twisted trunk...

Been somewhat busy of late engaging with a massive restructuring of my garden – involving the moving of many tonnes of earth and the building (by stone masons) of some rather lovely retaining walls of local stone… but that’s for a future blog – when I shall attempt to express my delight in natural materials and the skill and craft of human hands…

Now I would like to share what I believe about an aspect of the origins of the individual psyche… This goes to the roots of what I understand about my own psyche.

It could be the case that a psyche is like soup – to which experience is added as ingredients that constantly change its flavour. By this reckoning, it should be possible, by adding a little pinch of this, a little pinch of that, to sweeten the soup if it is to bitter; to add a dash of bitterness if it is too sickly – and thus to transform the psyche to a perfect balance…

Alas, my experience of therapy suggests to me that this is not possible. Instead it seems to me that the psyche is like a seedling that grows into a tree. At any point in its life, the form this tree takes is the sum of all its experiences: the sunlight of love that has fallen on it, the nurture that it has been able to draw up through its roots from the soil in which its seed fell, the storms it has endured. But it is clearly the case that the further back to the seed we go, the more fundamental are the influences on its future form. In its adult form, the psychic tree will need a gale to tear off one of its branches. By contrast, as a seedling, a glancing blow might be enough to take that branch off in its embryonic form…

No form of healing can hope to replace a branch lost in ‘seedlinghood’. What therapy can do is to bring awareness of how small that injury was – though it came to have such massive and lasting consequence – and thus a psyche can come to understand, accept and value the shape it has, without regret, as the natural consequence of its life experiences…