Live the Questions: A Guest Post from Dr. Dennis Ortman
LIVE THE QUESTIONS
“And
the point is, to live everything.
Live
the questions now.”
--Rilke
“I want right answers-- the clearer, the better.” That was
my mantra for half my life. I was born with a curious mind, often asking
questions, some annoying. As a student, I studied hard to arrive at the right
answers to the most complex questions. That pursuit was rewarded with good
grades and career advancement. I climbed the academic ladder.
When I aspired to become a priest and entered the seminary,
the Catholic Church’s teaching of the one true faith attracted me. As an
ordained priest, I relished any opportunity to teach. My parishioners asked me
questions of faith, and I gave them the right answers. Teaching at the
seminary, I became an adept defender of the Catholic faith. I believed that the
Catholic Church expressed the fullness of Christ’s truth, while other religions
reflected that Truth imperfectly. I felt a sense of pride and security in
knowing and teaching the right answers to life’s questions of eternal
significance. I understood the appeal of any leader, political or ecclesial,
who proclaimed, “Everything I do is right!”
At midlife, the ground beneath my feet fell away when I
decided to leave the active ministry. I married and began a new career as a
psychologist. That earthquake caused a major shift in my ways of thinking. The
clear answers no longer satisfied me nor provided a sense of security. Doubts
plagued me. I was launched on an inner search for what was ultimately
meaningful to me. Soul-wrenching questions about who I was and where I was
going in life gripped me. Off balance, I dived into the abyss these questions opened.
Over time, I came to embrace, and even love, the questions.
The questions opened up my mind and heart, while my former clear, simple, right
answers suffocated me. I realized that for half my life, I lived as if I were
playing a game of Trivial Pursuit. I sought only the right answers, while all
others were ignored as wrong.
SOCRATES ASKING
While in graduate school, I had to become an expert in
psychological theories and practice to pursue my career. However, as I
practiced over the years, I have given up my expert mind and cultivated a
beginner’s mind. People often ask me, “After all these years of doing therapy,
haven’t you seen everything?” I respond, “Quite the opposite. I approach every
session as something new, an event never experienced before or after. I listen
with a beginner’s mind and learn something new every time. Now therapy is an
exciting adventure for me.”
Today, my model psychologist is not Freud or Jung, but
Socrates. He met individuals in their confusion about truth and opinion and
shared his perplexity with endless questions. He never taught any doctrine. The
wise, he said, acknowledge how little they know about the world and themselves.
He claimed, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” So he asked questions to
provoke self-exploration. His questions pressed his listeners to look more
deeply into their experience. His whole life was dedicated to the mutual
discovery of Truth. His inquiries were dangerous. Accused of corrupting youth
by asking provocative questions that challenged conventional thinking, he was
ordered to drink hemlock.
Three descriptive names have been attributed to Socrates.
First, he called himself a “gadfly.” Socrates aroused his conversants from
their sleep. He provoked them with his questioning, like an annoying gadfly, to
think and examine their lives. Next, he named himself a “midwife.” He helped
others purge themselves of their false opinions and give birth to their own
thoughts. Finally, Plato referred to him as an “electric ray” that paralyzes
and numbs by contact. Socrates agreed, saying, “It isn’t that, by knowing the answers
myself, I perplex other people. The truth is rather that I infect them also
with perplexity I feel myself.” By his questioning, he exposed their ignorance,
their unknowing, and stimulated their desire to know. (See Hanna Arendt, The Life of the Mind, New York:
HarperCollins, 1978, pp. 172-73)
In my work as a psychologist, I see myself fulfilling these
roles as gadfly, midwife, and electric ray with my patients. Through my
strategic questioning, I encourage them to undertake a journey of
self-discovery.
PERSONAL QUEST
My patients come to me broken-hearted, lost, perplexed,
stressed out, and so forth. What do they want from me? The root word for
question is “quest.” They are on a quest, a journey, seeking something. They
begin therapy with a question. They ask me directly for relief from their
misery, healing of their wounds, and personal growth. “What can you do for me?
How can you help me?” they plead. My response proceeds in several steps.
“Take full responsibility.”
I begin the first session with the same question, “What made
you decide to see me?” I ask my patients to describe in detail what is
troubling them. This is an important first step, like the First Step of
Alcoholics Anonymous. My patients acknowledge their powerlessness over their
problems and that their life has become unmanageable because of them. Their
initial instinct is often to feel like a helpless victim of some adversary.
They want to blame their misery on their dire circumstances, other people, or fate.
