Tiny rooms, low light...(or how I became a therapist)

I've always been interested in the stories that define us. For me, this template was set early on. Growing up, my father told bedtime stories about Viet Nam that were awe inspiring and terrifying. "Dad, tell me the one about getting shot at in the jungle or when the jeep you were driving overturned," I'd ask, putting down my Star Wars figures, burrowing into bed and listening with rapt attention.

My father didn't say much about Viet Nam in the daylight. In the darkness of my childhood bedroom, backlit by a comforting swath of golden light from the hall, he went to confession.

I learned he was a communications expert in the Army and wore a cumbersome radio on his back. This made him a large, easy target for snipers. He said it scared him and I believed it. I learned Jane Fonda was an odious troll. I learned that you dig a hole to poop in when there isn't a bathroom. I learned of the anger he felt when he returned and no one cared. This anger raged inside him in recoil, ready to strike, many years after his discharge. As a young boy, I learned of the intertwine of anger and hurt.

I became a skilled listener, careful to note a break in his voice, the shift in his body from strong to vulnerable. Emotions long suppressed had a moment of light in the dark of my room. These were honest, intense and pure moments of expressing the unexpressed. It needed to come out, even if it was to a child.

I consider these stories and how I heard and held them as training ground for what would become a career in therapy. I spend a lot of time in small, softly lit rooms exploring hushed experiences that resonate deeply but are seldom spoken aloud. I'm very aware of the parallel to those nights in Yonkers with my father.

Boiling it down, therapy is witnessed storytelling and narrative creation with the help of an empathetic, compassionate care giver there to facilitate growth, change and healing. Stories provide context for many things, including the ways anxiety, depression, and other mental health concerns inform our lives and families down through generations. Suppressing stories and transforming them into secrets only serves to obfuscate the truth. It kills the spirit and twists in us, until it twists us.

From our very intimate stories of personal loss to the shared tragedies of war, events like my father's burrow in our mind, body and nervous systems, vibrating in us for a very long time if left unacknowledged. Even when given voice, these stories can take years to settle in our systems. I think of all that transpires in families; marriage, birth, miscarriages, graduations, divorces, disease, and death. I'm concerned about what we free from our mouths and what we swallow whole. Like the cat that has swallowed the canary, eventually we cough up a feather.

We talk about the highs with ease and comfort: the gorgeous and expensive wedding gown, the first birthday extravaganza, the promotion.  But the lows? Well that's where it gets tricky. Who in the hell wants to talk about the worst or most challenging of our lives? I do. I'm not sure if this makes me a lunatic or a masochist. I know I'm in good company. Many friends and colleagues sit in tiny rooms across the city encouraging people to tell their stories in a way that speaks to who they are, who've they've been and who they want to become. Anyone can and should do it. It's not about weakness. It's about being vulnerable and strong at the same time. As a therapist, I've learned how strength and vulnerability intertwine.

Artists acknowledge their personal narratives with pencil and paints, dancers do it with movement, musicians sing or play from their wounded and hopeful souls and writers shape fictions from truths that help them move through deep tragedy. What's a person to do if they've not tapped into these outlets? They do as my father did. The find those pockets in time where they feel safest and they tell. I'll never know how or if these "sessions" helped my father. I don't even know if he'd recall this story if he were alive today. I do know it did something for me. I learned early on the value of a story in small room with low light. And the power of the whispered story, the unlocking of the heart and the soaring of the soul that can occur when you feel heard and understood. I wish that for anyone.

Tell your story. Tell on yourself. Tell your story even if you've never told it before.