Chapter 1 - Who We Are

A celebration: the final presentation for my master's thesis, given and received, a culmination of years of work and effort. This was to have been in recognition of me—until my mother took me aside, away from the celebrants. I watched as a pink, wrinkled tissue appeared from between her breasts, the same tissue always tucked there for her runny nose, or for my face when I was a child. Spitting on the tissue, she would wipe off a smudge as I squirmed to get away. But on this, my day, she applied the tissue to her own eyes, spilling with tears as she broke the news that a few hours ago my father had been hospitalized. The nurse at the hospital said he was dying—the result of his lifetime of drinking.

For the next two years, as my father's health deteriorated, my emotions began to break open—unmistakable chancres, hard to hide, shameful and disruptive—on the tender surface of a new professional life I was trying to cultivate. I felt the precariousness of my father's decline from alcoholism, feeling at once the tug to go and help him, and the desire to cut him off. I found it difficult to continue to pursue my personal and career goals, knowing that he might die at any moment and that, as executor of his estate, my  life would be disrupted by having to tend to his affairs. I divided my time between working for temporary agencies and traveling to another state to care for him.

Then, a little more than a year later, while my father was still alive, I met Christopher Diggins. After we were in our relationship but a short time, we saw how much we had in common. After more than twenty years of practice, Christopher had stumbled upon a different way of doing therapy, but he had yet to discover any literature or training in his field that dealt with what he was exploring in any sort of nuanced way—he wanted to write a book on the subject, but he was not a skilled writer. I had my degree in psychology and writing, and so collaborating on this book with Christopher became a way for me to search out the tangles and obstacles of starting my own practice, a place to process my fear and trepidation. Also, writing about his therapy presented an opportunity to absorb what Christopher was doing, what his method was accomplishing, how and why it seemed so effective.

This, at times, perilous journey cast me headlong into research about all that I was hearing of Christopher's theories, along with observing his practice with some of his clients. The clients' stories were put together from Christopher's long history of doing therapy, piecing together and re-shaping cases so that no one is recognizable, but so that the essence of what happens in his sessions remains intact.

Beyond the theory and research, I needed a more personal, full-on engagement with the subject matter. As a result, Christopher and I developed a way of modifying his therapeutic method as a communication style in the interest of deepening our relationship, not as a therapy, but as a way of working out our own issues. Because of our intensively relational and mutual work, and because of the timing of my father's impending death, many layers of my own pain and hurt have been uncovered and expe rienced. I decided to use this uncovering and healing as material for this book, putting it out there for all to see.

This approach to writing and exploring feels risky, undignified, uncouth, even. Who does this? And how has my relationship with Christopher skewed my view of this therapy? Yet, to allow myself to be fully in the writing and in the experience, the subject matter necessitated this approach. So I offer it all, unapologetically. I offer it because I believe Christopher's therapy will help those who want to help others—I believe it will help those who want to heal, and offers both the neophyte and the experienced therapist, another method to consider, another tool or means of practice.

This is our inside story, a messy one, layered in the subjective shadows. I do not make a pretense of objectivity, but unabashedly share my lived experience, offering it as an insight into a field in which disclosure is at the heart of what therapists do, and yet which often encloses itself in distanced professional “isms” and jargon. Perhaps it is my way of leveling the implicit power imbalances, of revealing my process, myself, as my clients will reveal themselves to me. Strangely, the process of revealing and writing, being at risk in this form, follows the template of what Christopher risks with his clients, a risk that both the writing and the therapy take for the sake and the possibility of healing.

This therapy will not be for everyone, and will undoubtedly raise a few eyebrows. What I offer are my fears, difficulties of understanding, and my biases toward relational therapies and limbic brain science that I have studied and that Christopher and I continue to research. My love of discovery and Christopher's unwavering confidence in the effects on his clients is what we offer to our readers, refracted back to our own lives and ongoing healing.

1 * (For readers interested in more explicit detail about relational and limbic psychological theory, there are explanatory notes at the end of the book.)

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