Profoundly Touching and Remarkable Thank You Note

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,

New Must-Read Memoir: What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo

Stephanie Foo, an award winning journalist, has written a beautiful memoir about her journey healing from complex trauma. A couple of chapters near the end include snippets from a brief stint of psychotherapy I provided to help her consolidate what she had learned through this journey. It’s one of those books that make you cry and cheer all on the same page.

Podcast: 20 Years of "Never Forget" | Not Past It

On the eve of 9/11, I was asked to help Simone Polanen work through her complex feelings around the event and figure out a way to talk about it in a way that helps us all talk about it… I developed such a deep admiration and appreciation for this remarkable woman and the good she is putting into the world.

Favorite YouTube Thread (about Evil)

on my most recent YouTube post titled The Opposite of Trauma is Presence, someone posted some really profound thoughts on how trauma can’t be used to explain away the existence of evil. I thought I’d share the actual thread because it’s so cool. The commenter is named Alex_006.

Alex: The statement "this is the human condition" reminded me of a great paper by Murray Stein called "Jung on Evil" (.pdf freely found on google). What would love and goodness be without evil. What would we be without good and evil. Did you hide parts of yourself or did the overcoming of evil make you. I think the "survival parenting" concept is perhaps a bit soft on evil. I'm not an expert, I haven't worked in the field, but I do not believe that trauma is simply caused by the absence of good. A father who, drunk or not, sadistically beats his innocent child regularly and with growing intensity is not just "in survival mode" and in the absence of good parenting. There is such a thing as evil. And while trauma has played a role in going down this dark path, it is not the sole reason for it. Many people are bullied but don't become bullies themselves, even without much outside help. I think that the battle of the soul between good and evil is the crux of the matter. We cannot separate psychology from theology if we want to see reality as it actually is. So was glad to see a rabbi chiming in on this one. Together, you two will be unstoppable forces for good. Ending quote of the aforementioned paper: "While it is important for consciousness to throw its weight on the side of good, of life, of growth and integration, it must be recognized that this is a struggle without hope for final victory. For victory would be stasis and so would spell defeat anyway from the point of view of evolution. The evolution of reality depends upon the dynamic interplay of forces that we call good and evil, and where the evolution of consciousness and spirit is finally headed is still beyond our knowledge. The best we can do is to participate in this unfolding with the greatest possible extent of consciousness. Beyond that we must reconcile ourselves to leaving the outcome up to the Power that is greater than ourselves."

Jacob Ham: Alex, this comment has blown my mind... I fully agree that there is evil in the world and that much of my life is coming to terms with its reality. Then the next step for me personally is to not let myself be overwhelmed by evil and to not let myself lump traumatized people into that category of evil. It's an incredible delicate act. I don't have an answer for it. But, I do agree with Jung that consciousness is the transcendent answer to this struggle. Much of my life has been in the service of not turning a blind eye to evil, while seeking and willing pockets of beauty, in the way that Nietzsche originally compelled us to do. Thank you so much for taking the time to comment.

Alex_006: The way I understand evil, based much on Jung, is that evil has a reality of its own but it needs our cooperation. It is like a dance with the devil. This is ultimately an optimistic view because it means that people are never completely evil in themselves, but have rather given in to this force out of weakness, or to the wind blowing through men as Rumi called it. It also would mean that anyone can theoretically turn away from evil, repent and make amends; thus freeing themselves of bondage to it. Sadly, this is probably a rare exception when the hold is deep. And I agree, coming to terms with evil is a life-defining task that feels sometimes unbearable. I have also very much been impacted by Nietzsche's words of how the whole universe can be justified by a single moment of happiness, no matter the darkness before it. I've experienced the feeling myself; it was while feeding ducks with a woman I really like. I still find it incomprehensible that all of history was needed for that moment to take place. How you have not turned away from evil is what has made you a good and brave man. Life is glad to have you. Here is another quote that I felt would fit: “What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.” – St. Augustine

Jacob Ham: You are a long lost brother of mine... in the words of Cormac McCarthy: He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

Alex_006: Beautiful words. Really encapsulated this strange view I've had formulating in me for a while now, thank you.

The Poetry of Therapy

My patient began session talking about how, after the work we had done, he is now able to watch parenting in movies and say how the parent should act even though he still couldn't act that way for himself. He had watched The Little Prince, in which a very successful, but busy professional parent only parented by creating intensive schedules of homework, chores and self-improvement lessons for her child. He drew comparison to how his father used to hate when he played video games as a child and one day even smashed his gaming console into smithereens.

Then, he shared a recent event that left him feeling terribly rejected. He had a scheduled a "catch-up" call with a casual friend, who was demonstrably more successful than he, but this friend couldn't take the call because they were in the middle of working on a project with someone famous in their industry. He felt furious at himself for not being worthy enough to be chosen in that moment. He assumed that this friend didn't value him at all, even though his friend rescheduled the call for later in the week. He felt that the call would be an audition to prove his worth and was thinking about canceling it.

He resolved his obliterating shame by directing anger at his friend instead, judging them for being inconsiderate and irresponsible with scheduling and time management.

He knew his reaction was too extreme but didn't know how else to get out of it, so he asked me how he should think about it instead. My gut already told me not to comply (especially since I am loathe to give concrete advice), but I couldn't figure out why. So, we entertained some other possible explanations for his friend's behavior, many of which were more charitable in their assumptions, but he grew more and more angry and eventually smashed his laptop on his bed (and I saw the ghost of his father enter the room). I asked him what made him so angry and he shared that he imagined fake "enlightened" people pretending to be better than him patronizingly telling him how he should act.

I told him that my gut was right to think this line of discourse would prove unproductive. I didn't think the issue was how to change the way he should positively reframe the event but rather how he should feel even before the so-called "rejection" had ever occurred. You see, he carries a deep-rooted presumption that he is always worthless and undeserving and he spends a great deal of time and effort in his life proving otherwise. I told him that I thought that this event triggered an emotional flooding of that core experience and that we needed to get to the root of that experience.

He asked how, but I had no idea!

He couldn't think of anything that literally mapped onto a similar experience, such as a historic rejection from his peers, though granted he had experienced more than his fair share of bullying and ostracizing.

While looking at his father's ghost metaphorically lingering in the air, I said that I think it's about his father. He didn't see how that memory connected.

I didn't know either!

Then, I was given the memory of a conversation with another patient and also how our session started with The Little Prince, and I realized that in his rage he was feeling, "I'm never good enough am I? I can be the perfect son with perfect grades and perfect arpeggios but you still don't care enough about me that you would want me to just play and have fun, let alone play with me."

He solemnly nodded that maybe this was right and he settled into this feeling just a bit.

Exiting the session as we had come in, the muse guided me to ask him what he as a parent would say to this child who felt so rejected. He said he would do something fun, like take the child outside to play catch. Visualizing my own child, I added that I would tell the child, "I love you so much! No matter what!"

And tears uncontrollably fell over his crumbling expression, released from its prison of pain after all these years.


Podcast: The Long Arm of Trauma

This is a powerful must listen. Comedian/actor Darrell Hammond, Director Michelle Esrick and I talk honestly about the impact of childhood trauma on the Road to Resilience Podcast. This is what inspired the recent blog post, Transforming the Ember of Rage.

To learn more about the movie, click here. You can host a screening of the film here.

Saturday Night Live veteran Darrell Hammond, filmmaker Michelle Esrick, and Mount Sinai psychologist Jacob Ham, PhD, discuss childhood trauma, complex post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and healing. Dr. Ham is director of the Center for Child Trauma and Resilience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.