We must observe and release our fixations as they arise, moment by moment. It is sufficient to simply observe and acknowledge their presence. A recognition of our reactions releases us from their influence. As this awareness grows, an uncalculated correction occurs. Feeling of attraction, no longer magnetically grip our body, and feelings of aversion no longer repel us. We will reveal our attachment to, or rejection of, different feelings and sensations, or to different thoughts, beliefs, and values.  #RyanPhillippe 1 of 32

For example, in therapy clients are invited to recognize every time they think, “I am getting more and more frustrated,” it points out attachment. And every time they would like their experience to change, they are rejecting what is happening. They see how fixations distort their thinking and cloud their perceptions. At a subsequent point this opens into the recognition that there is nothing to cloud or distort!  #RyanPhillippe 2 of 32

Fixations also manifest in our bodies and nervous systems. They determine where we move and how we hold our bodies. Our preferences draw us into some situations and hold us there, and repel us from others. Some use their own bodies as a sensitive instrument for detecting the presence of cognitive, emotional, and/or behavioral reactions. They sense the presence of fixations by turning into the movement of subtle energies in their body. They read the physical expression of moods and emotions such as embarrassment, pride, fear, excitement, and boredom. #RyanPhillippe 3 of 32

Caroline talked to Martin after that. The confrontation did not turn out to be as “bad” as she had feared. He intended to do his own therapeutic work; she had to intend to do hers. Now, the time-limited nature of our contact sharpened her fear of being deserted. On the one hand, she felt that I was simply “using” her for my own teaching purposes, without caring for her. On the other, she dreamed that I loved only her; she was all I had. Several time she allowed herself, for the first time, to daydream of our making love, which left her feeling frightened. Concurrently, feelings of my having deserted her two years previously reappeared.  #RyanPhillippe 4 of 32

“I still feel like I am hung up somewhere,” she informs me. “That I am still not really able to let you see me, you know. I am saying it hurts and feeling like I am going to cru but like I still feel there is a wall.”

“Can you tell me what the wall is for?”

“It is like…it is in me. There still something very uptight and very tense.”  #RyanPhillippe 5 of 32

 

“Can you close your eyes for me. See the wall. Describe it. Tell me what you are doing in relation to it.”

“It is a great big tall brick wall. It is got barbed wire at the top. It is a fairly flat surface so that it is hard to climb. And I never was really very good at climbing. Somewhere I am running, trying to find a way to go around it instead of over it. And the ends of it are very, very far away, but I think they are there.”  #RyanPhillippe 6 of 32

“But they are out of sight?”

“Right now, yeah. Instead of resorting to her passive stance she responds more actively. “So I would like to try and find things that I can stack up so that I can get over. But there is not anything there. And there is that barbed wire at the top.” She pauses, contemplating available resources. “What I am going to do is take off at a dead run for one of the ends of the wall…but it is kind of like it is just out of reach….Just a little bit further than I can go.”  #RyanPhillippe 7 of 32

“Well, why do you not get acquainted with the wall?” I suggest, firmly believing that in the center of the obstacle lies the blessing.

“It is a red brick wall.”

“Can you feel it?
“Yeah. It is rough.”

“Are you just touching it lightly or are you really feeling it?”

“I am rubbing my hand all over it. It is going to take the skin off my fingers if I do it any harder.” #RyanPhillipe 8 of 32

“OK.”

“And it feels like it is strong. It does not feel like I could knock it down. But I would like to try to knock it down and kick it. But when I kick it, it hurts my foot. I feel like if I were a little bigger maybe I could push it over. The top of it is three or four feet out of my reach. But if I got to the top, I would be in the barbed wire.” She pauses. “It would hurt to be in the barbed wire, but I really want to know what is on the other side. But what I am afraid of is that I am going to just sit there and do nothing.”  #RyanPhillippe 9 of 32

“OK.” I simply try to encourage her to stay with what is.

