Radiation Therapist Quotes

I discuss Professor Yolanda Gampel’s idea of “the radioactivity of trauma,” which is the emotional “radiation” of disaster that spreads into the lives of the generations that follow.

gave no sign of noticing the cold. She’d seen him take shots without flinching. Once, a careless therapist put his chair too close to the radiator and his stocking feet had burned

Some teachers refuse to call themselves teachers, because they feel they have nothing to teach; their teaching consists in their merely being present. And so on. Psychologist Guy Claxton, a former disciple of Bhagwan Rajneesh, has found the image of the guru as teacher somewhat misleading. He offers these comments: The most helpful metaphor is . . . that of a physician or therapist: enlightened Masters are, we might say, the Ultimate Therapists, for they focus their benign attention not on problems but on the very root from which the problems spring, the problem-sufferer and solver himself. The Master deploys his therapeutic tricks to one end: that of the exposure and dissolution of the fallacious self. His art is a subtle one because the illusions cannot be excised with a scalpel, dispersed with massage, or quelled with drugs. He has to work at one remove by knocking away familiar props and habits, and sustaining the seeker’s courage and resolve through the fall. Only thus can the organism cure itself. His techniques resemble those of the demolition expert, setting strategically placed charges to blow up the established super-structure of the ego, so that the ground may be exposed. Yet he has to work on each case individually, dismantling and challenging in the right sequence and at the right speed, using whatever the patient brings as his raw material for the work of the moment.1 Claxton mentions other guises, “metaphors,” that the guru assumes to deal with the disciple: guide, sergeant-major, cartographer, con man, fisherman, sophist, and magician. The multiple functions and roles of the authentic adept have two primary purposes. The first is to penetrate and eventually dissolve the egoic armor of the disciple, to “kill” the phenomenon that calls itself “disciple.” The second major function of the guru is to act as a transmitter of Reality by magnifying the disciple’s intuition of his or her true identity. Both objectives are the intent of all spiritual teachers. However, only fully enlightened adepts combine in themselves what the Mahāyāna Buddhist scriptures call the wisdom (prajnā) and the compassion (karunā) necessary to rouse others from the slumber of the unenlightened state. In the ancient Rig-Veda (10.32.7) of the Hindus, the guru is likened to a person familiar with a particular terrain who undertakes to guide a foreign traveler. Teachers who have yet to realize full enlightenment can guide others only part of the way. But the accomplished adept, who is known in India as a siddha, is able to illumine the entire path for the seeker. Such fully enlightened adepts are a rarity. Whether or not they feel called to teach others, their mere presence in the world is traditionally held to have an impact on everything. All enlightened masters, or realizers, are thought and felt to radiate the numinous. They are focal points of the sacred. They broadcast Reality. Because they are, in consciousness, one with the ultimate Reality, they cannot help but irradiate their environment with the light of that Reality.

Initially, after David’s diagnosis, I would cringe when I read books or articles by cancer survivors who stated that cancer had been a gift in their lives. How could all that David endured be viewed as a gift? The invasive surgery, the weeks of chemotherapy and radiation: a gift? Yet, after the cancer, David would often reach for my hand and say, “If it is cancer that is responsible for our new relationship, then it was all worth it.” And I’d reluctantly agree that cancer had been a gift in our lives. We’d both seen the other alternative: patients and survivors who had become bitter and angry, and neither one of us wanted to become that.

The United States alone sports an inventive spectrum of psychotherapeutic sects and schools: Freudians, Jungians, Kleinians; narrative, interpersonal, transpersonal therapists; cognitive, behavioral, cognitive-behavioral practitioners; Kohutians Rogerians, Kernbergians; aficionados of control mastery, hypnotherapy, neurolingustic programming, eye movement desensitization- that list does not even complete the top twenty. The disparate doctrines of these proliferative, radiating divisions, often reach mutually exclusive conclusions about therapeutic propriety: talk about this, not that; answer questions, or don’t; sit facing the patient, next to the patient, behind the patient. Yet no approach has ever proven its method superior to any other. Strip away a therapist’s orientation, the journal he reads, the books on his shelves, the meetings he attends- the cognitive framework his rational mind demands – and what is left to define the psychotherapy he conducts? Himself. The person of the therapist is the converting catalyst, not his order or credo, not his spatial location in the room, not his exquisitely chosen words or denominational silences. So long as the rules of a therapeutic system do not hinder limbic transmission - a critical caveat - they remain inconsequential, neocortical distractions. The dispensable trappings of dogma may determine what a therapist thinks he is doing, what he talks about when he talks about therapy, but the agent of change is who he is.

Before going to bed, I sometimes wander out onto the terrace to view the night sky. Most of the time I can’t see it; the urban incandescence is so bright that no stars are visible. But the windows across the courtyard are glowing. Behind them, people are watering plants, baking bread, fixing radiators, flipping television channels. Other windows are curtained, and beyond them, people might even be making love. Good for them. I wish them well. It’s not easy to be successfully sexual these days, and perhaps it never was. I do what I can to help.