It’s a term coined out of practical application. The phenomenon happened a couple of times so I had to name it.
Auto Therapy. Two friends in a car (the auto part of Auto Therapy) headed out for an uncharted weekend. East. West. North. South, pick a direction. Come to an intersection? Right, Left, or Straight ahead? Sometimes it was just that simple. Other times we might have an end point in mind but no time schedule or roadmap plotted. The point was to let go of all that held us to our every day responsibilities. Just drift the weekend away, letting mind, body, spirit go unfettered. Let the unconscious lead the way. What came up, came up.
The Therapy part of Auto Therapy comes about because, if you go with the flow, the unconscious is unfettered. (You remember the unconscious is where we store all those things that we don’t want to know about ourselves or have hidden because they weren’t accepted or pleasing to people in authority over us that we wanted to be accepted and loved by. Hidden. Dark. The bloody room. Post 11) The unconscious can bring up and have you talk about stuff on a whim, seemingly random thoughts, reminisces, events, grievances—old, new, and/or deeply buried. Consciously, you may think they’re all unconnected, but I’m here to testify: If you have a problem or issue, the unconscious will weave parts and pieces in and throughout a weekend of Auto Therapy to give you insights and answers. (I’ll explain more how that happens in the next post.)
Road Trip!
I like road trips. I always felt, as the car left city limits and living, I could feel the breaking of the strings that held us to the daily grind and responsibilities. I could almost hear the ping ping ping as each string stretched taut, pulled by the passing road until each one broke. We were free. Nothing holding us now.
I worked with Bobby Bare on his tv show and I remember him saying that the tour bus was like a rolling time capsule. They were all locked into this little cocoon rolling down the road. That’s what a road trip feels like to me. Encapsulated time. Encapsulated thoughts that stick around for you to revisit or regurg. The outside blocked as a blur behind glass.
As the drive meanders spontaneous, so does the conversation. Oft times it started with airing the grievances, Gritching we called it. A hybrid of Griping and Bitching including grievances. Causal grievances are the basis of griping and bitching (as well as the root of our humor according to Marshall McLuhan). If you’re free-wheeling from the unconscious in your rolling capsule, what comes up will sit in the pot and stew.
Such was one trip that MG and I started; I’m not sure now whether it was to a civil war battlefield or just ‘headed in a southerly direction’ to a destination TBD.
I recall I was in an angst-ridden session of gritching about money (again) and meeting responsibilities, paying my bills on time, being responsible for this and that and all the other. I like to think that my gritching is not from a victim point, but more from searching for an answer to “why do I keep getting into this same situation, and why does it bother me to vexation?” While it started out as a time to get away, this trip turned out to be a resonant “aha” moment that had me awash in tears. (Tears at an aha moment are a sure sign you’ve tapped into a pus-pocket of grief that you have just now lanced bringing instant relief! They are tears of recognition and release from the exhaustion of harboring a pus-pocket of grief for so long.)
I’m sure I gave MG some time to do some gritching of her own, but for two days I’d find myself reiterating my grievance, wailing verse after verse after plaintive verse. Until…
As we repacked our stuff to check out at the end of the weekend, I was still twanging on the same string of not having enough money to pay my bills and why was that so important to me? MG, who’d been listening for two days, a mule in the traces pulling along side to help me find my answer, announced, “You sound as if it is a matter of life and death.”
WHAM! BAM! THERAPY ENGAGED!
All of the scattered Dots the unconscious had been dropping all weekend, non-linear as they may have been, all zapped together in a whole new revelation. It was like I could feel tumblers of the safe falling into place. I felt the answer. I knew it! Without knowing how I got there. Without seeing how the pieces revealed their answer:
BEING RESPONSIBLE WAS A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH FOR ME. If I wasn’t Responsible, I would die. Just like my daddy had died.
Tears validated the truth I had uncovered as I gushed to my friend, “If I’m not Responsible, I will die like my daddy.” Only then did the understanding fall into place: Somehow the convoluted thinking of a nine year old girl whose father had died two days before her birthday contorted into “If I am not responsible, I will die, too.” There is no linear explanation. No reason or rhyme. Just a young girl’s processing of feelings too intense to be recognized. Loss. Grief. Grief so devastating that her grandfather was worried “she would throw herself into the grave with her daddy.” Grief so out of control it would cause me to learn the word, keening.
There it was: I guess you can’t blame the adult me for taking on Responsibility as armor against dying. Who really can chart what effects the monumental, all-consuming, grievous loss of a loving father can manifest in the young and feeling psyche of a nine-year old girl? It may be the reason why I have tried so hard to find out “Why” to as many questions as I can.
Oh, What a Relief It Is!
There are immediate and lasting effects of aha moments. First is the intellectual and emotional understanding that comes in a rush. An epiphany many have named it; a revelation. Then follows ‘integration’ of the new understanding and that usually takes time, work, and practice. This particular weekend’s Auto Therapy brought an immediate load-lifting lightness that can only be felt when you finally lance a pus-pocket of grief and move to a better understanding of why you are. (We all have pus-pockets of grief that need lancing and draining to recoup our energy.) Just knowing why I felt so “responsible” all the time made me capable of relinquishing the onus part of it.
I remember proof-positive that I had integrated my new understanding of being responsible…or not. A co-worker came by my office. I can see her standing in the doorway as she started gritching about a grievance with the office or staff. All of a sudden I got an almost-smile on my face as I was able to say, “I’m not responsible for that.” I didn’t have to take it on, fix it, solve it, remedy it, deal with it! Oh what a relief it is!
Did I never worry about paying my bills or having enough money ever again? Probably not. But it never again held the life and death anxiety and angst that I had been living. All as a result of a free-wheeling car trip with no purpose in mind, just letting the River taking us where we needed to go. (Post 4.) I believe if we can let the unconscious talk to us, and for us, we can begin to clear out the pus-pockets of grief, the bloody-room of our best parts, and begin to live a whole life. The Dots are there.
Another Auto Therapy session with another friend revealed why I had to find Big Ron at Whirlpool.