Rivers, Hobbits, Dogs, and Learning to See

A Little About the Person Behind the Therapist PART THREE

I spent years believing feeling better should come first. Anxiety and pain taught me that sometimes we begin living—and let our feelings come along.

I have many interests besides psychology. There is an art to living well, and part of that art involves mastery. We talk easily about mastery in our work—developing ability, practicing a craft, becoming increasingly good at what we do—but there is such a thing as mastery at play as well as mastery at work, and I don't think we take this seriously enough.

By mastery I do not mean turning every hobby into another achievement project. That would rather defeat the purpose. I mean giving ourselves deeply enough to something we love that we learn its subtleties: becoming an accomplished gardener, musician, woodworker, cook, birder, photographer, golfer, reader—or whatever pursuit makes us lose track of the clock. There is something wonderfully balancing about becoming good at something that doesn't have to earn us a living, improve our résumé, or impress anybody.

For me, one of those things has always been fishing. I have been an angler since I was twelve and remain an avid fly fisher. Put me beside a good river with a fly rod and I am in peaceful bliss. Fishing has followed me through most of my life, and the longer I have done it, the more I realize it has been teaching me things I was not aware I was learning.

You cannot bully a river into giving you what you want. You can arrive with expensive equipment, years of experience, the right flies, and a thoroughly unjustified confidence about what the trout ought to be doing—and the river stays completely unimpressed.

You have to learn to see.

A beginning fisherman sees water. An experienced angler begins to see currents within the water: seams, riffles, pools, shadows, submerged structure, changes in depth, the places where insects collect and where a trout can hold without spending more energy than its meal is worth. You watch the light and wind. You notice what is hatching, what is not, and whether the fish are feeding on the surface or on something you cannot see underneath it.

The river hasn't changed. You have. You've learned to see more of what was already there.

That idea has followed me well beyond fishing.

Seeing

Annie Dillard writes about seeing as something we learn to do, and I have always loved that idea. Sometimes the problem is not that reality has failed to reveal itself but that we have not yet learned how to look.

A stained-glass window is one thing from six inches away and another when we stand back. An Impressionist painting changes when we stop examining individual strokes and allow color and shape to assemble themselves at a distance. Sometimes we see better by looking directly; sometimes peripheral vision tells us what staring cannot.

Psychotherapy has something of that quality. People usually come to therapy because they can see the problem quite well—or at least they think they can. My anxiety is the problem. My spouse is the problem. My anger is the problem. My past is the problem. Sometimes those things certainly are problems, but often there are currents underneath them: old fears, loyalties, patterns of avoidance, ways of protecting ourselves, family histories, assumptions we stopped questioning years ago. Therapy can be less about being told what is there than about learning to see what has been there all along.

There may be a lesson about psychotherapy in fly fishing after all.

There and Back Again

I have also been a Tolkien fanatic since junior high. That enthusiasm never went away. I first entered Middle-earth as a boy and, like many Tolkien readers, discovered that it is the sort of country one keeps returning to.

Tolkien gave me an early taste for stories in which ordinary people discover that their choices matter, courage does not require the absence of fear, companionship makes unbearable burdens bearable, and apparently insignificant people can find themselves participating in something much larger than themselves. His heroes are often not the strongest people in the story. They are the ones who keep going. They carry one another when necessary, resist things that promise power, become homesick, get frightened, and occasionally wish they had never left home.

And still they take the next step.

I suspect reading Tolkien quietly contributed to my understanding of human beings long before I knew I would become a therapist. A life is partly the story of what we do with what has been given to us. We do not choose the age into which we are born, our original family, many of our wounds, or all the things that eventually find us on the road, but choices remain, even when those choices become terribly small. Sometimes courage consists of nothing more glamorous than continuing in the direction of what matters.

Books That Lead to Other Books

Books have been another constant. My shelves wander through psychology, theology, poetry, spirituality, philosophy, biography, history, mythology, and literature. I have always been interested in what human beings have thought about being human, and one of the pleasures of reading widely is discovering how long that conversation has been going on.

Someone who lived five hundred or fifteen hundred years ago will sometimes notice something about human nature that feels startlingly contemporary. We may have newer language for it, a psychological theory to explain it, or research to understand it more precisely, but the human experience underneath it is remarkably familiar. Sometimes a psychologist gives me the language I need; sometimes it is a poet, novelist, ancient theologian, or a passage I have read twenty times before and somehow never really seen.

That's another kind of seeing.

A book can remain exactly the same while its reader becomes capable of reading it like a different book. We return years later and discover a sentence that apparently wasn't there the first time.

Of course it was. We were not.

This is why I have resisted confining my education to psychology. The human person is simply too interesting for understanding from only one perspective. Poets know things about grief. Novelists understand self-deception. Theologians have spent centuries thinking about desire, suffering, and hope. Philosophers have worried about the good life since Plato. And grandmothers sometimes know things about families that researchers take a lifetime to rediscover with impressive statistical analyses.

