Psychotherapy
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Blog (by JH, no AI)

Thoughts on Psychotherapy

Blog | Dr. Jamey Hecht | Beverly Hills, CA
 
Posts tagged forgiveness
If You Could've Done Better, You Would Have

We often want to help people with their regrets, by telling them: “If you could have done any better, you would have. The reason you didn’t, is that you were constrained by your trauma background, your history.”

They reply that this is a slippery slope; that if they allow themselves the solace of explaining their bad choices by invoking their past history, they might recklessly let themselves off the hook for all kinds of error—laziness, impulsivity, greed—in the present and the future.

But it is not a slippery slope, so long as we locate the determinism in the past, where it belongs, and the freedom in the present, where we need it. Both the past and the present are constrained by the effects of the remote past I call my childhood. But the past of my young adulthood is already fixed, whereas the present is still relatively fluid, with room for choice and decision.

What is the precise extent of today’s freedom? How far can I hope to excel my previous performances? How free am I this morning, to do better than before? The only way to find out is to do the best I can now do, and learn about the flaws in today’s efforts only in hindsight, later on. Only tomorrow’s perspective will reveal the hidden limits of today’s freedom. I can best reach those limits—I can make optimal use of today’s undefined opportunities—by living as if I were entirely free of the constraints my origins impose on me. I am now 55. For my twenties, therefore, this process is now complete, so I’m now free to conclude that at 25 I indeed did the very best I could do—even though some of my choices that year were relatively disastrous. Had I been more free, I would have done better.

This is not a moral framework; the goal is to understand, not to excuse. Understanding will give me the breathing room to choose how to handle the moral dimension of my past conduct, prioritizing compassion over punishment, wisdom over bitterness, edification over regret.

Every child experiences some particular mixture of three things: getting the good stuff (love), not getting the good stuff (neglect), and getting the bad stuff (misuse, or worse: abuse). The particular mixture supplied by a particular childhood has consequences—exerts constraints on our freedom of thought and action—for the whole lifetime. But those constraints can loosen and fade with experience, especially with enough good experience. At no point am I ever in a position to assess exactly how much my early years are still shaping my current actions and perceptions right now.

So: today, I will do the best I can, as if I were no longer limited by the consequences of my origins. Tomorrow will show me why I got as far today as I did, achieving no more and no less than my level of maturation could permit. The psychotherapy that helps me understand the tragedies of my young adulthood also equips me to improve my future, not only because it helps me learn from experience, but because it explains why I suffered from the particular ignorance that I did.

Today’s ignorance will be tomorrow’s knowledge. As I contemplate the ways I fell short in the past, the more compassion I can muster for my youthful self, the less regret I must endure today. From present contemplation of my past mistakes, I must learn both prudence in dealing with the outside world, and mercy in dealing with myself.

Of course my history limits my choices. But exactly how much? I don’t know, and that’s a good thing. Our ignorance of the precise nature and extent of our constraints is part of our freedom. And just as a temperate optimism can enhance my odds of success in the world outside, my inner life will likely go better if I let myself assume I have achieved more growth and healing than I can readily prove. “With every mistake,” wrote the Beatles, “we must surely be learning.” In the absence of an impossible certainty, we are better off trusting in the human spirit’s innate powers of development.

One way to have that experience, to grasp for that faith, is to “see” your elderly future self kindly smiling down on you from the future. You might as well… look.

If this post resonates with you, consider booking an appointment with me at 917-873-0292, or email Jamey@drjameyhecht.com. Sessions are available in-office in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and remotely in NY, NJ, TX, and CA.

The ILIAD: Letting Go of Anger, Too Late and Not Too Late

Enjoy this performance of Book One of Homer's Iliad, most of it produced in quarantine as an effort to keep the crisis creative. 

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the clinical value of this story lies in its viscerally felt linkage between rage and misery; competition and bitterness; loss, and the revelation that there are things far more important than being right, or vindication, or even victory. For this wisdom, the tragic drama of ancient Athens is among the best sources in the world (though King Lear, for example, teaches some of the same lessons about shame). 

Homer's epic poem, or "made thing," is among the deepest works of our species. It represents the collective labors of over four centuries of bards, who span the gap between the Trojan War itself (c.1185-1175 BCE), and the emergence of a vast epic tradition that has kept its human images alive. Those labors were woven together, and presumably linked by improvised poetic transitions, by the mind of an individual blind genius, touched by poetry's Divine origin. 

Iliad I (traditionally, the "books" or chapters of the Iliad are noted in capital Roman numerals; those of the Odyssey, lowercase) includes a Divinely sent opportunity to put aside anger. Though Achilles' reprieve from his own rage proves all too brief, each of us may be more free than we suspect; free, for example, to let go of old resentments, of old yearnings for retributive justice, or for a great day of reckoning. 

The non-tragic outcome is surely still possible for you and me, in part because the tragic consciousness is already is still available to us---only (or as I prefer to think, especially) if, as Nietzsche said, we still have some connection to the past and the ancient world.
I made the first portion (lines 1-92) in 2013; the rest in the Spring of 2020. It was a great experience----a real reward for playing hooky from the daily regime of anxiety about wasting time; or about being too expressive; or about failing to monetize every minute of each day, or meet other American expectations that are levied daily at the expense of each human spirit who buys into them for lack of support. The latter includes love (rather than isolation), as well as connection--not only to a partner and the community, but to the to the past and the cosmos.

Art exists to help us live our lives---as everybody says, in a chorus that includes Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer; Shelley and Nietzsche ("hey, those are my guys"). Living with the help of art does not make you Don Quixote. It can put you in touch with much more of reality, and not (usually) less.
Sure a Poet is a sage, a humanist, physician to all mankind.--John Keats. Enjoy some Homer, today.