The following is a final paper I wrote for one of my classes. The topic was to encapsulate parts of the class or program that were especially meaningful to me. I don't know why, but I feel like I should share it with the interwebs. Enjoy, interwebs.
As a whole, this quarter has blown my mind on several different levels. The idea of choosing which of the many things I've learned has affected me the most is a little bit difficult to do. How do you quantify the amount of meaning that a particular discussion has for you in your goal to be a therapist? And how, after assigning number values, do you know that the numeric legend will be universally true? In the coming years, I don't know which of the many discussions will come to mean the most to me. As it stands, I feel I must start this paper by apologizing for not being able to include a definitive answer as to what the most important things I've learned have been. Instead, I shall have to make due with what sticks in my mind right now as the most important things that I have experienced.
One thing that really is sticking out in my mind is the Levinasian idea of ethics. What a beautiful thing! The other is, in fact, my responsibility. I feel like my parents should be informed that their training has been vindicated and authenticated by a
Lithuanian-born French Jewish philosopher. I consider myself a very religious person, and I do try to adhere to the idea of being as Christ would be if He were in my position. How fitting that a Jewish man has so thoroughly captured the teachings of another Jew.
Thinking about Levinas has changed quite a bit of my daily life. As I walk to and from the bus, I cannot help but look around to see what I am doing with my responsibility. The homeless person on my path now calls to me. I don't say this to make my professors feel good or because I want to kiss up. I honestly cannot help but look at every homeless person I see and really ask myself if I can do anything to help. My whole life I've been taught to be a Christian and somehow I missed the point. In one quarter, in learning to see through a set of eyes made in the phenomenological tradition, I have come to find what it means to love and honor the face of an other as the One I call “
Savior” did, which is to say without reservation and without first casting judgment. Levinas somehow found a language to define what it means to honor an other, and in describing it, he has gifted it to me, which will allow me to gift it to others.
As I write this, I am struck that my first inclination is to use the word “gift”. An ethical and unavoidable life based on loving and honoring the other is a life based on opening oneself to an infinite amount of pain, the trauma Levinas spoke of, as it were. This brings to mind a discussion that I had with a very good friend of mine a few years ago. We were discussing the nature of God and where the source of His power lay. Initially, my thoughts were that it was based in the ability to command the universe and be obeyed universally. My friend rightly pointed out that this cannot be the source of His power because we as people do not always obey when He commands. I mused about infinite wisdom, infinite ability, and all of the other “infinite’s” that God possesses. My friend listened and agreed that they were all parts of His makeup that differentiated Him from us, but that each still lacked what truly defines God as
our God. My friend then suggested that maybe being God has less to do with being infinitely powerful and more with being infinitely vulnerable. His point was that, because of who God is, His power does not protect him from trauma in a Levinasian sense, but rather puts Him in a place where He has to feel it. As such, it is my opinion that this program is not only in the business of teaching one to be a good therapist or even a good person, but to be more like God.
This opening to trauma is not shied away from. Nothing in anything we have read or discussed in any of the classes tries to sugarcoat that one at all. We are putting ourselves on the path to an existence marked by the pain of the other. I have really come to appreciate the way that this class in particular has made it clear that we as therapists will be changed irreversibly by our contact with clients. My experience has always been that therapists who have been in the game for 20+ years have a certain serenity that can't be forced or faked. This isn't to say that seasoned professionals are zen masters who float on a cloud of personal existential Nirvana, but rather that they seem to know a beautiful secret that is only learned in listening to and accepting the pain of others. I think to my experiences as a full-time missionary and how they have changed me. There was a time when I was walking with my companion to an appointment. We were living in a little town called
Daugavpils in Latvia at the time, and as we neared the apartment complex we were headed to, we saw a man on the ground looking around, stuck in the daze brought to him by the alcohol he had drunk. Forming around this man was a puddle of blood that was collecting from a gash along his jaw. We were shocked to see people walking past, openly looking at him but ignoring him. My companion and I rushed over to pick him up. The man we were to meet with stuck his head out of his window, and we called to him, asking him to phone an ambulance. We pulled the man off the ground and sat him down on a bench. He looked at us incredulously, like we had just done something that should have been impossible. People were walking by and giving us the same look. One of them actually said “that's very nice of you two, but you're wasting your time on him. He doesn't deserve your help”. I was horrified. I looked at this man and saw in his eyes that he agreed with the words spoken by the passerby. I looked at his face and realized that his gash was caused by a rock that had gone through his face and broken his jaw. I don't think I'll ever forget that man. Moments before the ambulance got there, he looked me dead in the eye and said “are you angels?” This is the life that we are choosing. We will be the ones to lift, and we will do so because it was what angels would do, and we will be changed because of it.
