Today I sat with Mia, a young woman who wants to be able to sleep better at night. She clenches her jaw, grinds her teeth, and has to massage her face to open her mouth in the morning. While she spoke today, her fingers danced across the edge of the couch. Then up and down her right leg to her knee cap, over to her left knee cap, and up to her thigh. Her hands folded momentarily in her lap.
It was hard work to keep her on task. As soon as I verbally took note of something significant, she was off again, her words spewing from her mouth as though she was racing away from my comment. Watching her mouth move, her hands fluttering up and down her legs and across the couch cushion, I fantasized that she was a water spider, flitting across a pond--so quickly that she barely penetrated the surface.
We covered all sorts of things--an ailing relative, her responsibilities at work, how teenagers irritated her, how she tries to stay in control all the time, her sleep problems, her cat--it was one thing after another. My interjections and observations reigned her in temporarily, but then off she'd go to something else. It was like driving 90 m.p.h. on a circuitous road.
I knew what was happening, but the two doctoral students observing this from behind a one-way mirror, did not. They had been having trouble with their own therapy and I had invited them to observe me at work--something that seems to help students. They need to see different ways of doing therapy and to hear different ways to say things, phrases to use, mannerisms to consider for their own use. And here I sat, touching on every topic known to man whilst my students were probably falling into a coma of boredom in the next room:
You call this therapy? I can't believe anything is happening in there--they're just talking. She's all over the place. I don't want to be like that. Barbara should be more focused and settle that woman down.
There is a process to therapy, however, and it can be trusted. Mia was someone who used to look at the picture on the wall and disappear into it, in her head. Now she was able to stay present with me for the entire session, even though today, she was having a much harder time finding a landing spot. I knew Mia would eventually slow down and I could almost predict how the bridge would be made to her presenting issue in the last part of the session. Sure enough, at about 10 minutes to the hour, the session became focused, intense, and moving. It was the crux of the work and it took place in about 8 minutes. A couple minutes later as we stood to leave the room she said, "I feel really different now." That was obvious. Her face was no longer contorted and she looked peacefully satisfied.
Whew.
It sometimes feels like a crapshoot--where the client(s) will go with the issues over the course of an hour. Or which issue they will choose to address. Once, a client divulged that she had been abused, then promptly crumpled into a dead faint and urinated on my couch. Another client who was explaining a distressing situation, suddenly vomited in my wastebasket. "Big John," a man with paranoia problems, once began tearing the pictures off my wall because he was sure that my hidden transisters were relaying his image to the CIA. These things happen. But one thing is sure: there is a predictability to the process of therapy even though the individual journey may be different. Change will occur, ideas will crystalize, emotions will bubble up, and insight will expand. Staying the course and not giving in to my anxiety that the process won't work--this is the essence of being a therapist.
Salvation is like this.
Jesus has promised to will and do in us of His own good pleasure. It doesn't seem like it's going to happen when we look at ourselves and what we bring to the task. We either decide that it's too slow going and decide to push things along by forcing ourselves to do right (which can bleed over into legalism), or that it doesn't matter what we do, so just do whatever we feel like and God will forgive and forget (cheap grace). Or we blither and blather to God instead of making room for His voice in our lives. But there is a process to salvation--a process we can trust. It is a science and there are good rules laid out for how to reach for this experience. It is a "God Thing" and what He begins, He will finish and do well. The challenge is staying the course: managing our own anxiety that we will never be good enough, acceptable enough, righteous enough. We begin to wrestle ourselves out of the arms of God.
We can trust the goodness of God. We can trust the process of His righteousness through Christ. For it is greater than our eyes have seen or our hearts have imagined. For what He has promised, He will do. Corrie ten Boom knew this when she wrote, "Don't wrestle, just nestle."
Keep me on course, God.
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