Uncertainty – sinking into the proverbial
The beginning of a counselling relationship, like any relationship, can be full of doubt and uncertainty. The client may be wondering, What is this really about? Will we be able to understand each other? Can I be helped? Is this just opening a can of worms? Meanwhile, the counsellor is thinking (and you may as well know this!), many similar thoughts, such as, What’s going on here? I feel lost. Can I help this person?
At times like this, I find it’s good to breathe, and remember the words of James Hillman:
“I have come to see that the uncertainty about what the client and I are really there for—is what we’re really there for.”
He really had a way of putting things. And what this says to me is that when I feel uncertain, then I’m exactly where I need to be. Humans don’t like uncertainty, because it’s messy, confused, dark, shitty, scary. We move away from our uncertainty as best we can, trying to escape to an island of solid ground, but it keeps giving way beneath our feet. Everyone knows how to run away from uncertainty, because that’s how we get into the mess we do. Counselling is about not running away from it any more.
As we all know from old Western movies, when you’re in quicksand, the thing to do is not to struggle. Relax. We’re gonna be here a while. And so client and counsellor settle gently, together, into the quicksand.
Except, it doesn’t smell so good as sand. Oh no.
Settling down into that fetid, stinky mess is, after a while, oddly comforting. There’s nowhere left to go and it can’t get any worse. You’re already in the shit, so you might as well enjoy its murky warmth, splash about a bit. Poo!
Nigredo – also known as “the Dark Night of the Soul”
The old alchemists had a name for this, nigredo. This was the stage in the process of making gold when everything in the flask got dark, sticky and utterly unpromising. The experiment had obviously failed. Again. And what they taught was that only when things seem really useless, empty, fraudulent, does anything start to happen. The gold, symbolizing wisdom, begins to show itself when least expected.
In his later years the poet W.B. Yeats realised that his career to date had been all about vanity, performance and showiness:
“Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart
…
Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.”
What Yeats realised, like the alchemists, was that gold is to be found – always – in the very last place one would ever think to look. The worst thing about you. The bit you don’t want anyone to know, even yourself. That’s to say, in your heart – yes, your foul, stinky, battered old heart. Your shiny performances won’t serve any longer. They never really did.
