Twelve Uneasy Pieces on Research and Therapy

I

“You have to write a lot, don’t you?,” Oma Faith asks when she learns I am a professor. “No,” I say perhaps too sharply. “I don’t have to.”

“You don’t publish much, then?,” she continues.

“No,” I say more sharply, defensively, “I publish a lot. Not because I have to. I want to.”

Today, August 13, on the third anniversary of my sister’s death and feeling the deep sorrow, I have walked the two blocks from my home to Oma Faith’s office for my first “Enhanced Meditation” session. Actually, this is my first-of-any-kind-of-meditation class. I hope it lifts my spirits.

Oma Faith could be a cover girl on Prevention Magazine. Her office smells of lavender and resounds with an electronically simulated ocean. A rainbow “PEACE” banner flutters in the open window. Curio cupboards, filled with rocks, feathers, and fibers hug the mauve-colored walls. A small mahogany end-table, laden with polished stones and a Joseph table-coat of many colors, occupies the room’s center. Four chairs surround the table. I sit in the only soft one. Two women and Mona sit in folding chairs.

“I can’t imagine wanting to write.” Mona lifts her eyebrows and shakes her ash-blond curls.

I am thinking that if one does what one loves, it is therapeutic. That’s a “New Age” axiom confirmed by psychological research. Because I love observing the world through sociocultural lenses and figuring out my relationship to that world through my participation in it and writing about it, most of my consciously constructed waking life is therapeutic.

“I like to write,” I say, nodding my head.

“Do you want the music that’s playing?” Mona asks the group.

“No,” I quickly say.

“Why not?,” a comeditator asks.

“I disappear into it.”

Mona turns off the tidal waves emanating from her laptop. “Pick up a rock, stone, or crystal to hold during your meditation,” Mona says. “Invite into yourself its unique gift.”

I quickly pick up—well, grab—the sole lapis lazuli. It is the vibrant blue color of my newly created upstairs room. The stone slips through my fingers onto my lap. I let it rest there. Mona unwraps a tuning fork from its black-velvet sheath. “It is tuned to the vibration of a crystal,” she says. She strikes the fork against her hand, and the room reverberates with a clarion call.

I like Mona’s honesty and how she gets right to work.

Much of the subtext in this brief experience is autoethnographically familiar to me: Often others see me as “different,” often I am defensive about being misinterpreted, often I just take what I want (chair, stone, no music), and always I am totally charmed by watching others work with skills that totally elude me. Feeling grounded in what I know about myself in the world—recognizing the thematic familiars—allows me to be guided into Oma Faith’s world.

With our eyes closed, we breathe in and out, my out-breaths seemingly released through my pores. Mona does Reiki by putting her hands near our heads and shoulders transferring her healing energy through a mysterious atmosphere to activate our own healing energies.

“Ask a question or focus on a problem and ask your guides to help you,” Mona says. Time passes.

“Wiggle your toes. Move your fingers. Come back from your journey, come into this space and time,” Mona says. “Take your time. When you are ready, open your eyes.”

I open my eyes and see that the other meditators haven’t opened theirs. Another familiar experience. Me, being fast. Competitive. But maybe they are doing something better, deeper? Maybe slower is better. This constant reframing, second guessing myself, is familiar, too.

“Do you want to share anything from your journey?,” Mona asks the group. “Usually people don’t, but I am supposed to ask.”

“I do,” I say, aware that I am violating Mona’s practice and the group norms. Doing this is familiar to me, too, and it is exactly what I want to do so I’ll be where I want to be: someplace familiar.

“We have time.” Mona nods at me.

“I need to write an article on research and therapy, but I can’t get it started,” I announce. “So I asked for guidance.” I am embarrassed about telling the others that I asked for guidance on such a trivial, egoistic, and materialistic question rather than an overtly spiritual, matter-of-life-and-death kind of question that I imagine they have asked.

“Did guides come to you during the meditation?” Mona asks.

