In Which I Get All Deep and Stuff and Allude to Hollywood

This is my ninth post and it is about acknowledging ugly feelings and P.T. Anderson movies. My eighth post was about trusting our clients and empathy. The seventh was about the ethical challenges of assessing for functioning. Post number six was about ethical differences and new Southern Rock. Post number five was about imaginary devil worship. Number four was about Public Enemy and my contrary ways. Number three was about the blues, number two was about feorabros, and number one was about Scandinavian heavy metal.

One of the strengths of the literary, psychoanalytic perspective of Hollis’s book is that often prefers murky ambiguity to straightforward cause and effect explanation or simple psychological explanation. The end of the book has, for me, one of his stronger summative passages, and it exemplifies the strengths of his approach:

“When we to [Shadow work], we do it for more than ourselves. When we do this work we find, in the end, that the light is in the darkness itself. We will find that no feeling, even the most turbulent, most contradictory is wrong, although we are wholly responsible for how or whether we enact that feeling, for felling is not a choice. Feeling arises from soul autonomously; ours is the choice to acknowledge and honor that feeling, or not, without literalizing its meaning. So what if an old concept of ourselves has to go?” (pg. 237)

This “acceptance” aspect of his understanding of the shadow is probably my favorite aspect of the book. What is dangerous is when we try to rationalize our behavior, not when we acknowledge that we will have feelings that are troubling or socially unacceptable.

I would quibble somewhat with the passage, in that we can have a certain amount of control over our feelings, but that kind of mastery begins with acknowledging and understanding them. We do not like to consider that we are selfish, entitled, hostile, or insecure, but if we are going to get better, we have to let go of the self-image we like to maintain that does not include those sorts of feelings.

This line of thinking led me to consider some of the films of P.T. Anderson (Boogie Night, Magnolia, Punch Drunk Love, The Master, etc.). 

The stories in his film often involve broken characters who manage to connect to other people only when they go through some form of surrender at a very low point in their lives. “Hitting bottom,” is the term usually described for these moments in people’s lives. (Well, his characters who “get better” often go through some version of that journey.) A pivotal moment in Magnolia, a movie with a very prominent soundtrack, features an Amy Mann song with the lyric “It’s not going to stop till you wise up/ so just give up.”

The kind of surrender P.T. Anderson has some relationship to religious concepts that have been used in literature like Joyce’s idea of “epiphany” or Flannery O’Connor’s idea of grace, except that these moments are starting points for people to rediscover themselves rather than transcendent moments that are important in and of themselves.

This discussion, of course, has its dangers. We romanticize “hitting bottom,” which is not even a concept that addiction research supports. (Substance abuse is the topic when people use that term in a literal way.) Also, we can, perversely, use some superficial acceptance of our darker selves to excuse bad behavior. There is a difference between accepting that we are not the idealized people we imagine ourselves to be and accepting that we have feelings that are ugly and becoming complacent.

The tightrope walk describe in this post is one that people must sometimes do if they are to get better. As people who want to be better therapists, we have to attempt it. Similarly, some of our clients will have to walk the same path if they are to get better. We might never be the people we want to be, but we will not get a step closer without acknowledging who we are.