Some sentences make me happy

My school readings are so precious to me. They make me feel known and understood.

This morning I read about subjective omnipotence and objective reality. Subjective omnipotence is what a baby experiences: It has a need, cries, and then, as if by magic, the mother’s breast appears. The baby feels as if it is making the breast appear with its omnipotence: A wish makes things happen. Objective reality is when you grow up and realize that you depend on others’ wills to fulfill your needs. What happens in between these two forms of experience is the transitional experience.

My book Freud and Beyond says:

“The person who lives completely in objective reality is a false self without a subjective center, completely oriented toward the expectations of others, toward external stimuli.”

“In experience organized according to objective reality, the child feels she has to find the desired object out in the world; she is acutely aware of the separateness and distinctness of the object and her lack of control over it.”

“What is crucial in good-enough parenting with respect to transitional experience is that the parent does not challenge its ambiguity. The specialness of the teddy bear is accepted.”

After I read this, I felt good. I held on to my book like a treasure for it holds a truth that is helping to change my reality.

T-group

I have been wanting to write about T-group but I was afraid of not being able to do it justice. T-group is kind of like Burning Man in that you have to experience it to really get it. No amount of explanations or mental snapshots will be able to convey what it was like or why it was so valuable to me.

But I will try. This semester one of my classes was Group Dynamics. And this class was “a T-group.” I say was because this class didn’t last all semester and is already over. We met for a total of about 36 hours spread over the week-long retreat in August and over two more weekends in September and October, usually in 6-hour sessions with breaks.

The T in T-group stands for sensitivity training. T-groups are designed for people such as therapists who will be faced with other people’s feelings directed towards them and who need to be able to handle these feelings compassionately. As a therapist, clients might hate you or they might love you. They might tell you how incompetent you are or they might tell you they are in love with you. The thing is that everyone has other people’s feelings directed at them all the time, not just therapists! That’s why this experience was so valuable to me not just as a future therapist but also, and more importantly, as a human being.

What happened in T-group is that we sat around in a circle–12 of us, plus our instructor, a professor of psychology who had led many T-groups before. And the instruction was to talk about nothing but our feelings as a result of being in this particular group in this particular moment with these particular people. In the beginning we didn’t know each other at all. And you might think, “What kind of feelings are you going to have about complete strangers?” The answer is usually a lot. You might have prejudices, you might have admiration. You might feel repelled from some people and drawn to others. And that’s where you start. And as you express things such as “I really like you, and I have noticed that I have a strong desire for you to like me back,” feelings might come up in other people, such as jealousy or annoyance.

There is a saying that what happens in T-group stays in T-group. We weren’t even allowed to process what happened with each other outside of T-group. So I can’t talk in detail about some of the interactions that happened in our group–perhaps this is another reason why I have been hesitant to write about it–but I can talk about my own personal experience. And these are some of the things I got to face:

1) My fear of rejection from men. I noticed right away that I was not worried at all about connecting with the women in the group but felt insecure around the men, gay or straight.

2) My physical appearance: One day we talked quite a bit about how my piercings, black clothes, dark eyeliner, etc. affect others.

3) My discomfort with being German and having an accent: We touched on it a little but I want to go into it more in therapy.

Even though it might sound like it, T-group is not group therapy. It’s just about expressing feelings as they arise. It’s very focused on the present moment. We were asked to express our feelings as they related to a specific behavior by another person or event in the group. We even had a template for this:

“When you ____________, I felt ___________.”

The whole experience felt a little bit like Communicating Feelings 101. Maybe that’s why I got so much out of it: I had been lacking that in my life.

That explains a few things

This afternoon I went to a coffee shop to do some reading for school. One article I read for my Human Development class was Attachment in Adult Life.

Here is a quote from it:

Attachment is clearly a better basis for a reliable pair bond than the obvious alternative of sexual desire. Attachment, once established, is highly persistent. [...] Sexual desire, on the other hand, is sometimes persistent, sometimes not. Furthermore, attachment becomes the more reliable the more established a relationship is; sexual desire is often less urgent as a relationship is established. Attachment and sexual desire are affected differently by threat. [...] Finally, attachment is strongly associated with particular figures and resists redirection. Sexual desire, on the other hand, seems more nearly accessible to new figures. Attachment, in sum, is persistent over time, more reliable as a relationship is more nearly established, and dominant over other behavior systems under conditions of threat. None of these characteristics is true of sexual desire.