“Yes.”

“And?”

“They were Snowmen!”

“Snow symbolizes frozen thinking or emotions,” Mona’s green eyes are sparkling. “Did the Snowmen help?”

“They melted,” I say. “But in their place was a huge oak desk that I could rotate. As I did so, sitting at different angles, different drawers appeared. The drawers were made from unusual materials—like paper, cloth, and mesh, and they were in a variety of sizes and shapes. What I learned was that I could open some different drawers, ones I could not imagine, and. . . .”

II

What do I make of this? I had gone to meditation to get some solace for my blues, and what happens? I leave “therapy” with a concrete metaphor that gives me a way into the writing of this article. This is not “research as therapy”; this is “therapy” generating research/writing. One “desk,” with an improbable set of drawers. What’s in them?

III

Are the drawers empty? Am I supposed to put things in them? Or are they full? Am I supposed to revisit the contents? Tantalizing possibilities rise before me.

IV

I am going to “open” the drawer most familiar to me, the pencil and pen drawer that hovers over my thighs. Hmm. There’s nothing in it. I’ll put something in it about writing. I’ll go to the new writing group at the North Center. Everything under its auspices has been classy, so I have high hopes that its writing group will further dispel my blues, made worse, now, by the email news this morning that my Artist’s Way Group will no longer be meeting, and, the face-to-face, doctor-to-patient, news late yesterday afternoon that if I don’t have ankle surgery, I’ll end up in a wheelchair. I want a new group and writing often makes me feel better. So, off I’ll go.

I strap my new Dell laptop into the passenger seat of my old Chrysler 300m and drive to the Center for the two- and-a-half-hour writing class. I arrive right on time. Nine-thirty. I look into an empty room. Right day—August 14. I enter and take a seat at the seminar table. Am I in the right place? Some illiterate has scrawled questions on the board:

“What is the differance [sic] Between Fiction? And Non-Fiction?

What are the 5w’s?

Which is most important.”

At 9:40 an unshaven man followed by three elderly women comes in. He lumbers to the blackboard, picks up a chalk, and double-underlines “important.” Should I leave now? Or turn what I thought would be a therapeutic experience into an ethnographic research one? “Bill” is inked in crude letters on a nametag hanging around his neck. His striped polo-shirt is inside out; a black braided vinyl belt holds up his washed-out jeans, dirty at the knees, frayed at the cuffs that scuff the floor.

Bill sits down adjacent to me, his back to the blackboard. He pushes his chair away from the table and sits spread eagle, leaving no space for me to get past him. Too late to leave. My body recoils from odors of sweat and smoke. He takes two books from an overstuffed backpack and sets them on our table. His breathing is labored. I force myself to look at his face. Cheek-flab obscures his eyes. Black hairs protrude from his ears. He thumbs the inside of his nose.

“Hi,” I say. “I’m Laurel.”

He glances at me and says nothing.

It is 9:50 and there are now eight students in the room—five women and three men.

“Did I spell everything right?” Bill asks in a tired voice. “People are always making fun of my spelling. I just can’t spell.”

Nor punctuate, I think.

“What I want you to do is to write your answers to the questions,” Bill says, waving his left fist at the board behind him. “Write them now.” He pat-pounds his fist on the table, and yawns. “I got in too late last night. . . . I was bowling . . . bowling is therapeutic, but not as therapeutic as writing . . . and bowling costs . . . and then . . . I know you want me to be quiet while you write . . . so write now . . . answer the questions. . . . I’ll just go into the hallway and turn my shirt right-side out. . . .”

When he returns, shirt right-side out, nametag missing, he asks, “Okay, what’s the difference between fiction and nonfiction?”

One woman answers that fiction is harder to write, while her table-neighbor says nonfiction is harder to write; another woman says she likes to write fiction and her table-mate says his poems are not fiction. Others in the class “pass.” I feel like an overachiever. Or a deceiver as I have spent much of my professional career considering the question. I’m the last one to answer: “There is no difference, except the claim of the nonfiction writer, ‘Believe me. This really happened.’ ”

“Well, you got right to the core,” says a white-haired woman who had passed.

