Debra Flics's Articles on Lion's Roar

Meditation wasn’t designed to heal early psychological wounds, explains Debra Flics. She cautions us not to look to it as a replacement for psychotherapy. Many Westerners, when they come to dharma practice, come looking for psychological healing—but this is not what meditation was designed to do. As meditation has become mainstream, it has been marketed as a way to address physical and emotional ailments as well as a way to improve performance at work, reduce stress, and rewire the brain. I’ve been a psychotherapist for nearly twenty-five years, working with meditators and non-meditators alike; I have also taught meditation in the Theravada tradition to students who could clearly benefit from therapy. I’ve seen firsthand the benefit of combining the two. I’ve also seen the pitfalls of thinking that meditation can resolve early psychological wounds—as powerful as meditation is, that kind of healing is not its purview. For that, we have psychotherapy. And when psychotherapy is undertaken in tandem with a meditation practice, it can be a powerful mix. In a 1989 article titled “Even the Best Meditators Have Old Wounds to Heal,” Jack Kornfield wrote, “For most people, meditation practice doesn’t ‘do it all.’ At best, it’s one important piece of a complex path of opening and awakening.” Back then, the idea that meditation cannot resolve all psychological suffering was widely discounted in meditation circles. But with more research and anecdotal evidence, it has gained wider and wider acceptance. By 2009, in a Buddhadharma article titled “Medicate or Meditate?” Roger Walsh, Robin Bitner, Bruce Victor, and Lorena Hillman wrote, “It seems clear that the question of whether meditation and psychotherapy can enhance one another has been decided: many people benefit from combining them, and this has been observed by clinicians and demonstrated by research. When old traumas, pains, and patterns recycle endlessly, or make spiritual practice seem overwhelming and hopeless, the best answer may not be simply the classic one of more practice. Instead, psychotherapy may be called for.” Unlike many of us, Siddhartha was raised with absolute care, safety, love, respect, nuturance, and admiration. He emerged from his childhood psychologically whole. I practice contemporary psychoanalysis, which means that when I work with a client, we aim to deeply transform faulty emotional patterning that was formed in childhood. As this is done, I also reflect and encourage the client’s authentic self-expression. For example, someone may have learned early on that it is dangerous to get mad, as it could jeopardize a parent’s love. This may leave him in situations where he is taken advantage of because he does not have access to his legitimate anger. In therapy, we would not only discover the cause of the difficulty with anger but also encourage the practicing of it, especially at times when the client might be angry with me. By my staying steady and accepting his feeling, the client gains a living experience of being able to be angry with someone who does not retaliate or withdraw, who accepts his concerns. These types of exchanges assist the client in developing a healthy, authentic, and vital sense of self. This aspect of psychological development was not necessary for the Buddha, and the healing of these types of wounds was not included in the Buddha’s prescription to end suffering. As the popular story of the Buddha tells us, Siddhartha’s father shielded him from the sufferings of the world by keeping him behind the palace walls. This worked until he was twenty-nine and became curious about what was going on outside. Four times he embarked on a journey with his charioteer. In three of these journeys, he encountered someone—a very old person, a very sick person, and a corpse—who lifted the veil from his eyes, and he realized the inescapable fact of existential suffering. On his fourth outing, Siddhartha encountered an ascetic, one who had renounced the material world in order to live the holy life and be freed from suffering. This last encounter pointed the Buddha-to-be in the direction he would take to achieve final liberation. Unlike many of us, Siddhartha was raised with absolute care, safety, love, respect, nurturance, and admiration. Although his mother died shortly after he was born, which perhaps made him more sensitive to existential suffering when he was exposed to it as an adult, he had developed what is called a secure attachment with his aunt, meaning he had safely bonded to his caregiver. According to developmental psychology, this attachment is necessary in order for a child to grow into an adult with a healthy and stable sense of self. Siddhartha emerged from his childhood strong and confident—so much so that he was able to respond to the appearance of the four divine messengers and take immediate action. After his initial shock, he did not become overwhelmed or dissociated; he did not go into denial. He was determined and set upon