I just got off WhatApp after a 2 hour video conversation with 3 other women. One lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, the other two in Toronto, Canada. There’s a time difference. There’s divorce happening here, a waylaying gynecologic matter, chronic sleep disruption, and an elementary school level sociopath on the make there, there, and there. I have known these women for 2 decades and during that time an enormous level of trust has been built over long talks like these and witnessing each other’s lives unfold, bend this way and that, collapse, rise again, even from the great distances we must cover by car/airplane or by frequent group texts in order to stay in touch. We lose our sense of time easily when we are together.
And that’s the critical ingredient to the longevity of our friendship: losing sense of time. I can think of no greater pleasure in life than losing my sense of time in the company of friends.
***
As an Asian-American woman navigating complex trauma and generational trauma, I felt an immediate connection to Stephani Foo’s story when I first heard her speak on the Being Well podcast. (Being Well is hosted by Forrest Hanson. Forrest, though not a therapist, is deeply invested in mental health, obviously and profoundly influenced by his well known psychotherapist father, Dr Rick Hanson; Forrest talks about all kind of mental health related topics on his podcast and YouTube channel.)
Stephani Foo is a writer and radio producer, most recently for the illustrious This American Life. Over the course of her conversation with Forrest, Foo described her work with Dr Ham, her therapist, in her memoire, What These Bones Know.
Ham’s therapeutic approach with Foo went something like this:
Foo would record her sessions with Ham. Afterwards she would transcribe them into a Google doc. She would then send Ham a copy and he would annotate it for her as part of her therapy. He would do this to draw her attention to moments in their session where he believed a trauma response kicked in for Foo.
For instance, Ham would point out a moment in their conversation when she dissociated. This could happen in the middle of a painful or frightening recollection. On the Google doc he would label the exact moment she dissociated by showing her how she changed the topic or didn’t answer his question or didn’t seem to hear him at all and talk past him. Vorbeireden1.
Foo likened this digitized treatment of her therapy approach to editing a radio production. It made it possible for her engage with herself as if the story being crafted was a job. It gave her just enough distance–let’s call it the editorial stance–so that she could objectively evaluate her behavior in the here-and-now with Ham.
By literally seeing on screen the manifestation of her maladaptive behaviors stemming from complex trauma, Foo could finally become aware of when she entered dissociative states.
Ham invented this ad hoc therapeutic modality on the fly.
I was speechless. Inspired. It was like witnessing Joshua Bell in the DC subway system playing his Stradivarius. Jaw dropping, gob smacked, squealing with delight. (The woman in the video is not me. But I would have been standing next to her had I been there.)
Let me explain:
I have never even seen on TV or film an Asian-American male therapist before. (I have met one Korean-American woman therapist.) I didn’t even know such a thing existed. Not only is Ham Asian-American, but he is Korean-American, born in Korea, and immigrated to the west as a child. Like me. He wanted to be an artist as a kid. Like me. He’s got some art on his website. He’s hella talented. I couldn’t believe I was discovering this 1st gen Korean American male wannabe artist psychotherapist on YouTube. Learning about him was what I imagine it was like to hear Joshua Bell playing his Strad in a subway station.
Who was this man? Who was this creative therapeutic genius at work? What in the world was he doing? What do you call this therapeutic modality? How did he know to do that? What kind of psychotherapeutic theory was he practicing with his other patients if this was something he conjured up just for Stephanie? Is this a thing that I can ask for from my therapist? Was there some kind of manual for this?
***
These 3 women and I, we don’t often video chat, but default to group text. Technology has made even my generation (X)–the generation that grew up calling friends on a landline even after starting university–prefer asynchronicity and textual communication.
But today, I needed to say what I wanted to say out loud and see their faces and hear their responses in real time. And they all answered.
Isn’t that how it goes with people we love? People we trust? We reach out and they reach back. And then 2 hours fly by.
***
So fascinated was I by Stephani’s therapist, I read her book. And lucky for me, so fascinated was Forrest by Ham, he soon released an episode interviewing Ham. You can see the episode below. I think it’s worth every second of your time. I’ve watched it twice and have been moved both times to tears. Let me say a few words before you skip ahead.
Ham essentially works in the therapeutic model I first learned about in Dr. Irvin D. Yalom’s book, The Gift of Therapy. I have a post about his book here. I consider this essential reading for any therapist in training or practice who wants to make as much of a impact on their patients’ mental health as possible. In the book, Yalom describes the “here-and-now” approach to therapy: treat the therapeutic relationship between the patient and therapist as the immediate and present, i.e., the “here-and-now”, model of what a healthy relationship should look like. By focusing the patient’s and therapist’s attention on their here-and-now relationship, the patient learns how to create, maintain, and recognize healthy relationships outside of the therapeutic space.
Ham would agree with Yalom that the therapist and the patient are both equal participants and contributors of a developing and dynamic relationship, guided in the direction of health by the therapist, but a path built and traversed together.
But Ham goes further to describe the emotional territory that the patient and therapist enters, that space he would say is where you find that ineffable, evanescent thing that happens between two people, which he calls presence.
A more common term familiar to us might be “click”.
