Derek Paar

Published in Voices - American Academy of Psychotherpists, Spring 2017

 

It's late winter 2003. My buddy Mike-the-writer and I are sitting at the bar in Theodore's in downtown Springfield. We meet every few weeks to drink beer, eat things that will eventually kill us, talk about women, our teenage kids, our jobs teaching in college, and argue about baseball (he loves the Yankees, I love the Red Sox). For the better part of a year now Mike has been holding something back. I can feel it. Then again I've been holding something back, too. Finally the ice cracks. Mike asks me how he should go about getting divorced. (I do divorce mediations along with a small private psychotherapy practice.) I tell him what I know. He seems scared but kind of relieved. "My turn," I say....erisque enim ligula venenatis dolor. Maecenas nisl est, ultrices nec congue eget, auctor vitae massa. Fusce luctus vestibulum augue ut aliquet. Nunc sagittis dictum nisi, sed ullamcorper ipsum dignissim ac. In at libero sed nunc venenatis imperdiet sed ornare turpis. Donec vitae dui eget tellus gravida venenatis. Integer fringilla congue eros non fermentum. Sed dapibus pulvinar nibh tempor porta.

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I ask Mike how he writes.  He takes a sip of his beer.  Pulls back his barstool.  Readies his hands as if they were above a keyboard and begins wiggling his fingers.  Then he stops.  Looks in the air.  Swivels his stool to the right, wiggles some more.  Stops, looks up, pauses, swivels to the left, wiggles again… and this goes on for a few more rotations until I say, "I get it.  You follow where the story goes."

 

And Mike says, "Right, but first you have to sit your ass down and do it."

 

The next thing I know it is late June and I'm driving into a parking lot at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.  Mike has arranged for me to be a student at Stonecoast Writers Conference, a ten-day retreat that frightened me so much I never actually got around to applying.  I do not belong here.  I do not belong here.  I do not belong here.  I write occasional academic junk no one ever reads.  I write an every other week column about relationships for a weekly paper that people read for the supermarket ads.  I am fifty-two, these people look like children.  I imagine that each has the great American novel in their book bag, an agent on speed dial, and publishers seducing them with sinful things.  I fiddle with the stick shift – reverse and out of the parking lot wanting to go home, first gear and into the parking lot wanting to go all in.  Back and forth, back and forth until I finally get out of the car and register.

 

Son of a gun.  The people are nice.  Friendly.  There are people my age.  A couple people even older.  Everyone is scared.  Even the cool kids.  My section, creative nonfiction, has sixteen chairs in the room.  All the other sections – poetry, fiction, popular fiction, short story – have fifteen chairs.  I say a small thank you to Mike for making the last minute call.

Aside from wanting to feel like I somehow made a difference in the world, the biggest reason I wanted to become a psychologist was trying to figure out why we do what we do, what makes us tick.  As it turns out creative writing is after the same animal only that they can use lots of descriptive language and long loopy sentences, or fragments, and interesting punctuation, and adverbs (but only occasionally).  They also sit in chairs and talk with people except that the people they talk with don't really exist.  Or maybe they do.  I'm still not sure. 

 

It seems like every day at the conference the argument about "truth" comes up.  James Frey's memoir, A Million Little Pieces, was just published and the whole question of whether or not the horrors of his life were really true is the conversation at most meals and pretty nearly every cocktail hour.  Some are adamant that a writer, especially when that writer writes nonfiction, should tell the truth.  But then the question always pops up, "Whose truth?"  To which someone answers, "You know… the truth.  The stuff that's real."  And then someone else chimes in, "What's real?"  And the next thing I know I'm in the middle of a philosophy class but this time I'm having fun.  And I begin to think about clients I've had who felt and imagined things that seemed, on the face of it, preposterous to me, but to the person experiencing them they were as real as this keyboard under my fingertips.  I could try to talk them out if it, try to convince them that the bugs crawling on them were only pretend, but that never-ever worked.  The only way to make any sort of difference with someone so convinced of something that seems so untrue is to withhold judgment of truth (or not truth) and simply accept the bugs as completely real bugs to the person who is experiencing them.  Somehow I have to join this truth that seems so untrue to me.  But that's pretty much how I go about reading a good book.  I enter the world of the character, swim around in it, don't question every little detail and go along for the ride. 

 

I finally resolve the truth/not truth conundrum by replacing "truth" with "honesty."  I can't ever know what truth is.  I'm not sure there is a truth out there awaiting my discovery, but I am pretty sure there is some kind of honesty among us.  My client with the bugs crawling on her or the writer crafting a story that slides away from what I think is true might have something deeper to reveal in the honesty that lives in their imagination.