Motherfucking fuck. This explains in a nutshell what was wrong in Kean’s and my relationship: He wasn’t attached to me. There was a lot of sexual desire, on both sides, but attachment only on my side. No wonder I felt so threatened by other objects of his sexual desire. There was no attachment holding our relationship in place, and sexual desire, as this article points out, is tenuous and easily transferable. No wonder I was so afraid of his sexual desire transferring to another person and losing him. No wonder it was so easy for him to “attach” to another person: Even after three years, without attachment, all he had to do was redirect his sexual desire.

Motherfucking fuck. And then I went home and cried hysterically. It’s painful to realize how blind I have been for so long.

I deserved it too

I had a moment of pure bliss today. I was walking in the sunshine near Howard and 8th with my scarf blowing in the wind, Depeche Mode in my ears, an iced coffee in my hand, and I was on my way back to class, and I felt so happy.

School, omg

So I start school on August 7th. I will be in a retreat at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in Petaluma all of that week, also called the Fall Intensive. It is part of my weekend program. After that it’s one long weekend a month.

I am in a cohort called the Seahorses. I am registered for the following classes for fall:

Integral Yoga
Therapeutic Communications
Human Development
Group Dynamics
Psychodynamics

During the retreat, I will have breakfast, three hours of class, lunch, four hours of class, dinner, three hours of class. Every day. I am so excited!

I’m doing it

Three weeks ago I found out that I have been accepted to the Master of Arts Weekend program in Counseling Psychology with a concentration in Integral Counseling Psychology at CIIS. My friend Shu was with me when I opened the email from CIIS admissions. My first reaction was one of giddy excitement. The next day, torturous doubts came in.

I should have known from experience that when I am about to make one of the most important decisions of my life, I will also experience strong doubts. If I don’t have strong doubts, it’s probably not that important of a decision. When I got notice in August 1995 that I had won a greencard in the lottery, I was completely tormented by indecision for a couple of weeks. It was almost like my soul was saying “Why, oh why do I have to make this difficult decision? Could I just not have won to make things easier?” A great opportunity can also be a great burden.

The thing is that moving to the U.S. with my greencard was one of the best things I ever did for myself. I have not regretted it for one day. Maybe this master’s program will be similar. Sometimes I already get a feeling of “Duh, of course this is my next step,” but sometimes I still have doubts.

Here are the circumstances that tell me this is for me right now:

• When I quit my job in 2005, my goal was to become a counselor.
• I have been obsessed with drug addiction and eating disorders ever since I was little.
• My sessions with clients these days are less spiritually oriented and more psychological/emotional.
• Emotions and relationships are all I ever really want to talk about with people.
• I want to work with people on a personal level, not on a business level.
• I actually really like the idea of being in class one weekend a month.
• The program places a lot of emphasis on personal growth and self-reflection, which are two of my favorite things.
• A friend’s brother’s girlfriend, who is also in a counseling master’s program, recently said “I love being around so many people who are so self-aware.” Yep, I’d love me some self-aware people.
• This program does NOT require that I write a master thesis.
• Starting in year 2, I will have to do a practicum, and I get all tingly with excitement at the idea of working at an eating disorder clinic.
• Maybe it will be part of my job to help young girls with their self-esteem.
• A friend told me that years ago he applied to several psychology master’s programs but didn’t get in anywhere. How sad. I feel privileged.
• I will be required to see a therapist of my own during my practicum.
• Almost every movie I have watched lately has had a really cool therapist character in it.
• My tax refund plus the insurance money I expect to get for my car will pretty much pay for my first semester’s tuition.
• Did I mention that I don’t have to write a thesis? I would hate to have to write a thesis.

