The Ache That Makes Us Human

Becoming a psychotherapist never entered my thinking or fantasies.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” my father would ask.

“I don’t know,” would be my frustrated response after he’d dismissed my childhood dreams and more serious middle school ideas.

“Be a medical doctor or dentist,” he’d declare, “they make good money and determine their own work hours.”

As a preteen I suspected those professions were lucrative ones, but I doubted they allowed the kind of free time my father implied.

“Lawyers are a dime a dozen,” he’d say, “and teaching is a fallback vocation. Teaching should be for those who’ve made a mark in the world and then enter the classroom.” He didn’t just say these things, he pontificated. He gave unsolicited instruction. He was right, knew the truth, and if I didn’t adhere to what he said I was not a very smart guy.

My intelligent father, with bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Columbia University in business and management consulting, had a frustrating professional life. He wanted the prestige that he believed came with a medical or dental doctorate. Though it went unsaid, I could sense during those dinner table pronouncements that my destiny was to fulfill his unfulfilled dreams.

My heart ached to please him and make him proud of me. At the same time, though I didn’t understand it, I sensed that both he and my mother loved who they wanted me to be rather than embrace who I was.

I rebelled.

Doing enough to get by in the classroom, on the athletic field, in music and other extracurricular activities became the unspoken way I pushed back. By “hiding my light under a bushel” I not only avoided the normal consequences of learning from successes and failures, I increased their scrutiny.

“Why are you settling for being an ‘also-ran?’” my father would scold.

I couldn’t give either of my loving parents the answer that would satisfy them. I kept quiet, a strategy I later saw as a survival technique, but one that increased their judgement and criticism.

The seeds had been sown and were germinating.

I stumbled my way through college, the rebellious attitude continuing even as the ache to please and the ache of not doing well grew inside me.

After graduating from Wheaton College, I applied for and was offered a teaching job that challenged and stimulated me. The paycheck was great, but the eager-to-learn students filled me with joy. It wasn’t lost on me that my first job was flipping the bird at my father’s view of educators.

However gratifying those three years in the classroom were, my ache continued to grow, gnawing its way into my relationships and my lifestyle. Outside the classroom I distanced myself from friends and loved ones, used exercise to attest to my invincibility, and drank too much.

Freud, the consummate theorist and founding father of my profession, encouraged his followers to never underestimate the role chance plays in life.

Chance came into my life in the spring of the third year I was teaching, and it altered my future. A college friend came to stay with me and my wife following a psychotic episode. We provided refuge for him during a difficult time. Our conversations revealed that we’d had similar relationships with our fathers—two loving bullies. His pain exposed the pain of my own childhood, and the way our suffering mirrored each other’s made me want to learn more about the healing arts, particularly psychotherapy. I began reading Soren Kierkegaard’s writings on depression, which led me to apply to the doctoral program in the Graduate School of Psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary.

When I had my admissions interview with the dean, Lee Travis, he said, “I see Ds and I see As on your transcript. How do you account for that?” There was a momentary pause while I tried to figure out how to answer his question. I did what I’d done for years when confronted by my father, hide in silence, sit up straight and brace myself for the inevitable lecture.

“Pardon me for interrupting you,” he said, “I’m going to answer my own question.”
His smile caught me off guard. I remained hidden in silence preparing to have my application rejected and more importantly, be rejected for not being good enough.

“I think when your interest is piqued,” he said, “you apply the best of Roger. We’d like you to bring that to the doctoral program here at Fuller.”
His offer and embrace of who I was shocked me. Speechless at first, I quickly mustered the courage to gratefully accept his offer.

Freud’s alert about the role of chance has merit, and never more so for me than that interview. However significant its role may be when doors are opened and provide opportunity for change, altering behaviors is difficult. That following year, my first in the doctoral program, I continued to rebel, cutting classes and doing the bare minimum to get by.

At the end of the year my professors met with me individually after they’d conferred and called me on the lackadaisical approach. If I planned to return in the fall, which they wanted me to do, I’d need to attend class, maintain a B average, and find a psychotherapist to work with me.

Their gentle ultimatum and firm commitment to my doctoral candidacy reminded me of Dr. Travis’ faith in my ability. Using monies we’d saved, my wife and I spent that summer traveling around the country, living out of our VW van as I prepared to make good on my commitment.

My intentions were good, and as much as I wanted to excel, I felt the need to please them, make them proud of me—a fateful need that stirred the rebellious nature I thought I’d excised on a starry night atop a mesa in New Mexico.

This is when Dr. Jim Laughrun, an available psychotherapist came into my life. Several months into our work together, he told me about Donald Winnicott’s concept of the “good enough” parent.

“Loving parents make mistakes,” Jim said, “and ‘good enough’ loving parents
recognize, acknowledge, and correct them.”

My parents couldn’t do that.

Doctors Travis, Laughrun, as well as the other professors in the graduate program offered to be available, assist in whatever way they could, and trust that staying the course we’d laid out and being myself would be good enough.

Leo Tolstoy may have been the first to write that feeling pain means you’re alive and feeling the pain of others means you’re a human being. It made sense that the culture in my home of origin created an angry and rebellious young man, wrapped in his own emotions and pain unable to see beyond them. The years I spent in therapy helped me see their pain and brokenness as well as the source of my own troubling behaviors.

My parents’ views on child rearing hid their own aches. They were two loving and wounded people who couldn’t see their misguided ways because their own pain remained buried but in operation. We three, much to my chagrin and sadness, never explored that.

When I could recognize, acknowledge, and understand that, feel their pain in addition to my own I became a human being in Tolstoy’s and Winnicott’s meaning of the term.

Among life’s joy and suffering, pain and pleasure, it is the ache that makes us human. And it is relief from the ache that makes genuine gratitude possible.

by