“There is no difference,” Bill says.

Isn’t that what I said? Aren’t you going to acknowledge me?

“I wrote both of these,” Bill pushes two books on our table further into my space. “One is fiction and the other is memoir. People think the fiction really happened to me. They feel sorry that I was homeless and starving. But it all came from a seven-day-night dream.” He reads the first few pages of each book: “An arrow went through my heart. . . . We were poor as church mice . . . Flat as a pancake . . . A very close call. . . . Every cloud has its silver lining.”

Maybe I should just go home now and read Danielle Steele.

“I ordered one-thousand copies of my fiction book.” Bill scratches his head. “Only four are left. If I could of afforded it, I would of ordered four thousand.”

“Did you sell them on-line?,” I ask.

“You can buy one here,” he says, tapping the books. “Millie Sue has bought many of my books. Haven’t you Millie Sue?”

“Well, yes,” Millie Sue says. “And ah have found them very helpful. And while ah have got the floor, let me thank you’all for comin’ to our summer potluck.”

“We’ll have a Christmas potluck, too.” Bill says, his eyes look now as big as . . . his stomach! “Whoops! Can’t call them ‘Christmas’ anymore, can we? Never know who might be coming.”

“Winter potluck?,” a happy-faced man suggests.

“Holiday potluck,” Millie Sue writes in her daybook.

“I’ve written thirty Books,” Bill declares, “and I plan to write lots more.” His body expands. His eyes brighten. “How long do you think my last book took to write?”

No one ventures a guess.

“How long?” Bill prods us.

Still silence.

“It is the longest time any of them books took.” Bill exclaims. “Twelve whole days!”

Who would publish his books? I need to know. I ask, “Do you publish on Amazon—CreateSpace?”

“Of course, not,” Bill semi-sneers. “It’s a rip-off. I use Lulu . . . It only costs me $.37 a book…”

“He’s not writing, you know,” says a wizened man, perhaps near ninety years old. “I’m not either. We use Naturally Speaking software. ” Mr. Ninety-Years gives me a flirtatious smile. “We speak our stories to the computer.”

. . . and,” Bill continues as if no one else has spoken, “if I wudda used one of Lulu’s stock covers it wudda cost even less.”

“So, you hold the copyrights?” I ask.

“One book belonged to a publisher,” Bill says. “So, I changed the title, changed the cover, and changed the tense. Published it on Lulu. So, I have the copyright.” He pat-pounds both fists on the table. “No one owns me!” He braces his elbows on the table and rests his chin between his hands. He eyes us.

“Don’t forget to turn in your six pages of writing.” Bill yawns.

“Poems okay?,” A man in a baseball cap asks. He looks like Charlie Brown.

“Writing is writing,” Bill says. “I’ve told you that before.”

“When do you want my poems?”

“Email them to Elise . . . and remember no more than six pages. Got that?”

“Will Elise really put our book together for free?,” an older woman asks.

“You won’t have to pay anything for copies, unless you want to,” Bill says.

“I’ll want to,” says Mr. Ninety-Years. “I’ve got great-great grandkids.”

“I have all your emails,” Millie Sue says. “I’ll remind ya’all.”

“How many songs do you think Elvis sang in public?,” Bill asks.

A long silence.

“Write it down. There you’re writing!”

Nobody is writing.

“Nobody knows!,” Bill declares. “They think he had went to 800 or 900—in records

concerts, movies.”

More silence.

“Memoir and fiction,” Bill mutters, “are the same. Both must have a beginning, middle, end. Who, what, where, when, and why, if you are writing as story . . . but not if what I call a ‘vintage’ . . . short . . . what you see.”

“Vignette?,” I say.

“Yeah.”