a course of action to be free. In short, he was psychologically whole. Siddhartha’s quest was not a struggle to develop a sense of self within conventional reality. We can now see that his quest was in fact meant to move his consciousness beyond conventional reality, to overcome existential suffering by realizing the deathless. The practices that he left for us reflect this ultimate goal. We can see his strong and healthy sense of self when he was able to listen to his own internal promptings, leave everything that he had known, and move ahead without doubt. We can also see it later on in his journey when, after spending a number of years with yogis who were engaged in the practice of austerities, he realized practices such as fasting and self-flagellation were not going to solve the problem of old age, sickness, and death, and he went his own way once again. All along his journey, the Buddha had his low moments but did not give up. He did not become depressed, anxious, withdrawn, traumatized, or codependent. His sense of self was clearly healthy and intact. When I practice psychotherapy, I encounter people who have been exposed to suffering very early in life—before their minds can comprehend what is happening, when their bodies are still growing and vulnerable, and at a time when, for their optimal physical, emotional, and psychological development, they should be shielded from suffering. They may have experienced challenging family dynamics that include abuse, emotional neglect, and lack of nurturance. They may have parents who themselves were not parented and turn to their children to meet their emotional needs. Beyond the family, the culture itself presents us with violence, trauma, and systemic racism. Many people are far outside the palace walls. Children raised in this way may be unable to hear, let alone follow, their inner guidance, and be unable to act from love and wisdom. This can develop further into addictions, depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other ailments. So many of us in Western culture wonder who we are, how we fit in, and what our purpose is; we struggle with a negative sense of self as we try to manage the impact of difficult early experiences. In short, we arrive at the doorway of spiritual practice with a very different emotional and psychological landscape than that of the Buddha-to-be. When we begin practice, we are struggling to overcome personal suffering that prevents us from fully living within the relative, not yet at the point of grappling with existential suffering in order to realize the absolute. Is meditation helpful for us, then? If it can't fully heal psychological suffering, does it offer us anything positive? Does it have any healing aspects? The answer is a definite yes. Even if the Buddha did not come to meditation to heal, meditation does offer some respite from psychological afflictions. When we meditate and develop our concentration through awareness of the breath, it frees us, even if only temporarily, from the thoughts and feelings that have been bombarding us. For some of us, it may be the first time we see that we are not what our thoughts say about us. We see that thoughts arise unbidden, are conditioned by family, teachers, and culture, and do not require us to identify with them. We come to see that we don’t have to be taken away by every thought form and state of mind; we learn that we can make choices in the service of our well-being. We see the mental ride that we are about to take, and we ask ourselves if it is a ride worth taking. As we begin to act from awareness rather than from identification with thought, we behave more skillfully toward ourselves and others. We learn ways to take care of ourselves, develop compassion, and practice with love. During longer periods of retreat and silence, the difficult psychological states that have been buried in our psyches may rise to the surface in order to be felt, witnessed, and released. As the practice deepens, meditation allows us to move beyond discursive thought and to feel these experiences directly. In these instances, we are freed from old paradigms and ways of feeling about ourselves. This directly overlaps with what can happen in a good therapeutic relationship. However, we may leave the silence and stillness of retreat and once again find it difficult to concentrate and access deeper levels of patterning. There are clear reasons for this. Traditionally, difficulty concentrating has been attributed to the five hindrances—greed, aversion, sloth and torpor, restlessness, and doubt—all states of mind that prohibit deeper states of concentration. For some people, these mind states may be composed of those early psychological wounds that we are carrying with us. For example, what a meditation teacher may call aversion, a psychotherapist may see as self-hatred. What a meditation teacher may see as sloth, a psychotherapist may recognize as depression. What a meditation...

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