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Tell me what you look for and I shall tell you who you are

Paul Berg • July 23, 2024

Tell me what you yearn for and I shall tell you who you are. We are what we reach for, the idealized image that drives our wandering. -James Hillman

Do you know what you yearn for? Do you have a picture of what you are looking for? I am not talking about a big house or a trip around the world. Let’s go deeper. What fascinates you and draws you towards it? Maybe your picture of the security of a happy home? Maybe some kind of lighter and more playful world? What do your dreams look like? Have you lost touch with them?

He walked into my office very discouraged. Everything had fallen apart. Things had just gotten worse and worse lately. He had believed the “contract.” If he was successful everything would work out. Now everything that he knew that defined success was gone: his girlfriend, his health, his job, and his accomplishments. He had tried hard. The “contract” had been broken. Everything important was lost. Now he felt worthless. He felt like nothing.

Sometimes there are moments where your losses define you. They are all you can see and the melancholy sets in. Ok, you are sad but now what? What’s next? What do we yearn for? Have we forgotten what we yearn for? That still small voice of yearning, the only thing left, may be the most important part of who we are.

Or maybe you haven’t even had any big noticeable loss lately but the world still feels pretty “flat and dull.” You start focusing on “functioning” or “surviving” in the world. Like clients that ask me to help them to “cope” with situations. Coping’s ok, it feels better than failure, but “cope” is a sad little limited word to me. It doesn’t give you energy and you can’t build a life on “coping.” What about the “big exciting pictures of life” that you had in your mind at point in your life before “reality” sunk in. This “reality” that was taught to you that you are defined by superficial stuff like what you have, or what you do, or what people say about you. That message starts to feels oppressive. It’s an easy way for others to control you. Instead, what if you could really define your own original authentic self. You don’t want to regret all your “unlived life” someday. You want to do what you were here for. You want to live your own life. OK, welcome to midlife crises energy!

I love Hillman’s question: “Tell me what you yearn for?” We start with that. What pictures do you have of future? What feelings are you looking for? How do you see yourself? There is a “pull” to this. Good questions lead us in our “wandering” and help us to connect with ourselves. One of the main quests in therapy is to get rid of the beliefs that block us in answering these questions. When the blocks are knocked down, we can dig up these mental pictures and move towards them. There is an incredible amount of energy that resides in these pictures waiting to be released. It is so much more powerful than motivating ourselves with fears by beating ourselves up. It is the image that can fuel us, that can “drive our wandering” and help us to define ourselves.

Paul, Connections Psychological

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Slow down and listen: Acknowledging the big painful grief

By Paul Berg • 24 Jul, 2024

When you lose someone you love, Your life becomes strange, The ground beneath you becomes fragile, Your thoughts make your eyes unsure; And some dead echo drags your voice down Where words have no confidence Your heart has grown heavy with loss; And though this loss has wounded others too, No one knows what has been taken from you When the silence of absence deepens. Flickers of guilt kindle regret For all that was left unsaid or undone. There are days when you wake up happy; Again inside the fullness of life, Until the moment breaks And you are thrown back Onto the black tide of loss. Days when you have your heart back, You are able to function well Until in the middle of work or encounter, Suddenly with no warning, You are ambushed by grief. It becomes hard to trust yourself. All you can depend on now is that Sorrow will remain faithful to itself. More than you, it knows its way And will find the right time To pull and pull the rope of grief Until that coiled hill of tears Has reduced to its last drop. Gradually, you will learn acquaintance With the invisible form of your departed; And when the work of grief is done, The wound of loss will heal And you will have learned To wean your eyes From that gap in the air And be able to enter the hearth In your soul where your loved one Has awaited your return All the time. -John O'Donohue Keep Reading below!

Where do you feel it in your body?

By Paul Berg • 24 Jul, 2024

“When we relate to our bodies as having soul, we attend to their beauty, their poetry and their expressiveness. Our very habit of treating the body as a machine, whose muscles are like pulleys and its organs engines, forces its poetry underground, so that we experience the body as an instrument and see its poetics only in illness.”- From Thomas Moore- “Care of the Soul”