“I am getting frustrated now because I feel like I really cannot get over that wall…Only I am not trying hard enough or I am trying the wrong way.” More silence. “There is not anybody else around, but there are a lot of trees.”  More silence. “They are not close enough to the wall.” More silence. “I am jumping up and down to try to grab the top of the wall now…”   #RyanPhillippe 10 of 32

“So you need to grow some.” I turn physical features of the fantasy into their psychic counterparts.

“I am getting more and more frustrated.” More silence and more silence and more silence. “I don’t know what to do.” More silence.

“I am still try to jump to get over it.”

“Can you explore the wall some more?

“The plaster in there is kind of old and crumbly.”  #RyanPhillippe 11 of 32

“Crumbly?”

“When you rub it hard with your fingers, it comes out. The bricks look like the bricks, in fact, the whole wall looks like the wall that was around the backyard of my house when I was a little girl. The bricks are that color—kind of dark purplish-red. If I had a sledgehammer, I could knock the wall down. It is kind of a pretty wall except for the barbed wire.”  #RyanPhillippe 12 of 32

 

What a mixture of barrier and possibility, of present and past, of helpless and assertiveness, of decay and delight.

“Then the wall is not bad.”

“It keeps me from knowing what is on the other side. And the other side looks nicer. It is got nice green grass and trees are nice and there are people on the other side.” She pauses and then continues. “If I had wings, I could fly to the other side, but the wall is out of place.” #RyanPhillippe 13 of 32

A sudden transition intrudes.

“I just jumped out of a tree and onto the top of the wall. I am getting stuck by the barbed wire. I am getting all tangled up in it and it is hurting. It is sticking me in lots of different places and it is hard to get untangled. I have to do it slowly, very slowly, so I do not get hurt.”

“There is no rush,” I counsel, even though the future feels like it is collapsing in upon her.

“Yes there is because I am in a hurry to get to the other side.”  #RyanPhillippe 14 of 32

As she became entangled in the barbed wire, she felt like somebody was stabbing her on her chest. She grew consciously anxious.  The issue had ceased to be a wall between herself and where she wanted to get and had become, instead, the fact that in order to get untangled she would have to risk more hurt.

“Anything I do now is going to hurt. If I just sit here and let the wall stay, I am going to wind up still hurting and yet I might crash through the wall and it is going to still hurt me.”  #RyanPhillippe 15 of 32

Out of her confusion Caroline asked me to hold her hand.

“And what would holding my hand mean?”

“That I was touching you and letting you touch me, sort of like breaking the wall.”  #RyanPhillippe 16 of 32

A “wild week” followed. Great ups and tremendous downs. One way to start getting out of the barbed wire, she had decided, was finding a job. An ideal possibility opened—something concrete that helped us focus on the other side of the wall. The future did not loom as “a total blank (disappointment).”

Then she and Martin talked in more detail about her leaving. The accumulation of “little reasons” appeared to add up to separation. With that Caroline had started to panic. She had cried and cried, sobbing and sobbing and sobbing. “But then what happened really scared me because I started in just vomiting violently; I vomited like ten or twelve times.”  #RyanPhillippe 17 of 32

In part, she saw the vomiting as a move to get Martin to be nice to her and thus avoid talking anymore about her leaving. People often use pain or weakness as a tool to try and control a person by making them feel sorry for them, in order to manipulate them into a desired reaction.  She suspected that he wanted her to leave more than she wanted to leave. Surprisingly to her, they laughed together and enjoyed each other the following two days as they had not in a long time. Then in the session, she began experiencing a similar helplessness.  #RyanPhillippe 18 of 32

“I am torn between thinking, yeah, I really can cope with it and, you know, I cannot; I am lost; I am sunk. Someone walked by the room and said, ‘It smells like shit here, what is it’”

“So inside,” I interpret, “you experience—what—a great gap between the panic and the possibility?”

