Mirrors: Aroused Reflections

Photograph by Victor Bloomberg, October 13, 2024, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Remembered and Re-Lived

“Dad, I’m proud of you. You’ve become a great person.” We were on the phone in typical casual conversation. The moment lacked a movie’s climax, the drama was implied in a word - “become”, 68 years in the making. I recalled and kept to myself the moment my Addled Pops said with a smile, “I’m glad you’re finally happy.” Pops was sincere, my Grown Kid was sincere, the moment brought me joy.

In an instant there emerged within me a Warped Sound. “When he’s good he’s an angel but when he’s bad he’s horrid,” Mother said of me to another adult, when I was a child. Father and brothers agreed. I believed them for many years. Later, maybe in my 50s or 60s, I was casting off the myth, but I couldn’t see it clearly until both parents died. The ‘angel-horrid’ remark my parents bandied about hid a painful truth about them.

That myth was like others that haunted and obscured my view of my family and myself, for much of my life. The haunting was not by specters, but lets call them by ghostly sounds and images that emerged through recurring nightmares, physical sensations and my own destructive behavior.

The haunting is ended for me. I’m no longer fooled by archaic scratchy vinyl etched in my body, my mind. Finally, I’m grateful to have feet of clay, firmly planted on the ground even as my mind wanders.

Aroused Reflections in Session

Now here I am, a psychotherapist streaming over the internet. There’s always a possibility of ruptured connectivity. Degraded or lost digital signals do not concern me, because we have Plan B for that. It’s physiology signaling feelings, emotions, thoughts that are grist for the miller, the therapist. Signals flow back’n’forth, they thin and thicken, coalesce or smatter or shatter. My client is viewing me, initially and recurringly, through a matrix of their own mirrors, their kaleidoscope. My job: Engage fully - and stay clear in my own self-reflections.

Each client looks at me, actually at my streaming image. They look away and their face changes a wee little bit and then in an instant their expression completely morphs.

This particular Client speaks about their life in a country by the Baltic Sea. This is an unpaid consultation, a response to a desperate plea for help. The society has been upended by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It is like an earthquake emitting unrelenting tremors, repeatedly traumatizing citizens, refugees and migrant workers.

Baltic: I suffer quite a lot.

I've spent my life doing my job for this Republic. The Republic wouldn't exist if we hadn't done our job. For Christ's sake! Now the plumbing is broken and the plumber is God knows where. So I'm a little bit down the drain.

The doctor says my veins and arteries in my legs are clean. I do not have any risk of dying on my way to the school to work, except it's too painful because of the shoulder.

I was preoccupied with keeping us alive after COVID. Now I just put myself into stupidly earning a buck. I can work on the dissertation, but it's going to cost me in terms of health.

Well at least my dissertation gives me something to do while the plumber has disappeared. And then because of my joints, typing the dissertation, sitting hours a day is painful. Some days it’s worst than the COVID years.

Me: It was like switches flipping signals. What began as routine recitation of facts turned into a torrent of anger and then back to a reporter’s tone. What could I say that would maintain Baltic’s sense of here-and-now safety and show that I was gettng it?

You have survived.

Baltic: Angry, sharp, cutting.

That's all very nice, but that's because you're in the States. For me task number one is survival.

Me: I do have the privilege of not struggling for survival. There was a period of time in my life where I struggled to survive but that's in my past.

Sometimes its like watching an old, degraded video tape, the flashes of images and sounds lacking narrative. Terror during childhood, cold wet hungry while hitchhiking across North America as a teen, overworked and overwrought while putting food on the table for me and my kids.

Baltic: Next we will pay more, even more for electricity, for the removal of garbage. It's absolutely crazy. And now companies offer work for peanuts.

Me: “Work for peanuts.” That’s a metaphor for a big downfall from career heights of the past. Maybe this time I can show that I get it.

I think it's a trend. Get rid of high-paid experienced people, replace them with technology and young people who work for peanuts; and not care about the quality of service.

Baltic: "The Cage" by Alberts Bels asks how can you see a life you don't know, what it would be like, so he kidnaps his brother and whisks him off to Siberia.

Me: Was that an accusation? I don’t really understand. Is therapy a kidnapping? I’ll respond in kind.

Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" imagines what it's like to escape, and then go back to explain freedom to people who have always been trapped.

Baltic’s face seems focused. I pivot.

I saw a documentary and a scientist said, "So I didn't really care about much until I formed human connection that allowed the flow of love. And then all of a sudden I started caring." That's my purpose, done imperfectly.

Baltic: Don't undervalue imperfection. We are not that useless.

Me: Good, my Client sees me as a person, again. Baltic goes into a “fight” stance rapidly and that’s progress from the despondency that motivated first contact with me. Baltic had imagined freezing to death and not caring. I thought of other clients who have despaired, the tie-in is always trauma, different kinds, past and recent.