THERAPY

Some of the goals of therapy

To find ways to love and accept love

How to stop getting stuck in feeling bad about yourself

To create a fuller and happier life

To find ways out of helplessness and the feelings of being overwhelmed

To find a way out of the unnecessary pains, sadness, and losses in our lives

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Impatience

    The experience of sitting in a car, waiting for the "others" to finish up with whatever, and then join you in the car is a common one.   Sometimes this experience can be one of impatience.   Of feeling irritated, somewhat helpless, and frustrated.
     Why impatience?   Is the impatience mainly a blockage of our intentionality or is there something more involved?   Older people, 60+, often seem to experience a greater amount of impatience.   It is true that the older person has a decrement, a lessening, of their reaction time, of flexibility, and the capacity to sort through multiple trains of thought.  Also, there is a concomitant feeling of a need for more effort to accomplish the sorting.  I am sure these decrements contribute to the experience of impatience but I think something else is involved on a fundamental level.
      Our unconscious mind calculates, for example, it keeps track of what we get and what we give.  When we speak of "time", we usually refer to a series of abstractions - seconds, minutes, hours, years, etc.   Yet, since we are finite beings, human time has another face, another aspect.   We often refer to this kind  of human time as our mortality which we think of as an "unknown", like the variable "x" in an equation.   Our unconscious mind theorizes about this equation.  At some point early in life after discovering death, it takes up the problem.   It begins to formulate the upper limit of its life.  The question might be formulated in terms of how many heart beats do I have left.   In the womb the infant "hears" the heart beats.   Sometimes we become conscious of our heart beating, but I think our unconscious mind is continuously aware of our heart beats.   I think each of us has some maximum number of heart beats built into our unique biology -  although reality forces such as accidents, war, etc. and behavioral choices may affect this upper limit.
     So the prime question of existence  "what do I do with the gift of life" can also be contemplated in terms of what do I do with these unique heart beats.    I don't get them back, how am I using them right now.   The unconscious mind, "knowing that there is a maximum number" makes a demand of usage, a push for usage.
     So back to sitting in the car,  the person's impatience is partly an unconscious push for usage.   Often though, we don't want to know about this "push for usage"; and sometimes, even if we were aware of the significance of the push, we are adrift about what to do with the gift of life.    This is even more true as we begin to approach the upper limit of our maximum heart beats.