TRANSCRIPT
In many ways, the psychotherapy field, the psychology field, presents itself as being extremely modern, extremely cutting-edge, very scientific. But is it?
I had an experience when I was a therapist that really opened my eyes to an alternate perspective. It happened in the summer of 2003 in New York City. I’d already been a therapist for about four years by that point, and I had a little office in an apartment building in the West Village of Manhattan. It was an elevator building, but it also had a stairway that you could walk up for people that didn’t like taking the elevator.
And it was a very, very hot summer. A strange thing happened: there was a problem with the power grid in the East Coast, and it ended up that a lot of the power right down the East Coast went out. The power grid blew out, and there was no electricity in New York City. What I ended up with is no telephone, no air-conditioning, no fans, no subway going on anymore. The city shut down; nothing was working. My friends all stopped going to their jobs. All the offices closed down everywhere. People who were doing any sort of work just stopped doing their work. There was no internet; there was no nothing.
I wondered the first morning that I woke up with the power grid being fully down, should I go to work or not? I thought about it, and I thought one of the things that was extremely important to me as a therapist was that people show up. My responsibility was that I show up and that I’d be present. But I make sure I get a good night’s sleep so I can really be open-minded, that I’d be ready to listen, be really ready to engage and talk. And I’ve said it so many times.
So when I woke up that morning, I thought, I’m going to work anyway. I said, it’s gonna be dark. I’m gonna climb the stairway, but I have a key to get in the building. I have a key to get into my office. So I went there, and I thought, well, how are they gonna even buzz to get in because the buzzers aren’t going to work? And I thought, that’s if they come at all. I didn’t know.
I had some clients who lived in Brooklyn. I had some people who lived in the Bronx. I had people who lived in Queens. I had people who lived all around Manhattan. And I thought, well, people could walk or they could take a bicycle to get to me. A lot of my clients had bikes and things like that. So I looked at my list of clients for the morning, and I thought, you know, there’s really no reason that any of them can’t come. They could walk, and they could ride their bikes. So I thought, I wonder if they will. I said, you know, I bet some of them will.
Well, what happened is I went downstairs at nine o’clock when my first client was supposed to come, and the client was there. They were like, they said, I wonder if you were gonna be here, and how I wondered if you were gonna be here. So what happened as we walked up the stairs together, we went into the office, and it was dark. There was a window, and it led in some light, but it was much darker than usual. I didn’t have my little sound machine, my white noise machine that I worked with, but none of my other office mates, none of them had come in. So there was really no need to block the sound, and it was pretty quiet on the street because there were basically no cars from what I remember.
So we sat there just using a little bit of morning sunlight filtering in through the window, and we had a full psychotherapy session. And you know what was strange? It got, it was a little bit of an adjustment to realize it was, you know, much darker, but it was no different than any other psychotherapy session.
Then what happened is 9:45, that session ended, and I had my next client coming at 10:00. So I went downstairs, and they came up. We did the exact same thing. We’re like, oh my god, we can do it in the dark. And it was a dark stairwell, and it was dark mostly inside the inner passageways of my office and inside the building. But once we got into the therapy room, it was light enough so we could kind of see each other.
Then came the third session, my eleven o’clock, and my twelve o’clock, and my one o’clock, and everybody showed up. Some people had ridden their bikes. One person had actually walked all the way from Brooklyn, and he said, yeah, you know, I thought you probably wouldn’t show up, and I didn’t have a bike. But then I’m like, you know, I could use the walk anyways, and it’s kind of interesting to come visit the city when it’s completely dark because it was such a strange time to be in New York when there’s no electricity. It was like the city basically stopped functioning.
I ended up seeing, I think I had eight clients scheduled that day. Well, seven of them came, so basically I had a full day of psychotherapy. It gave me a lot to reflect on. I think there was no electricity the next day too, and I did it again. People came.
And that’s when I started thinking, what is this modern thing called psychotherapy? What is this modern thing called psychology? And I started thinking about it. I thought, what a strange job I have in Manhattan, one of the major metropolises of the world, that I could do my job without any electricity. And it gave me a chance to think, what is this?
Then I started thinking, am I a psychotherapist, or is it more honest to call this whole field shamanism? Am I just a shaman? Because I started thinking, what really am I doing here? I know a lot of therapists who use all sorts of fancy names for what they do, the type of therapy they do. They give it all sorts of titles, and they use all sorts of diagnoses, and they use all sorts of fancy psychology words to describe the kind of work they do and for analyzing the people they’re with and analyzing their behavior and analyzing their own reactions to people’s behaviors and defense mechanisms. And there’s all sorts of technical jargon that it’s kind of hard to understand sometimes.
But underneath it, what is it? It really is just two people talking. It’s one person coming, being more vulnerable and trying to grow and heal and work out their problems, and it’s another person using whatever interpersonal skill they have to try to be useful to them, to help them grow, to help them develop better relationships, to help them work out their history, their past, their pain, their traumas, their confusion, how to move forward in life, how to get more value out of life.
And really, when I thought about it, I thought people have probably been doing this for tens of thousands of years, hundreds of thousands of years, maybe millions of years. Probably in different tribes, going back who knows how far, there were people who were set aside as someone who was a good listener, someone who was good at interaction, someone perhaps who had different boundaries than the rest of the people in the tribe, in the group, in the clan, who were able to step out a little bit, who maybe were old or maybe were more wise, maybe were more caring, more compassionate, more empathic, maybe had more insight, or maybe they didn’t. Who knows? But that was their role.
Maybe they had more of a connection back then that would be considered with the spirit world or whatever they had. But ultimately, I thought, I have a stone-age job. I have a job that doesn’t require any props at all. It doesn’t require any equipment. It doesn’t require a computer. It really, to be effective, it doesn’t require any sort of technical language at all. You don’t have to know all the fancy psychology terms to be able to be useful to someone, to care, to listen, to talk, to think about stuff.
And I think a lot of times, actually, all those fancy terms, all the fancy labels that people get, all these degrees that people have, the letters after their names and licenses that people have, and the certifications and the…
Trainings and all these different modalities of treatment, maybe they’re just a big distraction a lot of the time for what’s really going on. One person being there, being present, being open, being vulnerable themself and meeting a person, being connected with them, forming a relationship with them. All this dressing it up and all the fancy lingo and all the fancy words and all the perfect, all the fancy labels that we give, I think a lot of times it can really be a defense on the part of therapists to bolster the insecure sides of them that maybe are scared to just really be present and be themself in the real light of Sun, in the real light without electricity, in the naked light of reality. To really be who they really are with no props in a helpful, useful way for someone else who is searching, someone else who is struggling.
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