At 11:00, Bill gives the in-class writing assignment: “Start with the sentence, ‘Today I met. . . .’ It can be fiction or non-fiction.” I open my laptop on my lap and begin writing, “Today I met a writing group and their teacher. He talks too much. . . .” Bill does not stop talking during our writing session. He takes up so much space, and time, and I feel the energy being sucked out of the room. Out of me. When I go to save my writing, some glitch saves me by deleting the noncomplimentary paragraph because I can guess he’s going to ask us to read what we have written. And he does. It is 11:10.

“Laurel?,” he asks. I am surprised he heard my name, and remembered it.

“Laptop ate my writing,” I say.

“Today, I met my baby sister . . . and I love her,” elicits from Bill, “I hate my sister, never have gotten on with her. She was abused even more than I was . . . ” and so on and on. “Today I met a puppy,” elicits from Bill, “I had a dachshund and I knew it would came to an end” and so on and on. “Today I saw a beautiful woman who would become my wife,” elicits from Bill a long narrative about how he met his wife and how she died and a “book he’s written about it,” and his philosophy of love and “how men and women are different because men get gone bonkers and can’t sleep or eat or do anything when they seen hips sway.” Bill is eating off other people’s plates. “Today I saw a race-horse” requires a long speech about how to bet at the track and how not to and how much he and his wife won “betting only $2.00 a time, and how much they lost when they bet $10.00,” so he “knows all about gambling and watching people gamble and picking them finished bet cards from the ground case someone missed somethin’.” Gobbling? “Today, I saw my eye surgeon,” elicits, “I’m surprised you’re here.” Maybe Bill’s full-up.

Forget about it, Laurel, I say to myself. You are not the teacher, here, or the sergeant-at-arms.

“Okay, here’s your writing homework,” Bill announces. “Finish what you started today.”

At noon, Bill wants us to talk about ourselves as writers. The students say they write a lot and are long-time members of his classes. They’ve followed Bill to different venues around the city and suburbs, even. Why?

“I write a lot,” I say.

“Why are you here?,” Bill asks me.

“I felt blue this morning, and my husband suggested I come,” I say. I decide not to tell him the reasons, my mourning of losses—sister, groups, mobility.

“I’m manic-depressive, too,” Bill says.

“I’m not manic-depressive!,” I say. “I’m blue because I just learned that I need surgery on my ankle.” So there! Once again I am letting my defensiveness about being misunderstood defeat my self-protection.

“My daughter had surgery on her broken ankle and it didn’t work. She had to have it a second time. And the pain has not went away and she can’t walk without a walker . . . and . . .,” Bill rants on.

“Stop it!,” I say.

“Have you tried writing about it?,” a woman dressed in black asks me. “That’ll help. It has helped me.”

“And I’m surprised you are not blind,” Bill says to the woman who saw her eye-surgeon in her “today, I met” story.

“Stop it!,” I shout.

“Did you read in the paper about the guy who went for knee replacement and died?,” he asks.

“You are not only manic-depressive,” I snarl, “You are sadistic.”

“Laurel, did you bring something to read?,” Bill asks. It is 12:20.

“No,” I say. Thank Goodness!

“Rayanne? What about you?,” Bill asks.

Rayanne reads two versions of being held up at gunpoint in a carryout.

“I had a carry-out,” Bill says.

“What’s a carry-out?,” some woman asks.

“It’s where you can get a beer . . . or two beers . . . or twelve beers,” the smiley-face man says.

“If you want to know about lower people,” Bill continues, “that’s how . . . I was held up—too—twice. . . .” And so on.

I raise my hand.

“Laurel wants to talk,” Rayanne says.

“I want to talk about the writing.” I hope I don’t sound too exasperated or too pushy.

Bill nods and takes out two white-bread sandwiches from his backpack.

