Dear Clients,
I am writing this letter to express my deepest admiration, gratitude, and respect to you. You are the most courageous group of people I have ever met, and I am so lucky to have the opportunity to get to know you, and to sit with you and share in your stories every week.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the work we do together, and I keep coming back to an amazing book I read recently called Rising Strong by Brené Brown. In this book, among other things, Brown writes about what she calls “day 2”. Many of you have heard me refer to this concept in the last few weeks, but for those of you who haven’t, allow me to explain.
When we tell our stories – not in therapy, but in day-to-day life – we frequently put a shiny gloss on them. We say, “I had a miscarriage and it was awful, but now I have two wonderful children.” We say, “I lost my job and it was devastating, but now my career is flourishing.” We say, “I was in this terrible relationship, but now it’s over and here’s what I’ve learned from it.”
But we usually don’t talk about the icky stuff in the middle. We don’t say, “After my miscarriage, I spent hours at a time just sitting in self-loathing, wondering how my body could betray me like this.” We don’t say, “When I lost my job, I thought about how many years I had put into cultivating the perfect career, and I wondered if I would ever feel a sense of self-worth again.” We don’t say, “I couldn’t leave him because I was scared to be alone, so instead I came home every day, dreading the discomfort I’d been feeling in my own home for months.”
Why don’t we tell these stories?
Well, for one, we’re worried they might make other people uncomfortable. Allie Brosh wrote an amazing web comic about her depression, and talked about how when she told people how awful she was feeling, she found herself in the unexpected position of having to comfort them – something she was quite unequipped to do.
We also think these fuller, more vulnerable versions of our stories make us sound weak. We think that if we admit that we wrestled with a problem instead of easily emerging victorious, others will perceive us as flawed. More importantly, when we think about those periods of our lives, they make us feel flawed. But the fact of the matter is that everyone goes through difficult times, and everyone wrestles with their struggle.
Rising Strong posits that any story of overcoming difficulties can be broken down into 3 acts. (The book calls them “days” but my flair for the theatrical leads me to prefer the use of “acts”.):
Act 1: The Reckoning – We realize something is wrong in our lives, or something dramatic happens that changes our lives in a significant way.
Act 2: The Rumble – We toss and turn. We feel pain. We feel heartbreak. We feel hopeless. We try every comfortable option available to us until finally resorting to something radical.
Act 3: The Revolution – We feel clarity. We bring closure to our story. We feel changed, different. We have learned something. We have grown.
In our day-to-day lives, when recounting our stories, we tell people about Act 1 and Act 3. But what about act 2?
Well, clients, act 2 is when I usually meet you. Act 2 is when you show up in my life for the first time, in my in-box or on my voicemail. You sound tentative or overwhelmed or uncertain, or sometimes very confident because it’s the mask you’ve learned you need to wear to survive while you’re wrestling with the hard thing that’s happening in your life. And then you come into my office, and we face your rumble together.
And it can be hard. Some days you come in, and you look like you want to lie down flat on the floor, unable even to muster the energy to cry. You come in other days, brimming with hope, ready to take on the world. Many days, you feel full of doubt, and that’s what we explore together. And often, I hold the hope that things can improve, because you’re just not able to find it for yourself.
After working with hundreds of clients, I want you to know some universal truths I have learned about Act 2:
- It’s hard. It hurts. It’s supposed to hurt. It hurts in different ways for different people, but it always hurts.
- The ambiguity is what makes it so challenging. If I could tell you, “it’s going to suck for a little while, but then Act 3 will come and everything will be better,” it would be a lot easier to sit tight and wait for that. But I can’t promise you what your Act 3 will bring. Sometimes Act 3 means you get to say, “wow, that was hard, and look how much better I am now,” but often Act 3 of one story is Act 1 of a new story.
- The cliché is true: “The only way out is through.”
- You’re trying every comfortable way to manage the situation, and that’s very human. If you can fix your flawed relationship, that’s much easier than ending it and starting over. If you can find another job within your career that feels fulfilling, that’s much easier than going back to school to start a new one. Sometimes those things work. Chances are by the time I meet you, you’ve tried many of them. Often, our work together is to face the reality that those things just aren’t working.
Oh, and one more thing about Act 2:
The greatest privilege I have every single day that I work with you is to help support and guide you through the rumble as you tap into your own wisdom and strength and figure out how to move forward. Every 50-minute hour I get to spend helping you untangle the ball of yarn that is your story, getting closer and closer until you finally arrive at Act 3, is a gift.
I am humbled and full of gratitude.