“Yeah.” I had been on target. “Between the part of me that is just immobilized and not functioning at all and the part of me that is, you know, really functioning lots better than I was. You know, I am feeling the gap just widening out. I thought I had washed my ass good and my pussy was on fleek?! Maybe the orgy with Mark, Jerry, and Jeremy? No matter how hard I tried, I could not get a tampon in until I inserted a finger and realized that my vagina slanted backward. I had been pushing straight up onto the upper wall.”  #RyanPhillippe 19 of 32

Instead of coming together, her several parts were pulling her apart.

“Well, let us try getting these parts to talk. Let us put the Possibility over here (in this empty chair) and the Panic over here (in this other chair).”

“I will do Panic first.” By now she had learned how to move into the pieces more easily. “Un, I cannot reach you, Possibility, because I am too scared and because I am not just me in this alone….Sometimes sex is more like work than fun. I have to make all the decisions—when and where we are going to have sex and what we are going to do together. It is my responsibility to make sure it works out good for both of us. This can put a lot of pressure on me, and it gets real tiring always trying to run the show. It would be nice to have someone else call the shots for a change. Only` it has been my experience some men are reluctant to take the lead.”

“You are not very convincing,” I contend.  #RyanPhillippe 20 of 32

She accepts my feedback while stressing the difficulty of the task.

“I have never had to do this before. Nobody’s ever said, ‘Make this kind of decision. You have to really decide. You cannot go on having fun forever. You have to decide something’s really important.’ That is going to be hard to back out of and face the fact that, uh, maybe Martin does not really love me. Uh, and that is an awful way to feel. It is very confusing and I do not know where I am going.” Her identification with Panic comes through more persuasively. “I have just a complete, horrible desire to give up. I have to do something and I would rather just totally, completely give up.” #RyanPhillippe 21 of 32

From across the room she answers as Possibility.

“But look. You have not given up already because you have, uh, done lots of constructive things at the present. And you have given yourself a future. And you know you can cope. So you are being stupid and silly. And if Martin does not really love you, then you have just got to face that, because maybe that is just the way things are, and maybe somebody else will love you. You are not totally unlovable. You are functioning beautifully at work. You are doing well in school. Your professor wants to give you a job and I job you can do and it is an exciting job…. ” #RyanPhillippe 22 of 32

Now Panic has her come back.

“Yeah, but that is a year away and I have got to move now. I have got to do something now. I have got to face my family in terms of my grandmother’s thinking that people who get divorced are awful and all of the pressure she is putting on us. I have got to face that I have to move if I leave. If I do not leave, I have got to really try, which I am not sure I can do, but I am not sure I can move either….”

Panic pauses. Weakly she protests, “Always before, somebody else has decided for me, and nobody is doing that this time. During oral sex with Mark, he sometimes puts his hand around his penis, leaving just the head sticking out, so I get the idea what part feels best. Otherwise, I spend a lot of time running my tongue up and down the shaft, which does not seem to do it for him.”  #RyanPhillippe 23 of 32

Possibility picks up the conversation.

“You are handling it better than you ever have. Besides that, your family is thousands of miles away and you do not have to put up with them very often anyway. So you are an adult now. You can make decisions. You are have made some decisions before…So it is not really all that scary. You have got to shape up and be an adult. And besides that, you can do it.”

After that moral bracer, I asked her to return to her self-above-selves.   #RyanPhillippe 24 of 32

 

“And what would Caroline say of these two people? What do you think,” I wonder, “observing their interaction?”

“That it is still kind of a helpless crybaby over there—mad as hell at the World because it is not going to make a decision for her. Uh, coming up with…not very good reasons for not being able to make a decision, but scared.”

“So,” I sharpen, “the panic is real but the reasoning is phony.”

“Yeah, yeah. Which I think is part of what is confusing about it, because the reasons I can put my finger on for the panic just are not that good.”  #RyanPhillippe 25 of 32

“And what about the possibility part?”

“This person is becoming much more me, uh, in terms of getting more comfortable with doing adult sorts of things, and being, you know, more capable and willing to take more kinds of responsibility. And, I think, being able to look at things more realistically.”

