I've decided to post this now after discovering a lovely poem by Silvia Behrend "In the Garden". What struck me was the synchronicity that I had written this on the same day Silvia posted her poem - I only discovered this when I opened my journal to add her poem to my own entry....
2014-7-15 Psychotherapy is a lot like Gardening
We live at a time in our history when the majority of energy is invested in quick fixes. It is interesting that not too long ago there were speciality variety acts called ‘Quick Change Artists’. These were people who would appear on stage as one persona and then walk behind a screen and apparently without pausing, re-appear in a completely different persona. This is no longer considered a novelty, but has become rather, a demand. TV chefs repeatedly exhort us to cook on the assurance that a gourmet level meal can be produced in just fifteen minutes. There is a whole genre of TV programmes based on the premise that a whole house or garden can be completely redesigned, restyled and redecorated in an hour, or at most a day. (If we are sharp eyed and attentive, occasionally, we can catch sight of some of the abominations committed to achieve these quick fixes – in scenes out of the corner of the camera’s eye, over the shoulder of the smiling presented, we see wallpaper held up with tacks, hammers being used to slam furniture into ill prepared spaces, areas of rooms not painted, etc. etc.)There is a branch of this genre which claims the same can be achieved for human beings… Likewise, the provision of psychotherapeutic services is being configured into briefer and briefer formats. I have colleagues and friends who I had assumed would know better who still chase after CPD training in the latest miracle procedure which claims to “heal” long standing trauma or other difficulties in a brief series of treatments, or in the extreme, in one session.
As a young man when I became responsible for my first garden, I approached it with a ‘one season fix’ attitude. I heaved and sweated to clear long grass and weeds; then dug clumps of solid earth, struggling to turn over spades full of earth, then going over the whole garden again breaking down the clumps with a garden fork. I then planted seeds and bulbs and plants begged or graciously donated form family members’ gardens. Then I sat back, exhausted, and satisfied that I had done the work necessary to create an established garden. By the same season the following year the garden had reverted back pretty much to the state it had been in before I began my brief labours.
By contrast, at one period of my life, I regularly visited a friend who had the mixed fortunes of renting a small apartment in what had previously been the servants’ quarters of a small rural stately house. This house was edged on one side by large gardens which had not been tended in any meaningful way for nearly a century; yet an underlying structure was still discernible. Likewise, several years ago I visited a recently reinvigorated walled garden, which again, had been left to its own devices for near on a century. When the brambles and weeds were cut back and the decades of accrued seasonal plant dieback cleared, a beautiful order and structure emerged. Stands of rhubarb and mint and other herbs still flourished. Rose bushes and fruit trees were rediscovered and the shapes of the old gardeners’ vision still survived. The reason of course that the underlying structure of the vision still survived, where my first garden had returned to wildness within a year, was that the previous generations of gardeners had tended this garden on a daily basis for decades; and over the decades the very shape of the vision had become embedded in the structure of reality and the garden had become ‘embedded’.
So, the next time your GP refers you for a brief course of manualised CBT, or you are tempted to pay your hard earned pounds to learn how to heal trauma in one session, remember - Psychotherapy is a lot like gardening…
