Crossing the Bridge

I have a very simple view of the terms soul, body, and spirit. The body must die; the spirit cannot, and the soul is akin to a communication device, like a telephone, a possible link between the two. All too often the phone is off the hook; we suffer a busy signal. This simplicity can get complicated, mostly as a result of a missed communication or faulty interpretation of events -something unpleasant occurs. This unpleasantness, typically a negative emotion, tends to get buried; and so we construct a subconscious, which we carry as an inhibitory burden; body and spirit are at cross-purposes. This makes our life, ‘our crossing the bridge’, difficult –even painful.

Allow this illustration: I remember, at age 26, being in a meeting room of the old Palmer House Hotel in downtown Chicago. It was not my first time to meet there. I had joined with a group of others to listen to tape recordings of chats by Nathaniel Brandon –the guy whose book, The Psychology of Self Esteem, awakened our culture to the problems we suffer through its lack.

But this Sunday afternoon was different; Nathaniel’s voice was on the tape only to introduce to us a psychotherapist friend from New York. The tape unwound, and the therapist put forward his thesis on how development of the psyche is possibly altered by meeting a bump in the road of its healthy unfoldment. At this point in my mid-twenties i knew nothing of the workings of the psyche, for i was just a cigarette smoking office worker who felt anxiety at making phone calls; whose habit demanded a lighting up before dialing.

The therapist’s voice continued intoning theory. I listened with split attention; simultaneously i searched memory for some clue, some incident in my past on which an understanding of his theory could be based. In this dual state of awareness, came recall of this story:

I was perhaps a second grader on my way home from a day at school. It was a long walk, and this day i happily skipped along sharing it with a classmate whose home was about halfway along my route. Children were few in my neighborhood, a circumstance of the low birth rate caused by The Great Depression. This meant that outside of my immediate family i had little contact with kids my age. Happily then i accepted this classmate’s offer to stop at his house and play. I was having a great time, playing in the sun that had not yet robbed his sand box of all dampness. After a while our play was interrupted; his mother appeared. Like all adults to a seven year old she was a towering symbol of authority. And with the voice of same, she spoke from on high, “Won’t your mother be worried about you?”

In a flash, i was up and about to dash for home. I really loved mom deeply, and would not have done anything to be purposely hurtful to her. Again spoke the voice of authority, “Why not phone her, to let her know where you are?” That stopped me in my tracks. My internal dialogue, spoke to me, “You mean i can have my cake and eat it too –continue to play and NOT worry Mother?”

I jumped at the chance. My playmate’s mother invited me inside, questioning me on the way. “Do you know your phone number?” “Yes.” I replied, “MULberry 2994” Mom had long since drilled this and other vitals such as my address into my young head. We entered a room with a curtained bay window, where a small table held a telephone. It was unlike the black party line instrument we had at home, which was a dialess affair. Its requirements were simple. Un-cradle the handset, hold it close to ear and mouth and listen for the business-like but feminine voice responding, “Operator.” Saying to her the number desired, she was then mysteriously, able to make the proper connection.

The bay window phone was different. It stood upright, about a foot or so tall with a mouthpiece pointed at potential users. Connected by wire to it was an earpiece, a sort of truncated cone shaped thing that hung from a cradle of its own aside the upright stem that joined the phone’s base to the mouthpiece. But the biggest difference between this upright model and the phone at home was that the one staring me right in the face held a dial. In the center of which was neatly printed the number needed to call to ring the bay window phone.

Up ‘til this day i had never made a phone call. But somehow i was able to figure out that the dialing was done with a finger, where a digit could enter the assigned place for each bit of alpha-numerics in order: M-U-L-2-9-9-4 was the proper sequence. Rotating each in turn to the finger stop.

Alas, i failed at this, having been sort of Mesmerized by the newness of the experience and the fateful number on the dial, so awfully staring me in the face –which in my inexperience i had dialed. Obviously perplexed at hearing what i later discovered was a busy signal rather than the reassuring sound of Mother’s voice, the towering surrogate mom, filled with a need of her own, said, “Here, let me do that for you.”

In a flash i realized that i had failed at a very simple task, a thing that could easily be expected of anyone who was to grow up in this world. From that flash came a thought, expressed in inner dialogue. “How seriously flawed i must be, that i could fail so miserably at so simple thing!” What a painful conclusion! The prospect of having to go through life carrying such an inherent burden was very painful indeed. I didn’t like it a bit.

Reconnecting with the voice of the therapist, his theory continued to outline how a trauma turns into a hang-up. The memory of the unpleasantness of trauma begins to burrow its way into the psyche, rodent-like, hiding there from the light of day. Spurred on by the phenomenon known as re-enforcement, went the explanation. In me it worked like this. The next time, and indeed every time thereafter, when life conditions presented me with the option to make a phone call and i postponed doing so or even refusing to do so, re-sent the terrible message of my awful flaw deeper and deeper into my psyche; creating on the way a world known as the sub-conscious.

Shrinks aptly call it repression. A process that leaves only the barest of trails to the conscious mind, a course seemingly as fragile and unsubstantial as the crumbs left by any Hansel and Gretel –surfacing in my case as the unease of an addicted cigarette smoking office worker who felt anxiety at making phone calls, who had to light up a Pall Mall in compensation before dialing.

Looking back on the experience, i might have been better served by some more apt parenting than that given by the bay-window mom. Instead of offering to do the task at which i failed, it would have been much better to ask what was the trouble, explain the situation and allow me to try again. Had she done so, facilitating corrected contact to Mother, subsequent occasions to make phone calls would have provided re-enforcement of an innate ability to overcome obstacles through learning.

Yet, i find no fault. Seen in retrospect her compassion mustered out at the highest level of which she was then capable. She did the best she could and so did the young Charles. The best result of the event and its consequences is that i am now armed with valuable information

Fixing hang-ups turns out to be a process of reversal. The whole picture is seen and serially reenacted in actual life situations, over and over again, each time with a happy result. Re-enforcement is now employed as an agent of healing. Perhaps it's implementation is why psychological health tends to either get worse and worse or better and better.