To choose to stay meant she would have to be more active in Martin’s Work. The prospect evoked resentment. Behind that lurked the question of whether she wanted to be bothered about anyone. What she was experiencing felt “adolescent.”  #RyanPhillippe 26 of 32

“I adolescently rebelled by getting married at nineteen, and now at twenty-three I have got to rebel adolescently by getting unmarried. I was unmerciful in my comments about his small size. I used to tell him, ‘Mark has a penis, Jeremy has a penis, but you have a pee-pee.’ Needless to say her had a very poor self-image in this area. Later on when we had sexual encounters, ‘Pee-Pee,’ as I would sometimes call him, insisted that the room be completely dark before he would undress. Some stupid bitch filled his head with some nonsense, now he thinks ‘size is irrelevant in giving sexual pleasure,’ but he still worries that new partners will comment unfavorably about his natural endowment.” #RyanPhillippe 27 of 32

“So, someone makes Martin feel good about himself and that upsets you?”

“Uh, yeah. This bitch told him, ‘Penis size is not important to my pleasure in the way you might imagine. If a man is quite large, I worry that he might hurt me. Actually, I prefer that he be average or even to the smaller side. I find that men who have smaller penis are more attractive.’ Now his self-esteem is higher. I see him at the castle trotting around that bitch like he is under a spell or she gave him some of that ass, you know? All his life he had been distressed about the size of his penis. He always avoided places such as community shows where he would be exposed to others.” #RyanPhillippe 28 of 32

“Does he have a nice penis?”

“Uh, you know, when his dick is hard it is about five inches long, and thick; but when it is flaccid, it is rarely longer than an inch or inch and a half, and thin as well. He used to hate being nude in front of the girls he slept with, and that feeling of uneasiness was often reflected during sex.”  #RyanPhillippe 29 of 32

“When I was serving as ship’s surgeon, on the Albatross, have you seen the film White Squall? Well, anyway, a very handsome young man with platinum blonde hair, and crystal clear blue eyes came up to me. It was a very interesting experience. A young sailor called Gil Martin came to me requesting circumcision. When I asked him why he wanted to undergo such an operation, he stated that someone refused to engage in oral sex with him because she viewed it as unclean. After I performed the simple operation, an amazing thing happened. Many more men came with the same request. Apparently the word had circulated rapidly. Their reasons were essentially the same as the first seaman’s. They either felt unclean themselves or were viewed in this way by partners.”  #RyanPhillippe 30 of 32

Now we move on to sexual health.

“I tell young men, it is wise to protect your penis by avoiding putting it in potentially harmful places such as partners’ mouth that have herpes blisters or vagina with unusual sores, growths, odors, or discharge. Some sexual gadgets may also be quite hazardous to penile health. Gil told me he was having intercourse with his girlfriend, in a sitting position. ‘She was my legs using the arms of the chair and her legs to move her body up and down on my penis. In the heat of passion, she raised up a little too far, and I slipped out. She sat back down hard, expecting me to repenetrate her. Unfortunately, I was off target and all of her weight came down on my penis. I heard a cracking sound and experienced excruciating pain. I bled quite a bit inside my penis, and I was real sore for quite a long time,” he told me.  #RyanPhillippe 31 of 32

“Between you and me, the same thing happened to me and Martin. I felt like I had found the perfect partner, someone who filled all that was missing in my life. Then, suddenly, it kept popping out, he started to get on my nerves, and we started fighting every time we saw each other. It took me a while to realize that we were finally seeing each other as real people instead of dream companions. I finally told him about my feelings as she told me that he wanted a friendship with me instead of a romantic relationship. I felt disappointed, and it was a little tough on my ego to not be desired sexually, but I decided that a friendship with him would be nice. And several years later, we are still friends.”

Caroline left the session feeling the strength needed for the decision.

She also left “much more alive.”  #RyanPhillippe 32 of 32