This season invites us to reflect on the highs and lows of the last 12 months and to name our desires for the new year. Here, Beau Denton, Content Coordinator and student, writes about his final year at 天美视频 and his hopes for the coming term and the years ahead.
Near the beginning of 天美视频鈥檚 Therapy I class last spring, we read an article by Martin Buber about therapy as a confrontation with 鈥渢he naked abyss of man.鈥� Many people try to objectify that abyss or bury it in theory and training, writes Buber, but there comes a moment when genuine connection and the hope for healing necessitate that 鈥渟elf is exposed to self鈥� and that the abyss in one person is open to the abyss in the other.鹿
I loved this idea as soon as I read it. It reminded me of when the Psalmist writes about deep calling unto deep, and it felt powerful and important. Buber鈥檚 abyss stayed in my mind the rest of the spring and summer terms, and I cited it frequently in papers and class discussions.
Then I started my internship in community mental health, and the therapeutic abyss was no longer a theoretical notion for me to romanticize. I met clients whose stories intersected my own in ways that unraveled me and left me raw, and on some days the abyss in my tiny intern office felt like it was going to swallow me.
On some days the abyss felt like it was going to swallow me.
That feeling鈥攗nraveled and raw鈥攕pread to other areas of my life as well: sleepless nights, apathy in maintaining friendships, phoned-in papers and work tasks. After a couple months I found the courage to start naming it as depression, which initially heightened my terror of the abyss. How could I help clients, I wondered, with such a storm raging in my own life?
As the term progressed, I grasped at the small moments that sparked life and beauty in the midst of my storm: like聽the mornings when, just as my work day was starting, I would hear music floating up from the Large Classroom. starts each Theology class playing her violin and inviting students to sing with her, and on many mornings this past term I found myself walking downstairs to let their music reach into where I聽felt unraveled and disconnected.
Then there are the rituals of Vespers and Wednesday communion in the Chapel, and inviting us to sing 鈥淥 Come, O Come Emmanuel鈥� at the staff Christmas lunch as we gathered聽to align ourselves once again with the work of the incarnation.
I think, too, of a Christmas dinner with my Practicum II group. Practicum ended months ago, yet we still find ourselves coming together, as if we are leaning on each other to help us remember where we have been and to witness our ongoing, sometimes awkward growth as clinicians and as people.
In recent weeks I have been clinging to these moments like small, steady beacons in the midst of the abyss. And somehow, in ways that I do not fully understand, they have changed me. Because of these moments鈥攂ecause of this community鈥擨 have slowly begun to find my feet planted beneath me again.
Don鈥檛 get me wrong: Buber鈥檚 abyss still terrifies me, and I think it should. Making ourselves vulnerable to another person鈥檚 chaos in order to help facilitate change is staggering and holy work, and I hope I never take it lightly. But I also hope I never forget to be awed by the wonder of two people being fully present with each other and both being changed by the encounter.聽Participating in that process in a therapeutic context is more humbling, difficult, and jaw-droppingly beautiful than I could have imagined.
In about a week I鈥檒l start my final term as a student at 天美视频. As I reflect on these last few years, my current internship, and all the work ahead of me, I find that the moments of connection and beauty in this community serve as milestones of my formation here, and that the internalized voices of my professors鈥攍ike urging us to 鈥渓isten to the music of the patient,鈥� talking about 鈥減lanting a seed of 鈥榳e,鈥欌�� or asking again and again, 鈥淲here does it hurt?鈥濃�攁re supporting and interacting with my own emerging therapeutic voice.
As that voice continues to develop in the coming term and the years of work ahead, my desire is that it will reflect the experience of being both humbled by the abyss and inspired by my capacity to confront it. For all of the times I have felt unraveled and raw in this community, it has taken me a while to also recognize the roots I have grown here: roots that have fostered a more thoughtful, integrated, and courageous version of myself, and that allow me to鈥攕lowly, painfully, over and over鈥攕tare into that abyss without shrinking from it.
鹿Buber, M. (1999). Healing through meeting. In J.B. Agassi (Ed.), Martin Buber on psychology and psychotherapy (pp. 17-21). Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.