Back in the days before the Internet, I looked for answers in the bookstore.
Surveying the packed shelves, I believed that somewhere, in those colorful stacks, lay answers to the questions that burned in my soul. How are humans supposed to human, exactly? Why am I depressed despite having so many gifts and so much support? Why am I so scared of everything? Why do my relationships feel so unhealthy and unfulfilling?
How could I human better? What was the thing I wasn’t doing? What was I doing that I needed to stop doing?
I’d spend hours moving slowly along the shelves, squinting at the spines of books, scanning, searching. I looked in the novels section. I looked in the poetry section. The memoirs and autobiographies. The books on art and science.
Sometimes I left with a pearl that yielded a breakthrough. Hope would surge within me. I would bounce out of the bookstore with a new purchase under my arm and a spring in my step, excited to tell everyone I knew about this latest epiphany. Soon enough, I would find myself heading back to the bookstore, searching desperately for another answer.
And now, via social media and the Internet, I find myself pummeled with answers. The Tower of Babel of books has been multiplied a million-fold with the fulmination of infotainment on the Internet.
Some days I marvel at all the wisdom and creativity bursting through my feed. I’ve received life-changing downloads there about parenting, relationships, astrology, sex, health, current events, politics, and nutrition. But the sheer overwhelming volume of it has caused me to shut out potentially valuable information, scrolling right past in favor of things that make me laugh, tear up a little, or feel that temporary ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) euphoric spinal buzz and scalp tingle.
Seems I’m no longer seeking answers on the Internet. My time there is more about self-medicating with my own neurotransmitters: manipulating their secretion with content.
This Substack was created out of a belief that if folks just had good humaning intel—do this instead of the thing you’ve been doing!—their intractable issues would dissolve.
I’ll confess that I thought that becoming a therapist would put me in a position to wow clients with prime info-nuggets that they would just try because I had done all the groundwork to build rapport and earn their trust. They’d go into their lives and just DO it. They’d risk it, and the results would be phenomenal. I’d be deemed a miracle worker, a healer who could enable transformation of dysfunctional behaviors or relational dynamics.
Ah, the arrogance.
Now, a couple of years into being a practicing psychotherapist, I understand down to my bones that this is not how it works. I should have known this sooner because it sure as hell isn’t how it’s worked for me.
Most of the time, people can’t just up and DO SOMETHING NEW.
Even when we know it’s the absolute right thing to do (whatever THAT means).
We are run by internal working models: the strategies we developed to ensure that our fundamental childhood survival needs got met.
Any life hack, framework, or advice that contradicts those strategies can feel utterly wrong and bad.
I know I would be healthier and have more energy if I ate more vegetables and drank more water. I know I would be more mentally well if I slowed down in my life.
My internal working model tells me that if I take the time to prepare healthy meals and take water breaks, or if I said yes to fewer external things and created more space in my life, I wouldn’t be spending every waking moment Being Of Service to Others, and this would make me a selfish, narcissistic ingrate.
I would be more fulfilled if I took the time to deeply connect with people I love—my partner, my children—every day. Like, look into their eyes, take time, breathe. Tell them I love and care about them. Learn about where their hearts, minds, and souls are that day.
My internal working model tells me that if I deeply connect, I will lose control of my emotions and walk around a blubbering mess all day, out of control and vulnerable, unable to Do All the Things. I will also feel so attached to these beloveds that when I someday lose them, or become lost to them, it will be unbearable.
I would be less grief-stricken about aging if I looked in mirrors less often and instead focused on the bazillion miracles upon which I could be focusing my eyeballs at any given moment.
My internal working model tells me that if I don’t do frequent mirror checks, I won’t be able to manage or control the way others see me. I won’t notice something unsightly or disgusting that others will see and they will laugh at me or dismiss me.
You know that Rilke quote:
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
I look back at that young woman I once was, searching and searching for answers, not realizing that there really are only a handful of such answers that must be lived into, slowly, with commitment…
If someone had shown her this Rilke quote, she would not have gotten it.
She had to spend several decades scrabbling about in books, cataloging information she hoped would unlock the mysteries of a life well lived. (She did learn a lot of stuff this way. She was, and continues to be, exposed to a great deal of magic.)
She had to spend years doing parent coaching and social-emotional education, seeing some folks embrace and live into helpful life hacks and strategies that they were ripe for because of factors that had nothing to do with her…and others rejecting wisdom that did not yet (or might never) make sense to them.
She had to become a therapist, thinking she’d be able to gift-wrap Answers in just the right way to help those who came to her looking for help, and find over and over again that people have to figure it out for themselves.
She’d have to fall terribly ill (it’s been almost a year now since I was hospitalized with viral meningitis, which I believe was a direct result of overwork) and realize that if she did not create enough space in her world to breathe and be present, she would probably end up too sick to do much of anything.
She’d have to change her whole idea of what it means to be a therapist, and would find a wonderland of possibility there: one of showing up in presence and total curiosity, and letting that be the doorway to the client’s own wisdom and willingness to have a new experience, encouraging all parts of the client to come forward—mind, body, spirit—and do the work of change on their own terms.
One of the nuggets I unearthed back in the day from a book was either from Natalie Goldberg or Annie Lamott—this is one of the problems with SO MUCH INFORMATION, notebooks and journals and shelves and shelves of books where I’ve found gold and jotted it down and then can’t find it—where she talked about having to learn from experience that the way to swim the backstroke…is on your back.
Until you flip over and get that real-time glimpse of ceiling or sky, feel the difference in your body between freestyle and backstroke, you haven’t really gotten it.
What direction, then, will this Substack take?
It’s evolving from STOPS (strategies, techniques, opportunities, etc.—shorthand: ‘life hacks’) into something quite different.
Telling stories. Being with challenge and magic. Living the questions.
No expertise to back this thought up, but, simple storytelling, seems to me, was the precise human mechanism developed from earliest on to impart "therapeutic" communication. You're an amazing storyteller; it is enough to just share them, so hope you don't feel as though you are leaving something incomplete by not doing more than that.
Thanks for this. I’ve long been a fellow answer rummager, with a still very romantic attachment to bookstores of old. Rilke was an early and pervasive balm for me. And, as I have lived on and rested into some little ‘a’ answers, I remain humbly reminded that very little is immutable, and that makes the landscape pretty vibrant.