The last one and a half hours of CE credits I logged in 2014 came from a free Dan Siegel webinar gifted to me by PESI and entitled Applications of the Adult Attachment Interview.
I'm always impressed how easily "Dr Dan" can speak, seemingly free from all props and devices but that of his own spontaneous sharing of knowledge and ideas.
During the webinar, Dr Siegel used the term feeling 'felt' which touched me in a deep, end of the year, kind of way. Here's a short clip of Dan touching on his use of the term.
http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/curiosity/topics/d-siegel-what-does-feeling-felt-mean/
So, with the changing of the year, and turning of the clock, I've been thinking about what that means, for myself, for my patients and for the world. What is the experience of knowing we are felt by another person? How does it show up emotionally, somatically? How painful is it to know that we are not felt by the other, when that is what we most long for in life?
In the PESI seminar, Dr Siegel discusses three core needs of an infant: to feel seen, to feel soothed and to feel safe. If those qualities and experiences are available, the infant stands a good chance of growing up with the ability to self reflect, to self-soothe and to feel at ease in relationship.
Yet all too often, we as therapists see the results of a failure to experience and internalize these core needs. This lack shows up in many different ways, we might say, and sometimes the multitude of ways they do show up causes us to see pages of the DSM in our mind instead of patients crying out to feel felt, to feel seen, to feel safe and to feel soothed.
I recall years ago when I had endured an emotionally painful experience while in medical school at the University of Toronto. I didn't have the words for it, at the time. Instead, I walked over the Village by the Grange just south of the university. There was a piano around the food area and I sat down and channeled my emotions into music and felt heard, felt felt and ultimately felt less alone.
Today, I might have the words, or even the insight to know the gifts and the limits of the present other before me. Allowing friends to be who they are liberates me to be who I am. Old habits do persist, but there's a sense of slowly making headway in this journey of daring to risk and to look. More and more, I try and see each patient as an individual, and understand that their own experience of sensing themselves in the mind of another is different from my own. Helping my patients know that I can hold them in my mind is not all I do, but I believe - on the first day of this year - that it is still the most important.
There seems to be less room these days, in this busy and out-of-balance world, for us to allow emotional entry to the other, and to expect the other to allow us to be felt by them. There's this palpable sense in the world, lately, that we have to strive and shout to be seen; being felt might just be asking too much. There are countless sound arguments for limiting ourselves to 'thinking' the other, yet I cannot imagine anything more empty and painful
Dan Siegel knows all this and much more too. And he often ends his talks by discussing and speculating upon what is possible for a world that chooses to embrace empathy and presence, mindsight and care. Do we dare continue to reflect and make sense of our lives? Do we dare to feel the other, and - in doing so - strangely gain access to a deeper appreciation of our own rich and mysterious inner world?
As the year waned, I read a series of stories written by an American nurse who volunteered in the French Medical Corps during World War One. If you come to read The Backwash of War, by Elizabeth N. Lamotte, you will encounter a book whose wisdom and vision seem well ahead of their time.
Lamotte had already come up against the rigid and conservative medical establishment when her recommendations (again ahead of their time) for the public health management of tuberculosis were ignored. In her stories of tending to the grands blessés (badly wounded, hence part of the backwash of battle), she captures something of the ugliness, stench and tragedy in the foreshortened time between vibrant life and early death. It's awful and quick, and so unlike civilian life where these processes are in some ways similarly unfair, yet so much slower.
I read Lamotte against the words of Dan Siegel, and was especially struck by some lines in her story Alone. Rochard, a soldier from the front line, has had his leg torn open by a German shell splinter, from his buttock to just above his knee. He rapidly develops gas gangrene, which was endemic to Flanders, where they were stationed. Radical debridement only briefly prolongs the period of dying - amputation is impossible because the infection is too high up into the hip area. Besides, another piece of shrapnel has penetrated the skull, and begins to produce neurologic signs during the few and painful days of his demise. At times, the orderlies pass by and comment on the sadness of it all. By the time he dies, with his military medal pinned above his bed, his caring nurse is at lunch, and the orderlies, instructed to watch over him and call the nurse if necessary, are on the other side of the ward, drinking.
"So Rochard died, a stranger among strangers. And there were many people there to wait upon him, but there was no one there to love him. There was no one there to see beyond the horror of the red, blind eye, of the dull, white eye, of the vile gangrene smell."
Alone, insulated by the smell of his spreading infection, he's dying an anonymous death in a French field hospital. Yet the words of Lamotte are a kind of testimony and reminder. I'm told that her book inspired a recent BBC television series as part of the current centenary honouring of the Great War. Called the Crimson Field, I'm told it was also cancelled after an initial year, despite the goal of the creators to offer a much longer series.
Still, that is something that moves me, and grants me the solace of somehow feeling felt by something larger in life. Some calls, for witnessing, and clemency, and decency, are answered, for reasons I do not grasp. The Backwash of War, in all its brief beauty, is now available as a free download for Kindle and has been republished in a new edition by Conway Publishing.
Is there enough love and feeling in the world; enough remembrance? For you, for me, for the Rochards dying their unlucky deaths. Can we love and feel and hold others in our minds and still leave space for our own growth and progress?
This, I suppose, is the real challenge of the season and something to dwell upon in the dark hours of these long, winter nights.
