Coming Back to Work

I have lately been pulled away from work and writing due to the birth of my second daughter.  This is not to say that I’ve been inactive with regards to reading or thinking about therapy.  But, as is often the case with these kinds of things, the development of a new kind of lived rhythm is to be sought out to better support the continuation of the kind of practices that feel nourishing outside of the specific set of obligations that comprise being a parent to a toddler and new infant.  That said, I did have two immediate thoughts in the aftermath of my daughter’s birth that I thought might serve as a useful conduit for finding my way back to producing material for this space.

Both reflections hinge on ideas that I’ve frequently explored in other posts: grief and relational dimensions of experience.  The grief component I will discuss somewhat obliquely, as I want to honor the privacy of my family and the experiences we navigated relative to the way my daughter came into the world.  Suffice to say, there were some concerns that arose following her birth that could not have been otherwise anticipated and which were cause for a considerable amount of worry.  Now, there are certainly densities of grief to which we could have been exposed which we fortunately were not.  It is not lost on me that I have a child I was able to bring home and according to medical professionals we have no reason to be concerned about long-term impact to her health or development.  For those things I feel deeply grateful.  Though at the time, the loss of a “routine” and uncomplicated birth, along with the required application of various levels of mechanical medical interventions, carried their own profound sense of loss, which in some ways could be described as the loss of a kind of taken-for-grantedness that was a component of the birth of our first daughter.  Particularly on the heels of months worth of positive scans and OB appointments, the shock of having to begin my daughter’s life by rooting for her to attain a state of relative wellness was one neither I nor my wife were prepared for.

My world buckled that morning.  What was meant to be an opportunity for finding the subtle differences in a familiar experience of welcoming a child into this world became an exploration of the confusion, fear, and sadness of having to navigate something that felt antagonistic.  Instead of my wife and I getting to hold her after her birth, I was trying to figure out how to tend to a partner recovering from the physical demands of labor as I made plans to follow a warming cart down to the “Specialty Nursing Unit”.  It was seven hours after her being born before I was able to really lay a hand on her and a day and a half before I held her at all, albeit hooked up to a number of devices that were either monitoring or assisting with some of her basic functions.  The strange impossibility of the words “get some rest” seemed a kind of farce as we were checked into the maternity unit, despite the fact that her birth occurred around 4:30 in the morning after an already long and sleepless night.  And I will never forget the uncanny sense of spending the next two days on a maternity unit without a crying infant to learn the nuances and cadences of, while those sounds projected from the rooms around us.  Instead, I found myself having to go through multiple levels of security clearances anytime I needed and or wanted to come and go from our room to her own.  The nurses thought I was deranged when I asked how long it would be before I could change a dirty diaper.

What I was struck by during all of this was the remarkable clarity I experienced at times through the confusion and the disorder.  Yes, there were intense emotions that needed to be navigated and at any point could overwhelm what it meant to be living any of this.  However, having the freedom to allow those feelings to take purchase allowed for energy to be recruited elsewhere.  I think this is where having language for ideas of being present, of being intentional, of being-there can help to contain and provide a resource for considering how to navigate fairly traumatic conditions.  There was no sense of having to do anything extraordinary to “contain” my emotions.  The experience was the container.  In being able to allow those sensations and feelings to be what they were, I was able to be in it and channel that into a kind of caring awareness of the moment I was being presented with.  Though I would have rather not had this particular invitation to reflect on some of these principles, I think it served as a helpful reminder of what is happening when I speak with clients about the need to move squarely into life’s unpleasant and unwanted experiences.  For any relational and existential therapy to work the interpretations and interventions have to be sincere. 

The other component which has largely been evoked for me in these past two weeks is an increased awareness of hermeneutics in which experience yields certain relational dynamics, which then brings forth new kinds of experience.  Something about changing the infrastructure of our life always brings about some new organization of meaning in how we understand who we are.  There is something staggering about the ways in which new relationships invite us to become something we would not otherwise be.  If we are able to attune ourselves to this process, we can often feel the way relationships and our experience of ourselves in those relationships ebb and flow like the pulsating of tides, carrying within their undulations layers of cascading moments of being molded by our willingness to receive another’s appeal to their own needs and fulfilling the complex dialectic of finding in our own desires the desire for being the desire of the other.

Much in the same way we were talking about presence and being-with-what-is with regards to the complex emotional dynamics of navigating personal hardship, being present to the interpersonal needs of a newborn—immediate and unfiltered as they are—calls up variations in being-with that otherwise are not typically the ones I push to the foreground of my personality.  I am not generally a therapist people seek out or choose to work with because I exude an abundance of “warmth”.  Certainly, aspects of being a therapist demands things like tenderness, a kind of compassionate firmness, and an ability to commit to those things with confidence; however, being with my daughter and the nakedness of the claims she makes on those parts of who I am brings them out in ways I had forgotten since my first child was born.  

Now of course given the nascent vulnerability of a newborn, I meet those needs over and again in as much as I am capable.  In other facets of life, and other relationships, we modulate based on a more complex interpretation of what is being asked of us.  However, even in that complex interpretation, there are aspects of negotiating experience that exist beyond our awareness or which so deeply penetrate our basic understanding of who we are that relational structures emerge unimpeded.  I have been continuing to enjoy and explore Edgar Levenson’s work quite a bit and he talks about the resolution of the countertransference as being the thing that actually cures in the context of therapy.  That resolving the countertransference is what allows the analyst to get out of the way of trying to solve or fix and allows for freedom of inquiry and interpretation of the psychoanalytic enactment most directly.  There is, I think, something to this when it comes to many of our relationships.  That our job is not to fix the demands being placed on us by others, but to be more attuned to what it is we are experiencing in the aftermath of those demands, while aspiring to authenticity in how we choose to respond to them.

I feel compelled to be clear that, though not the experience we planned for, I do have another happy and (so far as we can tell) healthy baby who is demanding a disproportionate amount of my time and energy.  I now get to look forward to the odd amalgam of feelings that is returning to work and going away from my family as a means of contributing to the care of my family, which of course often includes some combination of the feeling guilty about needing to leave those I love and care about in order to provide a version of the love and care I can, while also feeling some amount of guilt at the awareness that I may be don’t always feel quite as guilty as I ought to.  And with that return to the office, hopefully much more activity and time for reflection in this space, as well as within the context of a work that I am in some ways growing eager to get back to.