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The
Therapist's Journey by Donna Hardy
The Field
Sometimes one
plus one equals two. But if we're doing the math of a friendship,
one plus one might equal three. The idea is that out of the meeting
of two grows the third, an area of betweeness that some psychologists
obfuscate with complex explanations and others clarify by naming it
a field.
Ever on the side of simplicity, I think of The Field. If you saw the
film you will remember how that small expanse in the Irish countryside
stood out rich and green and deep against the surrounding land. You'll
also remember how the fierce old man who cultivated that field was
willing to give his life for it. A good friendship is like that.
A good friendship, like a good marriage, needs field work. The field
holds the relationship in an ongoing dialogue that gradually changes
all three of you. In fact, the self-help rules of relationship boil
down to caring for each other so the field will thrive and then nourishing
the field that in turn sustains the friendship. We may not consciously
create the field, but once it is there it is ours to honor or ignore
as we might honor or ignore a dream or a talent given us.
In using the image of field we have a picture of boundaries, of containment.
Go back to a scene where a boy is breaking a horse to the halter.
Or go to a rodeo. A lot of wild energy can be contained in a defined
field. Try to tame a wild horse on the open prairie and when the beast
breaks lose the first time it will be gone, as surely as an acquaintance
will disappear on the first confrontation if the two of you have not
yet built a field.
I was ticketed to go to the San Francisco opera on the October afternoon
of the great anti-war rally. Anyone aware of the potential parking
space shortage took alternate means to get to the opera that day.
My husband and I parked a mile away and walked to Civic Center. When
finally at the opera house I saw two fiftyish women emerging from
a rest room. They were met by a third woman who greeted them with,
"Hi. How are you going to get home from here?"
"I don't know, we just got here," one of the women replied
as she walked on with her companion.
"What did she want?" her companion asked.
"She wanted to know how we're going to get home; I told her we
just got here."
"We just got here" was not an answer. I wondered if the
two women hurrying to their seats were friends, and, if so, would
they later talk about this snub of the third woman. I imagine the
one saying something like,
"Boy, I hope I never find a time when I have to ask you how you're
getting home."
"Well, she is not you. I've told her in a hundred different ways
that I am not interested in her friendship."
"I met her once at your house. I liked her."
"I'll give her your phone number."
"Never mind. If you don't like her, I don't like her."
"It's not about liking or not liking. I just don't have time."
They can go on from there to talk about the woman, about insecurities,
about junior high, about the stress of never having enough time. The
turf needs tending.
I hope the other woman got home to a field of her own and was able
to say to someone there, "Let me tell you . . . ."
Field work is about talking and listening. Then it's about noticing
what one doesn't want to notice, forming thoughts one doesn't want
to think, finding words to speak what doesn't want to be spoken. It's
about admitting loneliness that goes way beyond the afternoon your
friend is telling you she cannot fill. It's about admitting fears
that have been covered over with anger; owning jealousy that has been
clothed in fabricated interest.
If we are afraid to go toe to toe with a friend at times of difference,
if we can not or will not find and share our most honest self with
the other, then the friendship will lose its zest and a blanket of
blandness will settle over the field. Ho hum. If we won't dig in and
turn up the dark soil, the field won't produce growth.
What field work gradually reveals is how complicated we are. Each
brings to the friendship the experience of mother, father, siblings,
girl friends, boy friends, best friends, spouses, partners. Each brings
a history of betrayals, abuses, disappointments, triumphs, tragedies,
successes, failures, the whole catastrophe.
We can share a thousand and one stories with a friend or partner and
yet never make the connection that perhaps this sticky behavior keeps
happening because something that happened in quite another relationship
a lifetime ago laid the ground for never expecting, never trusting,
never assuming, never revealing, or never asking.
Your friend is not there to probe your unconscious process, but the
field is there for you to mine until you dig up the cache your psyche
hid there one day to protect you from just such moments as this.
One does this work in conversation, in pondering, in reading, in journal
writing, in prayer, in therapy. It can happen dramatically with a
break-through dream or a mountain top revelation; it's more likely
to happen gradually, like an old woman hoeing a field and turning
up a gold ring she lost a long time ago.
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