don't know themselves, are afraid of themselves, or have otherwise become so traumatized by life that they have disengaged from the world. Not feeling, not living, I found that the people I worked with were neither here nor there. They were somewhere in between. They were, as I affectionately called them, the walking dead. Zombies.

One man, in particular, has filled my thoughts today on World AIDS Day. He really was the walking dead. Infected with HIV before HIV even had a name, he had suffered every opportunistic infection there was. He rattled off stories of countless hospital says and harrowing near death experiences. Somehow, he lived.

On bad days he was use a walker to get into my office--his leg on fire from neuropathy. On good days we would walk across the street together and sit in the beautifully manicured Lake View Cemetery. We had this conversation on the day I was leaving the clinic to move to New England and start my doctoral work:

"Jason, I think of you as more than a therapist. This will sound strange, but I think of you as my funeral director. In you letting me talk so much about death, and keeping me focused so I didn't look away, you taught me how to live. You did that. You taught me to be alive before I die."

Years later I heard through the grapevine that he had died. After being one of the first patients diagnosed with AIDS and having had a trial of nearly every medication, his body had finally failed and he died.

When he said goodbye to me I wished I would have known myself well enough to tell him this:

By sitting with you as you looked at death, I too found how to live.

So on this World AIDS day I'm filled with many warm cherished memories of this patient--and all the other men (and two woman) who came into my office every week as we stared down death every day only to discover how to live.

Each of you live on with me in my office every day. Thank you.

Existential Therapy Meets the Irreverent Psychologist

Imagine the following two stories which are basically true.

The patient asked, "What happens if my plane breaks up over the ocean and crashes?"

"Well then I suppose you'll die," responded the irreverent psychologist.

"Well now that's comforting. Aren't you supposed to say something comforting, something to make me feel better. I feel that we've lost a little safety here."

"You'd feel even less safe if your plane breaks up over the ocean and your last thought before you died is that I lied."

"Thanks a whole hell of a lot, Doc."

"Anytime."
____

I was in Palm Springs getting ready to venture out into the desert  to look at the early spring flowers that were blanketing the landscape. I distinctly remember looking into the mirror. That lump on my forehead. I can't really pretend like it's not there anymore. I can't really explain it away by saying that it's just the natural contour of my head. I can't explain it away by saying that I'm just a lumpy sort of guy.

I know what a lump means. It doesn't mean something good. I know what it means when people avoid thinking about their lumps: they are avoiding something that is too scary to contemplate. They are avoiding something that is too unimaginable. They are avoiding death.

I couldn't avoid it. I couldn't be that person.

I returned from the desert and made an appointment with my doctor. "Hmmm. It's a lump," he said. "Great help you are doctor," I responded. X-Rays, CAT scans, MRIs, and bone scans followed.

For one full week I sat with my lump. I sat with my fear of death. I was not yet even done with my doctorate and I might have bone cancer. I  might have brain cancer. I might be dead before I finished my doctorate.

I head back to the doctor to talk about my head. "Not cancer," he said. "Stop shaking."

I'll save you from the medical gibberish, but I had a bizarre condition most commonly seen in cats. I needed to see a neurosurgeon. I needed to have a portion of my cranium removed and replaced with titanium. I would be just fine, though a little more thick headed. I was hoping I could attach notes to my head with a magnet but apparently that doesn't work. I know this because I tired. Twice.
____

Viktor Frankl, Irv Yalom, and a raft of others have taught me that we should not avoid thinking about death.  In fact, that we should think about the finite amount of time we have every now and again. When we turn off our defenses and tools of avoidance we become closely connected with a single unalterable fact: we all have the same destination and that destination is death.

On a good day I don't find this destination particularly sad or scary. I find it liberating. I find it enlivening.
____

"You know exactly what I mean. You know that I hope that if your plane is crashing apart, your final moments are filled with connection, and presence, and knowledge. That is the best we can do. That is the only thing we can do. We're all heading full tilt to that destination of death. How are you going to get there? Hasn't that been exactly what our work together has been about?"

How are you going to get there?