I want to quote myself about writing in different ways—“that’s why we call it material, it can be shaped”—but I resist. Instead, I say, “Perhaps you noticed that in your second story you moved from omniscient narrator to first person?” After I have spoken, I remember how often during difficult family times I had used my professorial knowledge to distance me from personal pain, how glad I was that I could “compartmentalize” home and work. I think I am doing it again, here.

“Oh! Thank you!,” she says. “I knew the transition was off.”

“See, like I told you,” says her table-neighbor.

I gratefully acknowledge the exchange, just as I would had I been teaching this class. Grateful, not only about the student-to-student support but about a space for distancing myself from the emotional see-saw of this class.

It is 12:35. Bill finishes his sandwiches, starts on a package of Oreos.

Mr. Ninety-Years begins reading from a stack of papers about his travels to Micronesia thirty-five years ago. “Have you ever wondered what it is like for a Negro couple to be the only brown faces surrounded by white people?,” he reads. When he finishes reading, having answered his question to his satisfaction, it is 1:05. Somnambulistically, Bill says, “Interesting.”

Bill laboriously gets up and deposits the empty Oreo package in the recycle bin. He’s breathing loudly with his mouth open. He leans his bulk against the door frame.

“I have poems,” says the Charley Brownish man in the baseball cap.

“Wasn’t class supposed to end at noon?,” I ask. My throat’s closing up. I am suffocating.

Silence is my answer.

“I have to leave to feed my dogs,” I choke out.

“What kind of dogs?,” Bill asks.

“Papillons”, I whisper.

“I had a dachshund. We named him. . . .”

“I have something to read,” an elderly woman says.

“So do I,” says the man-who-loved-his-wife.

“Me, too,” says a little woman in a long skirt.

“Okay,” Bill says.

Baseball Cap stands up holding a thick sheaf of lined paper. He reads, “The sun is hot/The sun is far/The sun is not/Made of Tar.”

I am packing up my notebook, Bic and laptop. Maybe I can escape before the second poem begins.

“Millie Sue says. “We’re jes’ gettin’ goin’.”

“I don’t mean to be rude,” I say, meaning it, “but I do have to go”—and to myself and get out of here.

“Excuse me, Bill,” I mumble, standing in front of him. I suck in my stomach.

He glowers, but moves aside. As I squeeze sideways past him, my laptop brushes his shoulder. His nametag falls to the ground. I resist kicking it.

In the hall I hear the second poem’s kick off, “The sun is yellow. . . .”

V

On the drive home, I have an insight into why people keep coming back to Bill’s class. Here there is no criticism. Here nothing crafted is expected from them. Here others listen to their stories, and Bill verifies their reality by telling stories that dovetail with theirs. He gives them purpose and the promise that their “writing” will be “published.” They are not Writers, but they are a group whose members write. The group is therapeutic for its members. Would it be more therapeutic if they had a more capable teacher? Or would they just produce better writing? I don’t know.

Yet if I were to generalize from my experience with the Northwest Center’s excellent oil painting teacher from whom I am learning something, getting better, despite my lack of talent and misty eyesight, I would say that my increased painting skill has given me access to a therapeutic “rush,” a tactile thrill of oil paint flowing from my long strokes onto a stretched canvas. And, there’s color, too. Colors, I blend better each week.

So what would you do? Would you “report” Bill for being a fraud, narcissist, sadist, sexist, and totally unfit to be a teacher of writing? Would you fear manic or sadistic repercussions from Bill? Or would you just not come back again, let it go, let the group alone, and go about your own business?

V1

A police officer has moved into my soul. The mongrel attached to a chain attached to a post in a backyard two blocks from my house barks all afternoon. I want to report its owner for animal cruelty. I want to call the police about the damn telephone book that’s been thrown on my driveway. I want to report the bearded corpulent librarian for insisting I pay $12.45 worth of fines for books I hadn’t been emailed were due. “You’re supposed to know when books are due,” he snarled. “You are supposed to email me. That’s what I signed up for,” I snarl back. He checks “My Account,” and glares at me. His unshaven chin points imperiously at the computer screen. My usual circulation librarian, Vivienne, would be apologetic about the snafu, ask after my dogs, and negotiate a fair fine. “Are you running out of money?,” I snidely ask. “Will my library be closing?” And by implication, “You losing your job?”

