Month: March 2010

I am good at helping other people solve their interpersonal problems. I am even quite good at solving my own problems as long as they are not in the realm of significant intimacy. I have spent years teaching others (and myself in the process) how to be more assertive, spend time more wisely, manage emotions, make presentations, facilitate, mentor, coach, counsel, manage teams and groups and do inner work, which means getting to know the contents of the unconscious part of the psyche. I think that along the way I have made a difference to some people and I am pleased about that.

Many of the people who have allowed me to work with them have asked me why I do this kind of work. Over the years my answer has become more honest, or rather more accurate, as I have become more conscious about the truth. In trying to help and heal others, there is of course a part of me that I am trying to heal, and my way of doing that has involved (amongst many other strategies) an intense and relentless research project aimed at understanding the psyche and its functioning. Somewhere inside me, driving me mercilessly, is a childlike belief that if I could just understand how the whole thing works, then maybe, just maybe, I can rewrite my personal history, and so prevent the unthinkable from having happened. Except of course it did happen, and even though to this day I am still not really sure what happened, I have all the symptoms of a survivor of the unthinkable and unbearable. I have painstakingly reconstructed most of my history out of many fragments discovered over the years, but a crucial hole remains, and so do the essential symptoms. Real intimacy remains a continual struggle. And so the research continues. I will keep us posted.