Psychology gives me one way of seeing. I have spent much of my life collecting others.

And Then There Are Dogs

I am an incurable dog lover and have a particular affection for the ancient Tibetan breeds. Dogs have been part of my household for much of my life, and they provide a useful corrective to people like me who can spend entirely too much time inside their own heads.

Dogs are not particularly impressed by résumés, professional credentials, unfinished writing projects, or whether we have adequately contemplated the meaning of existence before breakfast. They have more immediate concerns. There is a walk to take, somebody has arrived at the door, dinner is inexplicably three minutes late, and apparently something fascinating happened beside that bush yesterday that requires another investigation.

There is wisdom in that.

I have learned a great deal about attachment from psychologists, but I suspect dogs understand something about loyalty, forgiveness, attachment, and uncomplicated delight that the rest of us spend a great deal of money trying to learn. They are wonderfully accomplished at inhabiting the life immediately in front of them.

That is the thread connecting many of the things I love. Fly fishing, books, Tolkien, dogs, walking through the woods with grandchildren—they continually invite me to pay attention: to look again, become interested, notice what is beneath the surface, and recover some capacity for wonder that adulthood has a way of misplacing.

I sometimes use a simple maxim for the spiritual life: You become like who you hang out with. I think something similar is true of what we repeatedly give our attention to. Our loves educate us. The things we practice form us. What begins as recreation can quietly become formation.

That is why I have become less inclined to divide life neatly between the things that form us and the things we simply enjoy. Some of our best teachers arrive disguised as play. A river can teach attention. A difficult book can enlarge the imagination. A grandchild can return us to wonder. A dog can remind us to inhabit the moment we are actually in. None of these is a substitute for spiritual practice, but neither are they entirely separate from it.

Formation has a way of happening while we are busy living.

So yes, I take play seriously. I want to master my work, certainly. After more than thirty years as a therapist, I still want to learn, reconsider, read, and become better at the craft, but I also want to become a better fisherman. I want to read books difficult enough to change my mind. I want to know old stories and discover new ones. I want to walk slowly enough with my grandchildren to notice whatever has stopped them beside the trail. I want dogs underfoot and rivers around my legs.

Maybe mastery of life is not finally about getting very good at controlling it. Maybe it is becoming very good at accepting it and noticing that you are alive.

Why This Blog

All of this brings me to this blog. I don't intend for this to be another corner of the internet filled with Five Easy Steps to Eliminate Anxiety or Seven Secrets of a Perfect Marriage. After more than thirty years as a therapist and forty years as a husband, I have become suspicious of both easy steps and perfect marriages. Human beings are considerably more interesting than that.

I am more interested in questions: Why do intelligent people keep doing things they know are not good for them? Why does anxiety sometimes become stronger the more desperately we try to eliminate it? Why do two people who genuinely love each other become remarkably skilled at hurting one another? How much of what we call personality is really an old adaptation that once helped us survive? What is the difference between accepting ourselves and simply giving up on change? What are we becoming through the things we repeatedly practice and give our attention to? How do psychology and spirituality illuminate one another—and where should we be cautious about confusing them?

And perhaps most importantly: How do we become freer?

Not free from sadness, anxiety, grief, anger, uncertainty, disappointment, pain, or the ordinary difficulty of being alive. I mean something quieter and more substantial: the freedom to experience what we feel without always being governed by it; to recognize the stories we have inherited without assuming we must keep living inside them; to remain connected to other people without disappearing into them; to walk through a tunnel even when we cannot yet see the other end; and to choose, as often as we are able, the kind of person we want to become.

Perhaps all the lessons I have gathered—from marriage and family, psychology and faith, Tolkien and old books, dogs and rivers—aren't as unrelated as they once seemed. They keep bringing me back to attention. What are we looking at? What are we missing? What lies beneath the surface? What happens when we stand back, change perspective, or look again? What do we repeatedly give our attention to, and what is that attention quietly making of us?

That is formation too.

So that is what I hope to do here: pay attention. To psychology and relationships, certainly, and to good research and what we continue to learn about the mind, but also to old wisdom, family stories, literature and poetry, spirituality, rivers and occasionally dogs; to suffering without making suffering the whole story; and to those moments when something that has been in front of us all along suddenly becomes visible.

Sometimes Bowen or ACT will provide the language. At other times it may be Brother Lawrence, Tolkien, Annie Dillard, an ancient writer, a trout holding invisibly beneath a current, or something one of my grandchildren stops to examine on the trail.

I want all of them at the table.

Because if there is a thread running through all of this, perhaps it is that we are always being formed—by what we love, what we fear, what we practice, whom we remain connected to, and what we give our attention to. That means change is not something reserved for the therapy room or undertaken only when something has gone wrong. We are becoming all the time.

And I am still learning.

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