Sometimes we meet people (fewer and farther between with age) with whom we “click” with. It’s a word at once colloquial, vague, but also perfect. When it happens, it almost seems as if we can hear a piece of ourselves click into place with a piece of another. It’s, frankly, magical. So magical, in fact, I believe it’s the thing every human wants more than anything else in life. To connect with another person in a deeply psychosomatic way is our birthright. Poets have tried to use other words to describe the “click” since humans could put two words together. Chemistry, fall in love, hit it off, Je ne sais qois, vibe, on the same wavelength. It’s very ineffability is what drives so many poets, song writers, and MCs to take on the challenge to try and describe it. (In the words of my nine year old, “Why are so many songs about love? Ugh!”)
Like all things difficult to put into words, best to approach it sideways.
There are moments in therapy, Ham says, when he gets bored or irritated by the patient. For him this isn’t an inconvenience or a downside of his profession that he must tolerate, but rather it’s a signal that the patient is in a state of disharmony with herself. This when the patient’s words vibrate in one frequency while the thing she really wants to talk about vibrates in another frequency. Both of these wavelength, rather than creating harmony and amplifying each other, results in dissonance, disharmony, noise. What’s happening outside of the patient doesn’t reflect what is happening inside of the patient. He describes this state of the patient as lacking presence.
This is when he will turn to the patient and ask her, What is going on right now? Why are you annoying me? Why am I so bored? He says he puts it more gently then that most of the time, but sometimes not.
This is the critical moment in therapy for the patient and Ham. The patient must choose to stop and listen to the sound behind the sounds she is making. If she decides to listen, she will hear what she really wants to say. She then speaks the words she hears, word that vibrate at the same frequency as her truth. Her new frequency acts like a tuning fork to the strings inside her and inside Ham. Her vibrations resonate inside both patient and therapist. Ham and the patient are now in presence together, encountering the same sound, one beautiful enough to call music. And while in this frequency of connection, patient and therapist know Kairos, the absence of time. And in that space of music and timelessness, the patient experiences the antidote to trauma: presence.
This, he would say, is where/when/how healing from trauma happens. Presence with one’s self in the presence of another.
***
Near the end of our 2 hours long conversation, I tell them, I’ve decided to slow my roll into reentering the dating world. Stuff that started the roll: Ali Wong’s post-divorce sexcapades stand-up special, the perimenopause fueled mid-life profundity on glorious display in Miranda July’s magnificent All Fours, all these movies in 2024 of older women getting laid, like the one with Laura Dern hooking up with Chris Hemsworth’s brother, which appealed to me on so many levels. I mean, she’s a writer. And he’s Chris Hemsworth’s brother. And they’re in Morocco.
Anyway, these magical ingredients of art alchemized to enchant me.
But then there were the night sweats, I tell them, the plummeting libido due to birth control, the 8:30-9 PM bedtime and The 5 AM Club membership to keep up, being a single mom, and, of course, the divorce, which I learned recently is the 2nd most stressful life event after death of a loved one. Separation is 3rd.
So the stalled foray into the world of dating apps will likely remain stalled for at least another, oh, I don’t know, 12 months. Minimum 24 months post separation before dating is the prescription I found on Instagram for someone like me.
While I say all this I am looking at their faces. My amygdala, fully turned on to connect mode rather than it’s popularly known fight/flight channel, scans their faces to see them smiling with amusement, sympathy, and affection.
After 2 hours, 2 hours of being in presence with each other, sometimes out and back in again, I feel like I can go for another 2, so healing is my time with them. But we are all busy women.
Love you! Talk to you later!
***
Trauma is a thief of presence. It takes away my ability to exist fully in the here-and-now. It makes me live in past memories or future anxieties. It makes me live in a constant state of low level fear that something bad can happen at any moment even when there is no evidence to support such a state of mind. It keeps my body in a persistent state of ready tension. It’s literally a pain in my back. Rather than living in my environment as is, trauma leaves me living in a world of danger that exists only in my mind and in my body. Trauma not only blinds, deafens, and paralyzes me to the world, but also to myself. There is no present knowing of emotional reality or physical pleasure or spiritual high. Trauma is, as Ham says, the opposite of presence.
Creating a space of presence with another person is an incredible therapeutic act of creativity, compassion, and clarity of purpose. Ham takes the person in front of him, the person he is, and the moment presented to both of them, and, using just the right modalities, each wielded with expertise curated and refined over decades of practice and experience, Ham makes manifest a moment of presence between him and his patient.
It’s a work of relational art.
Anyone working at the highest levels of their profession eventually leaves behind the workshop of technique, theory, and practice, and enters the halls of aesthetics. Ham is an artist.
***
One more thought:
Have you ever seen those sand mandalas by Tibetan Buddhists? They celebrate their destruction as meaningfully as their creation.
I imagine Ham has contemplated the fleeting nature of presence in his office. Like the sand mandalas, beautiful and impermanent, presence doesn’t last. The hour ends.
Time stops, time passes. You connect, you disconnect. You feel satisfied, you feel dissatisfied. And on it goes like everything in life. Life is so awesome and it sucks at the same time. And perhaps this lesson, too, is part of his therapeutic plan of healing. The spiritual part. (The man nearly became a monastic.)
Perhaps, then, the opposite of trauma isn’t just presence, but rather accepting, experiencing, managing presence and absence, connection and disconnection, harmony and disharmony, Kairos and Chronos.
Ambivalence abounds.
Living in a state that rejects rigid, permanent dichotomies, and embraces duality and, ultimately, evanescence, is perhaps the more encompassing definition of presence. We move like a wave from the peaks to troughs, the ebbs and flows.
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- “to talk past” in German. ↩︎