I have one more week to make my decision. Right now I am about 95% sure that I am going to do it. A friend asked me recently what it would take for the other 5%. I said that it would probably take me paying the $300 deposit required to reserve my space in the program. So I think I am going get on that.

My motivation for grad school

Next week I have an admissions interview at CIIS where I have applied for a psychology master’s program. When I told a good friend about this, he said “I’m glad that you are doing this. I know that you are worried about getting in debt but I think that ultimately you are bettering yourself.” And suddenly I started crying. At first I thought it was about the debt, but at the end of my yoga class this evening I realized what the tears were really about: Over ten years after I was originally going to go to grad school, I feel like I’m finally going for the right reasons. All throughout high school and college I had assumed that I was going to grad school. It was about prestige and earning power for me and about pleasing my parents who had never had the chance to go to college. Plus, to me grad school was something smart people do, and I know I am that. But luckily, thanks to a few ecstasy trips during college I decided NOT to get a master’s in economics. And now, eleven years after graduating from college, I am going to grad school after all. This time my objective is to become a better person. It feels right.

Below is the autobiographical statement I wrote as part of my application.

My interest in psychology, particularly the mind-body kind, started tragically early: At the age of 10 I spent a couple of months in a psychosomatic ward in Germany. I didn’t go there to study psychosomatic therapy per se, but what is true is that I had developed an obsessive depressive disorder because my mind and body had become disconnected. Having been raised in Germany where a lot of emphasis is placed on cognitive thinking, I had lost trust in my body. I couldn’t stop obsessing over fears regarding my body, such as weight gain, disease, death, or shame from bodily functions. Since I frequently talked about suicide—I suppose what I really wanted was harmony and peace between mind, body and soul, like in the death pose in yoga—my parents were afraid for my safety and sought professional help.
I remember admiring the social workers and psychologists at the psychosomatic mental hospital. I thought it was interesting that they thought they could use their logical brains to help me.
Two years later I finally experienced an energetic shift within myself that I didn’t think had anything to do with the treatment or medication I had received. That’s when I started feeling like a “normal” 12-year-old again, who was interested in working on creative projects and making friends.
I didn’t think to further explore the nature of that energetic shift. Instead, I was just glad that the depressive episode was over and continued trying to figure life out with my head. I was a very good student, especially at math and foreign languages. When I was 17 I came to California as an exchange student for one year. I loved California and felt that its diversity and openness made it easier for me to be myself than it had been in Germany. I decided to try to come back after finishing school in Germany, and life stepped in to make that happen for me: I won a green card in the annual U.S. green card lottery. My father gave his blessing and agreed to help financially support me during college, and at the age of 20 I immigrated to the United States on my own.
My major in college was Economics. It suited me in that it was math-heavy, and it didn’t suit me in that I was much too eccentric to wear business suits, literally and figuratively. I think I was just trying to study something pragmatic that I knew I would be good at. A friend of mine recently asked me what I intended on doing with that degree, what my dreams were during college. I replied that I was hoping to become a market research analyst. I wanted to research consumer market trends and find out what kinds of new or improved products people were asking for. My friend commented that things were coming together for her: Knowing that I am interested in counseling now, she remarked that even then I was interested in people’s desires. I was going at it from an unsatisfying angle though: Shortly after graduating—I was already working at a major corporation as a demand forecast coordinator—a feeling of dread started coming on that I was heading in the wrong direction. Luckily my boyfriend at the time asked me to move to Virginia with him, and I accepted and was able to quit the joyless job.
In Virginia I fell into a completely different profession. I started as an operations assistant at an e-learning company and quickly gained programming skills thanks to my enthusiasm. When the company laid me off, I was able to find a job as a programmer at the University of Virginia. Though similarly mathematical and problem-solving in nature, I found the world of programming infinitely more exciting and inspiring than that of business forecasting.
After having spent two years in Virginia, I moved to San Francisco in 2002 where I have lived ever since. For a while I telecommuted for the University of Virginia until I decided I wanted to be around people again and accepted a job on the engineering team of a major software company. The company was surrounded by a worldwide community of developers and fans, with whom I enjoyed interacting.
About a year later the company had major layoffs. I was spared but started becoming disillusioned with the software industry. A failed relationship later, I was downright depressed. My medical doctor prescribed me some antidepressants but they didn’t affect me noticeably. A few months into the depression in a flash of spiritual insight I decided that I wanted to explore my intuition and connection to myself in order to help myself in times of depression and emotional difficulty. Shortly after making this decision I ran into a friend of mine who called herself a medium and who was about to teach a series of spiritual workshops designed to train one’s intuition. I eagerly started attending these classes as well as exploring meditation and yoga. Soon I started coming out of my depression, which coincided with the realization that I needed to leave my corporate software job and pursue a different path. I wanted to interact with people instead of computers; I wanted to help and heal people like myself; I wanted to make a positive contribution to human evolution.
I decided that I wanted to work as a counselor but that I didn’t want to go back to a traditional university. I felt that traditional education was too left-brained and logical, and I preferred orienting to my heart, my newfound intuition and connection to spirit. I started marketing myself as an intuitive counselor and enrolled in a year-long counseling program called Interchange – A Training in Radical Counseling. It was designed for people like me who wanted to be counselors without necessarily becoming licensed therapists. I enjoyed the program immensely, especially the personal transformation I experienced as a result.
I pursued other spiritually based trainings, such as certification as a theta healer and past life regression counselor, as well as self-development programs such as the Landmark Forum and a yoga retreat. I slowly deconstructed and healed the deep-rooted feeling that there was something wrong with me, which had possibly been with me since my parents had committed me to the mental hospital at age 10. I started giving myself more self-love and acceptance than I had ever known.
For a few years I continued growing my counseling business and practice while also making a living as a taxi driver, translator and freelance programmer. I enjoyed working on my own time and having an irregular schedule. But I continued lamenting the fact that I was still spending more time on the computer than changing people’s lives.
During the course of the year 2010 I strengthened my level of commitment and responsibility for the path of the healer. I decided that I wanted to take serious steps towards spending more time counseling and less time working on the computer. I also started re-appreciating the intelligence of my head and decided that I finally wanted to put it to use in obtaining a graduate degree. I had been noticing for a while that my sessions with clients had shifted focus from being purely spiritual to more of a spiritual-psychological nature. It makes sense for me to study psychology because that’s where I have been lacking training. I want to gain knowledge and skills in that area to have more to offer as a healer.
CIIS is the only school I am applying to because of its spiritual approach to psychology. The Integral Psychology Counseling programs seems like a great way for me to balance the two halves of my brain and enable me to make an intelligent and wholehearted contribution as a change-maker. I especially appreciate the prospect of continued self-development and self-reflection. Aspiring to become a licensed therapist is not just a career choice for me; it’s a lifestyle choice. I envision my future to be therapeutic and healing for the people I come in contact with as well as for myself.