This program makes room for a life based on faith in ways that I didn't think psychology ever would or could. I was taught by Brent Melling, one of the more influential professors I had during my undergrad years, that the word “psychology” originated from the understanding that the psyche meant the soul, or the uniquely lived human experience. Since hearing this and contemplating the implications, I have been very sad that psychology as a whole didn't seem to make room for the lived experience, for the presence of faith and hope, in a person's life. As I have come to find out, this lived experience is precisely what we are taught to honor in this program. I think that is a beautiful thing.
My experience with my cohorts has been one in which we accept and love one another. At least, I hope that has been everyone's experience. It certainly has been mine. When I had to miss a day of classes at the beginning of the quarter, I was afraid to ask for help. Past experience had taught me that asking for help would be met with luke-warm responses at best. I didn't think I would receive 10 emails from other members of the class who were not only willing to help, but almost seemed happy to do so. I have never had such a support system in any academic undertaking. I didn't think that such things existed! That experience was so telling to me and such a beautiful relief. It inspired in me a desire to be the same for my classmates. I want to be there for them, and I want to give them help as freely as they have so often given me help.
I have been humbled by the incredible intelligence exhibited by every other person in this program. The experience of being around people who are intelligent is not new to me. I have always been very fortunate to have friends of the highest caliber in terms of intelligence, drive, and compassion. However, in general, my experience with intelligence in the classroom has been one in which a kind of competitive undertone exists. That undertone simply does not exist in this group of people. Not a single person in the class is trying to step on anyone else to showcase how smart they are, and it is so beautiful to be a part of! It seems I am amazed at the incredibly well-thought-out and well-articulated statements of my classmates on a daily basis. I don't think there is a single one of them who has not impressed me with something they've said in class. Their drive and proficiencies inspire and make me want to be better in my studies and understanding. I have found that I cannot do my best work without first consulting with them. Their ideas and ways of understanding are proving invaluable to me. I am not used to having this type of experience. I have never ever been one to consult with anyone else when it came to school work. I have always hated group projects because they invariably turn into one or two people doing the work for the rest. There always seemed to be that one lazy person who could not have possibly cared about less the task at hand or how they could contribute anything of worth to the experience of collaboration. Somehow, the lazy, unmotivated student does not exist within this group.
I am finding myself changed by the experience of having a workload like this put on me. Nothing about this quarter has been easy. I have been separated from my girlfriend (
who then became my fiance) by a distance of about 1000 miles. I have been in a new city where I knew next to no one when the program started. I have never been good at school. I have had a job that I've kept up for most of the quarter, and I have a position at church that requires me to spend my Sundays in meetings discussing teaching plans and the needs of the members of our Parrish. To top it off, I lived in a house on Beacon Hill that was very lonely for me, as no one interacted with each other beyond the minimal salutations common decency requires of people sharing a space. I have been broken by far lesser things. Somehow, though, I am still progressing forward. I haven't missed an assignment in any of my classes, which is particularly amazing to me when I stop and realize that I have never done that for a single class in my entire life. To say that this has been an easy time in my life would be a bold faced lie. This is hard stuff. The pressure to perform well, the fear of making mistakes, the changes that my life has brought to me, all of them push down on me in ways that I didn't think I could handle. Yet, through the exterior coal that makes up my imperfect self, I can see shining bits of diamond starting to form. Perhaps it is a bit egotistical of me to say that I see myself as a diamond in the making, but on some level I think it's true. Whatever I am made out of right now is being changed by the pressure of this program into something of more worth and beauty. Even better is the understanding that this change is occurring in a way that I could not accomplish on my own.
I am grateful to this program for giving me a language to describe what I have always held in theory to be the way a life should be lived. Further, I am grateful that this deepening of a theoretical orientation, this phenomenological view, is giving me permission to live it.