VIl

Displacement. Displacement does not become me, nor is it deeply therapeutic. It is a familiar pragmatic practice, though, a practice through which my unconscious displaces feelings about one person or object onto another. I know I have displaced my anger and frustration about Bill onto the errant dog owner, phonebook delivery system, and hapless librarian. I do so because I feel powerless to change the writing class—and I care deeply about writing. If this had been a pottery-painting class, for example—something I have no desire to do—I would probably just find the whole experience funny. But my dis-ease lingers. Displacement has not “fixed” me.

Some might think that all my emotionality was itself a displacement of my sorrows, emotions I was not willing to own. But I don’t think so. Nor, should you wonder, do I consider writing, itself, a displacement activity anymore than I consider talking, itself, displacement. If they were, then how therapeutic would they be?

VIIl

Time to open another drawer in the metaphoric desk: I choose an old manila expanding envelopish one. Inside there are notes from graduate school: “In whose interest? Valuable for whom?” Quite right, and quite applicable to the “research and therapy” topic. In whose interest is a particular research project? For whom is it therapeutic?

During my graduate school years (and for a few years afterwards), I was dedicated to the sociology of science. My work focused on “moral responsibility and scientific freedom.” Through various qualitative studies, I demonstrated that the two could not be separated and that atomic scientists understood that. I studied the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ “Doomsday Clock,” whose hands moved toward or away from midnight, figuratively monitoring how close humanity was to obliterating itself. “Couch” therapy did not concern me: Survival of the human species did. In hindsight, I recognize, though, how the research was therapeutic for me and probably my readers because it provided “data” that “verified” that atomic scientists were ethical actors, not Mad Scientists. We all had a chance.

IX

A large heavy-metal drawer holds scads of my feminist research projects, some finished, some abandoned. In the research and writing on those projects, my intentions had been that my writing reach the hands of those who needed it, and thereby, be therapeutic and confirming. “Blaming the victim” was a case of mistaken identity: It was the social and cultural world that needed to change. Therapeutic interventions were required at the systems level.

Dozens of research and writing projects by others are in this drawer, too. It has been therapeutic to be in such good company. But, for reasons I am not clear about, I have no desire to linger here, sorting through this overstuffed drawer.

X

And now here’s the mesh drawer. The one with lots of holes in it. The sieve. This is the drawer that holds my postmodern sensibilities. Here are the scratchings from when I was intellectually paralyzed, unable to study or write about anyone but myself, lest I misinterpret or misrepresent someone’s life, at best, or cause pain and suffering, at worst. Writing had been my way into recovering from a car accident and coma a decade earlier. Writing was central to my identity, my life. So any semblance of well-being depended on me continuing to write. No more data collection through interviews for me, though, and no more writing about others’ lives: I became an autoethnographer.

XI

What’s this? A silvery-white crystal drawer with a computer screen? Okay. To do autoethnography is to be a witness to one’s self. Writing autoethnography gives one the opportunity to tell one’s story—over and over again, to see it on the computer screen, to alter it, delete it, over and over again, altering one’s sense of self, because one is reading about a newly emergent self, changing on the screen before one’s very eyes. One witnesses again and again one’s life, not as a foretold story, but as an evolving one—evolving the writer/witness as well, creating a more complex person. For me, somewhere between the fourth and fifth draft—after I have struggled with the craft of writing (genre, structure, tone, telling words, metaphors, subtext, images)—do I experience not a therapy that would have me adjust to the world or one that would “cure” me, but rather a leap out of “therapy consciousness” into the transformative experience of having pieced together disparate pieces into a “piece.”

XII

Time to leave the desk and take the dogs for a walk.