 

My instructor says over and over again that we have to really become the characters we are writing about.  I might be telling a story about a kid who was lonely and small and so desperate for friends and wanting to prove that he wasn't afraid that he didn't even flinch when a curveball hit him in the eye and left him half blind.  This never happened to me but for the story to live I have to become that kid and feel what he feels and see what he sees and let him wash around inside of me without forcing my sense of what he should experience.  And again, just like the truth/not truth argument that has animated so many discussions this week, this idea about being the other for the moment, brings me back to my profession.  The person sitting in the chair across from me is not me, quite obviously, but for me to have any sort of impact I must imagine what it is like to be him, to be scared of things I might not be scared of, to love things I may not love, to hope for a life that I do not hope for.  Empathy, right?  But as I think more about it, I begin to see that empathy, the coin of the realm in psychotherapy, is really an act of fiction.  Rick is not Joe but if Rick wishes to have some sort of engagement with Joe then Rick must – to the best of his ability, knowing full well that he will ultimately fall short because Rick is not Joe – imagine what it is like to be Joe.

 

But there is one place where the world of creative writing and psychotherapy split.  As I sit in a comfortable chair reading about a character so wildly different from me, and as I suspend judgment and crawl inside of her world and her experience and imagine being her, I don't have to communicate that understanding to anyone.  The character doesn't care if I communicate to her that I genuinely and deeply get it, (whatever it is).  My kids and girlfriend don't care.  The author might care that I get it but she'll never know.  It only matters to me and in this fundamental way reading and counseling are worlds apart because my client absolutely, positively, has to understand deep in her bones that I understand her and the only way to do that is to communicate it in some manner so that she gets that I get it.

 

After a couple of days of warming up we begin to "workshop" our stories.  I begin to hate that workshop is a verb.  One at a time we sit mute as each person in the group takes shots at what someone has written.  The writer can only sit and take notes.  When everyone is done with the target the instructor takes her turn.  She is much smarter than we are.  She sees things that so many of us don't.  She speaks in a soft voice, a voice that the workshopee can actually hear.  She isn't a pushover and she is not a fan of everything, but her comments can be embraced.  Finally it's number sixteen's turn and I hand out my piece, a rambling, long winded thing about driving on a crazy commute to work and hearing my brain pop with new thoughts, none of which are at all coherent to my fellow baby-writers.  Each person rips me.  I sit and write down their comments as I try not to cry.  I am so wishing I kept the car in reverse and had never registered for this damned conference. 

I so wish Mike, my so-called friend, hadn't done me this rotten favor.  Then my teacher, my lovely beautiful teacher, says almost exactly the same things everyone else said but it feels different.  I can actually hear what she has to say.  Why am I able to hear her and not the others?  I wonder.  Maybe it's the way she speaks to me.  That she is clear and direct but I don't feel the sting of a sharp edge against my tender skin.  Her voice feels warm to me, like I want to hear more, like I can take what she says and actually use it.

 

And later that night I begin to think again how much this experience is reminding me of therapy.  My client has to be able to actually hear what I'm saying for it to make a difference.  I must speak in a way that can slip past the defense and fear and his wish that whatever is wrong would just – poof – go away.  And I am reminded of the therapists I've seen over the years and how some felt too distant and aloof or too harsh and critical and others felt like we "just need to get on with it."  The therapists who I felt heard me and could speak to me with honesty, and yet in ways that didn't make me want to hide, were rare and treasured.

 

Then again maybe I am able to hear what my instructor says is because I think she is beautiful and smart but dammit she's married to some Pulitzer Prize winning poet who turns out to be a really nice guy.  But this isn't transference.  No, this isn't transference.  Not at all.  Ha.

 

We have a lecture from some guy who has written a bunch of middling successful crime novels.  I have no idea who he is but everyone else seems to think he is a big deal and maybe he is because every couple of days he has to rush down to Boston to meet with a guy named Clint (who turns out to be Eastwood) who is making a movie out of one of his books.  This guy gives a very entertaining and passionate talk about just letting it rip.  "Get those fingers moving," he says. "Let loose the thought, do not edit, just keep writing, and writing and don't wait for the muse to come, I said not to edit, right?  Well, don't edit, type-type-type, it'll come out, trust me, trust yourself.  And then… edit like crazy once you have it all there.  Write and rewrite and rewrite again and again and then go back and let it rip and then rewrite.  Rinse and repeat." 

 

Another, less jazzed writer, a poet apparently with great credibility in a world I know nothing about, tells us pretty much the same thing the crime novelist said only she says it with less caffeine.  She tells us to "trust your unconscious."  She says it in other more poetic ways but the gist of her message was that inside of us is the story waiting to emerge.  We just have to trust it and get out of its way.