I ask, “Why would you allow anyone or anything power over your emotional
wellbeing?” So I invite my patients to look inward for the source of their
sorrows and happiness and to take full responsibility for their lives. I
promise to accompany them on this perilous and exciting journey. I also promise
that they will feel liberated through the process. Hope keeps them going.
Recovery begins with the cry, “Help me!” At some point, many
of my patients ask, “What should I do? Please give me an answer.” I respond,
“How should I know? You live with yourself 24/7, not me.” “But you are the
expert,” they insist. “Who is the expert on you?” I counter. “I know I should
be, but I’m not,” they exclaim.” Then, I enquire, “What keeps you from being
the expert on yourself?” I persist in encouraging my patients to look inward
for the answer and assure them they have the key to their emotional prison, but
may not know it yet. Much of our work together is analyzing the obstacles to
their freedom to be themselves.
“Think for yourself.”
To understand the obstacles, I invite my patients to think
critically for themselves. That may be a new experience for many. They are so
accustomed to following the crowd, engaging in group-think. They avoid the
rigors of critical thinking. I tell them, “I’m not here to tell you what to
think, but to examine together how you think.” Whenever they relate some
insight about themselves, I respond, “That is very interesting. How did you
come to that conclusion?” For example, a patient told me, “I’ve always seen
myself as a loser, not good enough.” Together we examined the history and roots
of that peculiar self-image. We inevitably discovered that message from
childhood and from unrealistic societal expectations they came to believe. All
our thoughts are conditioned and based on interpretations of past experience,
which we repeat automatically. Critically examining them, we set ourselves free.
I encourage my patients to become scientists of their subtle
inner experience. As scientists, they act as impartial observers of all that
arises from within their minds. They learn to watch the parade of thoughts and
reactions come and go without judgment. Then, they analyze the origin and
consequences of their thinking and behavior. They ask, “Does that make sense to
me as I am here and now?” They entertain hypotheses about the meanings of their
experience, keeping an open mind to more evidence. They feel free to change
their minds as new evidence emerges. In the process, they gain a sense of being
the author of their own life stories.
For this work, my patients need to spend quiet time alone.
But they are really not alone in the solitude. They engage in a soundless inner
dialogue between me and myself, the two-in-one in each of us. In this inner
conversation, they both listen closely and answer themselves. Real intimacy
involves getting know ourselves at ever deeper levels. We cannot be any more
intimate with others than we are with ourselves. I hope to inspire a wonder and
curiosity at the workings of their minds, and a friendlier relationship with
themselves.
“Learn from others.”
The conversation between me and my patients, the free give
and take, is a model both for their inner dialogue and intercourse with others.
I encourage their self-talk without judging to free them for engaging in
open-minded conversations with others. If we only entertain our own thoughts,
we may become locked in a mental prison whose walls are false assumptions and
illusions. We open the door of our minds when we have honest conversations with
others. That requires humility, acknowledging that we do not possess the whole
truth and can learn from others. It also requires empathy, the ability to see
things from another’s perspective. It is particularly valuable to have
conversations with those of differing opinions. Honest disagreements force us
to grapple more deeply with our own thinking and to expand our own
consciousness.
For example, an elderly patient of mine who had been
self-sufficient her entire life suddenly became incapacitated by an illness. I
asked her, “What bothers you most about your illness?” She quickly responded,
“Having to depend on others. I don’t want to be a burden to my family.” “What
makes you think you are a burden to them?” I enquired. She said, “I have always
taken care of others. Nobody has ever had to care for me?” “Is that really
true?” I asked. “Of course, as a child my parents cared for me,” she admitted.
“How about now?” I asked. “My husband now has to take care of me,” she said.
“What does he think about that?” I enquired. “I’m not sure,” she said. “Have
you asked him?” I suggested. Later, she did ask him and reported, “He said it
was a privilege to care for her.” An assumption was shattered by her checking.
“Be consistent.”
If we engage in honest dialogue with ourselves, we will
discover many conflicting and contradictory ideas. Peace of mind eludes us. We
realize that our thoughts are not reality. So which notions will we trust? I
invite my patients to wrestle with their conflicting thoughts and desires to
deepen their self-awareness. I tell them, “If you stuff them, they will only
come out sideways.” When we suppress disturbing thoughts, eventually they will
drain us of energy and express themselves indirectly. That is a psychological
symptom, the return of the repressed.