Some recent developments

I am applying for the Integral Counseling Psychology Weekend master’s program at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). The school is practically in my neighborhood. If all goes well, I will graduate in the fall of 2013 with a master’s in psychology, and after that I will eventually become a licensed therapist (MFT).

A friend of mine commented today that I keep “getting sucked back into the easiest way to make the most money.” He is right, with Flash programming being the easiest way to make the most money for me. I quit my full-time job five years ago because I wanted to work with people instead of the computer. I still spend way too much time on the computer, and I don’t like it.

With this master’s degree I hope to finally make a fundamental change to the way I spend most of my time. My aim is to really commit and take responsibility for my path as a healer.

With the start of school approaching next fall, I am finally feeling some pleasant pressure to finish writing my first book before then. I have been thinking and talking about this book for over four years. I started working on it multiple times but always got discouraged. Finally I am absolutely convinced now that I have to write this and have written six chapters in the last two weeks. Even if it won’t get published, I have to write it for myself and for my future. But I have a feeling it’ll get published. It’s called Rejection.

I’m going to Germany for Christmas, and while I’m there I have a date with my very first unrequited crush (who is now married with child) to talk about what happened back then. Why didn’t he want my kisses? And last week I had a long chat with someone from college who stopped calling after sleeping with me once. Working on this book is making me feel more alive than I have in a while.