relationships with other people. We will talk about dissatisfactions with life, about
how to make life meaningful.
I will name some general points here where in my opinion a Buddhist approach
can enrich the commonly understood ‘working through’ process, and I will try to
make a connection to John’s experiences.
It is essential that, given the problems that the client presents, client and therapist
look together at what the client is repeating, in such a way that he or she can really
feel, experience it. We look at patterns of repetition in the resistance against fully
being with it, which so often have to do with fears, linked to self-esteem: the feeling
of having missed so much, of not being able to do without.
John knew of his sensitivity in many situations in actual life, and he made a
connection to the reality of his mother’s illness when he was three years old, which
meant that at times he had been left in the care of relatives, not knowing how long
it would last. She died when he was five. Anxiety about abandonment (as he was
young, interpreted by him in ways such that this might be a punishment for things
he had done wrong) and a reactive entitlement for attention made him vulnerable.
His first reaction to the reproaches of his friend was one of guilty submission.It is important that the client truly feels his demand for reparation, and the fear of
the pain and hollowness which lie behind it (and are fended off), against which he
may try to defend himself with all possible means,
John’s feeling of entitlement confused his precise attention to what was going on at
the very moment in the interaction with his friend. To tolerate his despair at not
being seen as he thought he deserved was hard. Often, before, he had had an
inclination to enact and act out, or to make a fight in comparable circumstances.Can the client ‘live’ this hollowness intensely? Going through it can be very painful
and frightening.
John now really tried to be with his despair with ‘bare attention’ and without
judgment; he tried to contain and to tolerate his emotions, in a way that had aspects
of intrapsychic ‘desensitization’.It is important that the client recognizes the repetition (often, hurt self-esteem), the
resistance (reactive self-importance or self-contempt), and that which is fended off
(pain, emptiness, fear, depression) as something of himself, and that he feels how he
identifies with these positions.
For John this meant being with his hurt feelings, with his anger and defensive
feelings of grandiosity and with his anxiety for being insignificant, nobody, nowhere.
Also it meant for him recognizing that his early biography, as sad as it was, served96 ADELINE VAN WANING