The note below was sent to me this morning. It left me moved and stunned that one of us humans could be so heroic and courageous. It is shared here with permission.
Dear Dr. Ham,
I hope this message finds you well. …I felt inspired to reach out to you in gratitude today, after almost two years of following, learning from, and being touched by your work.
Today I attended the first session of family therapy I have ever tried with my mom. She immigrated with her family in the 1960s; she and her siblings were the only Asian students in their entire school growing up. In her life she has endured an unspeakable amount of loss, hardship, and violence--violence that, sadly, she then took out on my siblings and me. Our relationships as a family are so fractured now, and the deepest pain I've ever known has been feeling disconnected from my siblings and my mom--misunderstood and unwanted. For me it was a ray of hope that she was finally willing to try a therapy session together when I asked her.
While driving to the session today (it was a ways away from where I live), I decided to re-listen to your interview with Dan Harris on "Ten Percent Happier," to help calm my anxieties about how the session might go (my mom has never been to therapy before and has historically had, let's just say, some doubts about the merits of psychology as a field). I'd listened to this episode and been so comforted and enlivened by it before, but when it got to the part where you were talking about holding the other person with your gaze, where there is nothing else left to say, your words pierced my heart anew. I thought, I can dwell in this love.
While the session was an absolute failure as far as us being able to communicate or get anywhere regarding our relationship--my mom would barely look at me and stormed out at the end--I somehow didn't leave feeling the knifing shame and self-disgust I usually feel after difficult interactions with my mom. I wondered why that was, and I also realized I hadn't felt afraid at all during the session, even though her anger used to frighten me more than anything else in the world. Throughout the session, I had simply been trying to hold her with my gaze while she spoke, even when she wouldn't look in my direction, and to try to send my love toward her so she would be able to feel it. I don't think that she is in a place to feel or receive it at this moment, but in trying to send this love toward her I realized I could see her sitting there as so many versions of her younger self: the little girl who was bullied mercilessly at school and beaten at home, who was raised mostly by relatives and daycares because her mother was working to keep them afloat and her father was sick; the young woman who lost her first child and wanted so much to be a mother again that all she has tried to do is hold on to her living children at all costs, in the only ways she knows how. I saw a person who is afraid of being alone and abandoned and my heart ached for her. I feel so much love for my mom.
I have sometimes wondered why it is worth it for me to keep living if my own family doesn't want me anymore, and in the past I hadn't really been able to articulate a true reason that would allow me to go on without numbness or despair. Today, because of you, I was able to feel that true reason. Thank you for all the work you do to make your voice and ideas available to people who may never have the opportunity and good fortune to be your patients. Thank you for reminding me that there is goodness we can search and work for in the world, in others, and in ourselves. I am grateful and humbled to have found your work and to be able to grow and open my heart because of it.
With admiration and gratitude, and my warmest and best wishes to you always,