As all good gardeners know, we are supposed to plant in threes or fives. This blog is my third “planting”. Five seemed too many given the amount of time we spend in our real and metaphorical gardens. As with all good work, I’ll begin in the here and now. I came in from the garden the other day feeling rather disgruntled. “How did you get on?” asked my wife. “Did you get lots of things done?” I grunted a reply and she carried on typing. I began my blog, I was disgruntled because I’d spent several hours outside with nothing much to show for it. I’d dug up a couple of clumps of couch grass and removed yards of convolvulus . But no “Wow!” moments. Just plodding away at routine maintenance. The chief thing I’d done was to plant some bulbs for later this summer. Neatly labelled: “Summer bulbs. Misc.” (I keep careful gardening notes, as you can see!) And at this point I’m going to risk sounding like ‘Thought for the Day’ by using this anecdote as a jumping off point to talk again about the garden as an image for that which I’m going to call “soul”.
I had somebody come to see me recently. He had a number of issues from his youth which he needed to resolve. He talked. I listened, and I made some observations en route. At the end of the session he commented that this had been helpful. He’d talked about more issues that he’d planned to and felt relieved. I asked him if he wanted to come back. He thought for a moment and said “No. This session had been helpful enough.” I wasn’t persuaded that he had resolved the underlying difficulties but it was his choice. Others stay much longer. With these patients I can spend a lot of time double digging, removing the entrenched weeds and trying to see what lies buried beneath years of bad planting and poor care. There is a satisfaction to this kind of work, although at times it feels like hard labour! Hard labour with no “wow!” factors to mitigate it. I remember one patient who spent two and a half years with me. Each session seemed to last forever. I did not look forward to seeing her. (It was probably mutual!) We met faithfully each week, seemingly getting nowhere new. Then, suddenly, six months before the end of her course, something shifted. In her. In me, I’m not sure. But new growth started to emerge. Like those early buds in spring. I think we did more work in the final six months than in the previous two years. Asked her why she had stayed when so often our work felt fruitless, she commented that she trusted the process- and me! We both learned a lot from that therapy.
The link here is, I think, about patience. My miscellaneous summer bulbs will flower in due time. I’ve done the preparatory work. Now I have to leave them alone and “trust the process”. I find it hard , at times, not to want an instant result. I was discussing two of my patients recently with my supervisor. I complained that I was running out of ideas on how to help them. She commented on my sense of frustration, underpinned by a certain crossness. “I’ve been working with this one for several years. And still we go over the same ground, week in, week out. Then they complain at me that we seem to be spending a lot of time going over old material!” The indignation in my voice could have been heard throughout the town! She was sympathetic and reminded me of Bion’s maxim that one should approach a therapy session with neither memory nor desire. It’s a quote I knew but had lost sight of in these cases. She reminded me that it was not my task to make my patients better. My function is to manage the process and, thereby, help my patients towards their solutions. I’ve taken her reminder to heart and feel more relaxed and less irritated.
As a gardener I can’t make my plants grow. All I can do is to provide the right conditions for any given plant. The rest is, mostly, outside my control, which sometimes comes as a great relief and sometimes exasperates me. Just like my patients!
Epiphanies 