More About Commitments
I want to share with you how my commitment is coming along - it was to give up the hopelessness, with implications being that I would commit myself to accepting that RC theory also applies to me; to ending Jewish oppression; and to finishing my Ph.D. I made it at the West Coast Teachers' Workshop at La Scherpa this summer. It's been great. The work against Jewish oppression follows as a continuum since I was already committed to that - a new aspect, like I mentioned earlier, is the work on pride in my Christian heritage which has unlocked the guilt and the pretense and opened the door to effective work. What's been newest has been my work on my dissertation - this summer I gathered and xeroxed necessary materials and since I've been back here I've been writing away. It has helped enormously to remember how many people I've promised that I would finish - it's like I'd let them down, if I didn't. Also, it's begun to seem a manageable task, for the first time. And I'm anxious to have it behind me so I'll have that time for other things. So far so good!
It's the bit about giving up the hopelessness and accepting RC theory for me that's had the most dramatic impact - that in conjunction with my work on embarrassment. One thing it meant was discharging on how I hate to be client - how I hate to be looked at, how starting to discharge always makes me feel like I'm giving up, like I'm falling into a black pit. I just kind of gave up and worked on it. At the same time I was beginning to realize that one way into the tears for me is to be held very close. To ask that of my counselors also felt like giving up, like humiliation, like dying. I did it anyway. Over and over again, going into session, it felt like totally giving up, to take those risks. The thing which allowed me to do it was the commitment. I decided to just act as though I would survive, as though it was important for me to keep pushing, as though the theory did apply to me and that there was hope. I don't mean to sound melodramatic. That's exactly how desperate I was feeling. I had spent nearly six years totally desperate about how to make RC work for me and hadn't really found a way. (It has a lot to do with how I was interfered with, about crying, when I was younger.)
So by now, I've accumulated a whole summers' worth of sessions, nearly every one of which was like what I described above. But as time went on, I began to have some perspective. I began to see that I hadn't died, was not loved any less by my counselors - that in fact I was much much closer to my friends than ever before and thinking superbly. I began to be able to separate out my feelings from the reality. I began to love my counselors as they were counseling me, to take in the fact that there was someone there loving me well - began to trust and to push myself harder and harder. It's all been such a relief. I could go on and on. I now know how to get to the top of the mountain. Thanks, friend.
I'm beginning to work more on the embarrassment of being looked at while I cry. So I don't feel I have to lie close to someone in order to cry ...
Kathy Dancingsun
Athens, Greece
(First printed in Present Time No. 34, p. 33)