For example, a patient who was overweight told me, “I want
to lose weight, but dieting has never worked for me.” “How come?” I asked. “I’ve
just never been disciplined enough to follow through with any diet. I quickly
go back to my old eating habits and regain the weight,” she lamented. I
suggested, “Perhaps you tell yourself you want to lose weight, but really you
don’t want to. Is what you say or what you do more revealing of what you truly desire?”
Confronted with the clear self-contradiction that plagued her throughout her
life, her yes-but thinking, she admitted a sense of powerlessness over her
eating. Then, we began exploring her conflicting notions around food, how it
serves for her an emotional need. She realized that she would never be at peace
with herself until she decided whole-heartedly what she wanted to do.
Freud pointed out that deep unconscious drives influence our
behavior more powerfully than our rational minds. He observed that our psyche
is like an iceberg, with only ten percent, the rational part, above the
surface. The work of therapy is to become more aware of what emerges from the
depths, from the darkness below the surface. Becoming more conscious of it, we
can then use that hidden energy to shape our lives according to our values.
Like Socrates, Freud believed in the power of the examined life.
“Have faith.”
If we are honest in our self-examination, sooner or later we
hit a wall. We feel powerless to change ourselves. Some habits of thinking and
behaving are so deeply engrained that they resist all our best efforts to overcome
them. St. Paul expressed clearly the frustration: “I cannot even understand my
own actions. I do not do what I want to do but what I hate….The desire to do
right is there but not the power. What happens is that I do, not the good I
will to do, but the evil I do not intend.” (Romans 7: 15-19)
In my experience, some self-defeating habits, like
addictions, cannot be changed without a spiritual conversion. What is required
is faith in a Higher Power, however we may conceive it. In the AA program, the
First Step of admitting powerlessness is followed by the Second: “Came to
believe in a Power greater than ourselves could bring us to sanity.” We may
conceive that Power in a variety of ways: a Higher Consciousness, innate
Wisdom, the Energy of the Universe, the Absolute, a loving God, and so forth.
That Power is available to us if we open our minds and
hearts in faith. Faith is trusting in the depth of reality and its goodness,
truth, and beauty. In life’s darkness, a glimmer of light shines forth. We then
fully engage in the mystery of our life as it unfolds, not demanding quick
answers, but embracing the questions. As St. Paul says, “For now we see through
a glass, darkly; but then face-to-face.” (I Corinthians 13: 12)
If my patients are willing to persist in spending time alone
in self-reflection, I invite them to go deeper. I encourage them to engage in a
deeper dialogue in silence with the Divine, called contemplation or prayer. In
the stillness, our restless hearts sense a longing for Something or Someone
more than our everyday life. If we are attentive, we experience what the
Psalmist wrote, “Deep calls to deep.” (Psalm 42: 7) Or as Meister Eckhart, the
German mystic, stated, we meet God “as the naked meets the naked.” In this
inner encounter, there is no exchange of words, but a sense of being in the
presence of the Sacred which is healing. We sense that hidden in all our
questioning is an absolute and loving Response that gradually reveals itself.
We cannot heal by our efforts alone. It is all grace.
The words of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke in his Letters of a Young Poet capture my
second half of life personal and clinical experience: “Be patient toward all
that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like
locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do
not seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able
to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant
day into the answer.”
Practical concerns dominate the first half of our lives. We are building our lives, families, and careers. We seek concrete solutions to practical problems. As I grow older, I realize how impractical my life and work has become. So many answers that gave me a sense of purpose and security in the past no longer interest me. Instead, in both my personal life and work I entertain and ask probing questions. Now, more than ever, the wonder and mystery of life have awakened my curiosity. I want to plumb the depths with my patients in the quest for ultimate answers that await us in the unknown future. For now, glimpses of those answers sustain me in hope to continue the search.
mage generated by AI
Dr. Dennis Ortman is the author of Anger Anonymous, Anxiety Anonymous, Depression Anonymous, Being Catholic in Troubled Times, and Life, Liberty, and COVID-19.
For more posts by and about Dennis and his award-winning books, click HERE.
CONTACT editor@msipress.com FOR A REVIEW COPY
has gained mass recognition for releasing highly acclaimed books of varying genres
that are distributed internationally. Check us out on Wikitia.
Check out recent issues.
 |
Follow MSI Press on Twitter, Face Book, Pinterest, Bluesky, and Instagram.
Interested in publishing with MSI Press LLC?
Check out information on how to submit a proposal.
Planning on self-publishing and don't know where to start? Our author au pair services will mentor you through the process.
Julia Aziz, signing her book, Lessons of Labor, at an event at Book People in Austin, Texas.
Comments
Post a Comment