Reclaiming the Sacred in Psychotherapy ~ Laura S. Brown, Ph.D.

I want to begin with a quote from Audre Lorde, poet, prophet, and teacher, from her short book, The Cancer Journals, written as she was first diagnosed with the disease that killed her: She said:

"I have found that battling despair does not mean closing my eyes to the enormity of the tasks effecting change, nor ignoring the strength and barbarity of the forces aligned against us. It means teaching, surviving, and fighting with the most important resource I have, myself, and taking joy in that battle."

I offer her words to all of us as the theme of what we’ll be talking about today; how to draw upon ourselves in the struggle against despair, and to find joy in that process and in the opportunity to engage in that process. For the loss of the sacred is a path to despair, yet also a chance to renew hope and ground it more solidly and firmly than before. Were it not for despair and the loss of the sacred, we would never have the opportunity to regain hope and prize the sacred more firmly.

As I sat down at the end of September to begin writing this speech whose title I proposed to myself back in February, I had to go back into the file in my computer to see if I really had done this pretentious thing of trying to tie in my utterances to the notion that in a couple of years, by the calendar of the Common Era, we will be entering a third thousand years of counting. I had in fact done this, I am embarrassed to say; embarrassed, because most of the time, when I’m not trying to play the role of rabbi or preacher, I tend to avoid trying to sound like I know something meaningful about the world. But there it was, in my own saved file. At any rate, I felt a little foolish to have given myself this title, and also a little overpowered by what I had done to myself with it; like, who did I think I was fooling, that I was going to say something profound about meaning-making in psychotherapy at this particular juncture in time, however we count it off?

But given the topic, it was also fitting that I am started to write this between the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashana, the beginning of the Jewish year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement; a time known as “Yomim Noraim,” the Days of Awe. It is a time when, for Jews like myself who are attempting to use the forms of our culture to make meaning in life, we go back over the past year; we examine our actions, our decisions, the places where we did what we said we would, the places where we fell through, where we missed the mark. We seek opportunities to forgive others, to be forgiven, to acknowledge which promises we made could not be kept, whatever our best efforts, and to recommit ourselves to those promises that we believe can still happen. This last year had been an especially difficult and painful one for me, a time in which I had looked at myself in a particular human mirror and drawn back in some horror from what I thought was reflected there; a time of a great deal of despair, fear, and grief, much of it occasioned by the faulty enactment of good intentions, therefore all the more painful to face. And some of it occasioned by my own previous unwillingness to accept the things I could not do and to acknowledge promises made that could never have been kept.

As I have been going through this journey of despair, moving down and in and now, I hope, beyond, I have had a chance to take a long, hard look at myself. I have noticed the value of my despair as a potential source of power and growth and change, as well as its seductive pull towards futility, passivity and powerlessness, fighting themselves out within me. During the ten days of the Yomim Noraim, as I began to write this talk, I have also been trying to go over this last year, and the series of events that led up to it, so that I can learn, so that I can change, so that I can let go and have the choices to move forward.

Go To Reclaiming the Sacred in Psychotherapy Part Two

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