 

And over drinks at Joshua's Tavern that night I feel like I'm in grad school again eating pizza and drinking cheap beer at Buddy's.  Everyone is talking about the unconscious and if it exists, and if it does exist does it work to our advantage, and if so does it work to our advantage all the time?  The general consensus is that each one of us has been surprised that an idea or feeling or character popped up from what seemed like nowhere.  "So where does that come from, huh?  You tell me?  It has to be the unconscious, right?"

 

And just to be a jerk I ask if anyone can actually say what the unconscious is and every answer was something to the effect, "Ummm, ummm, I can't actually say what it is but I know it's there."  And I say, "Precisely because if you could say what it was it wouldn't be unconscious, would it?"  But I think they are liking me in spite of my being a jerk.

 

Near the end of the ten days, over lunch, there is a discussion about how much of the writer is in the character she creates. 

Some of us resist because we don't want to believe that some of the crazy-violent people we are writing about with such gusto is in anyway connected to ourselves.  But we know that they are.  Where else could they come from?  There are dark spots aren't there?  Spots that only get a chance to come out at night in our dreams or on the blank page. 

 

All through the ten days there is talk about some smoky, cloud-like thing I do not quite understand – Voice.  Our instructor wants us to develop this thing I do not yet grasp.  She wants us to let it out.  Let what out?  I mean, sure, all of the stories we've read these ten days have had a different feeling to them.  Some were sharp and clever, and others were languid, and others were dark as hell.  Is that Voice?  No, apparently not.  So says our instructor who is now bothering me and frustrating me and maybe she isn't as beautiful as I thought she was.  So what the hell is it?

 

I think about this idea on the four-hour drive home and for weeks later and then it hits me.  I hear a Stevie Wonder song and I know what Voice is.  I hear a Neil Young song or a Joni Mitchell song and I know what Voice is, and it's a little like that trick question about the unconscious or what Justice Stewart said about pornography, "I can't really define it but I know it when I see it."  There is a distinct sense of Joni that Joni gives me.  I get the same click when I read Hemingway or my friend Mike.  I know there is a real person on the other side, someone who has mastered their craft and has earned the freedom to be who they are on the page.

 

And I think about learning this craft of psychotherapy and how much I wanted to do it well and how I learned all of the "things" I thought I needed to know.  And then how I still felt wooden and kind of stilted.  I aped Carl Rogers for years until it dawned on me that I was not born in 1902, that I was less patient than he was, and that I could be funnier than Carl (which might be like saying that I was a better baseball player than Julius Caesar).  Eventually I became enamored with Milton Erickson for a time and did some training and worked on induction and story telling with my clients but I never felt all that comfortable with the manipulations (though no Ericksonian would say that manipulations are going on).  But I did like the story telling even without the trance.

 

Eventually I think I found my therapeutic voice.  It has a little Carl and a little Milton and some of my father and some things from others, too, but mostly it is me.  The core of what I do is try not to judge, try not to give much advice and to put myself into the world of the other – as best I can – and swim around for awhile and report back what it felt like.  At this point of my career I can't really say I am any one specific kind of therapist.  I know I'm not a behaviorist or a cognitive behaviorist or someone who does psychoanalysis old or new.  My best guess is that someone might place me in the humanistic/existentialist slot but I'd resist that as well.  I am one person trying to understand and engage with another person who is not me, who never will be me, and who has her own story to tell, one that is most likely better than anything I will ever read.

 

I suppose the purpose and aim of psychotherapy is to help people be happy because at the root of life is the pursuit of happiness, isn't it?  And if this is the case I can think of nothing better than this ten-day experience I had at Stonecoast trying to figure out how to sit in a chair, waive my fingers over a keyboard, adjust my direction again and again, and follow a story.  So far following stories has taken me back and forth across the country more than a few times and deep inside myself.  I have gone on writing benders for a few years and have suffered through fallow periods where I wondered if I'd ever have another idea.  I have been in a monthly writing group in Maine for three or four years with excellent friends I made in those wonderful days at the retreat.  I have been in writing groups with excellent friends at my college.  I read at open mic nights in local bars and art galleries.  (I'm big at the North Quabbin Garlic Festival.)  I've published a little, hope for more, but am satisfied that when I put pen to page I feel a me that I like a lot: more open, honest, questioning, curious, less judgmental.  I've met people on my travels who scare the hell out of me and other people who I felt as if I'd known forever.  I've had to come to grips with fears and shadowy edges in myself that I've always tried to hide.  And when I was horribly mugged four years ago, writing about the bastards who did it helped me get to a point where I wanted to send the sons of bitches thank you notes because, while I can't recommend getting bones broken and money stolen and having a long knife held to your eye as a pathway to happiness, the experience seemed to work for me to help shake off a lifelong affliction of taking precious things for granted. Spilling the experience out on paper in a mad rush of feeling and thought and then spilling more and more and more and then editing it all (over and over again) into something that brought some order to the chaos surely felt like therapy because for me it was.