Find Your Therapy

I’m not a fan of Western therapies and it’s not for lack of trying. It’s a personal perspective born of direct experience and one that I didn’t understand fully until several months ago, at the grand age of forty seven.

For over a year, I had been on a wait list to see a specialist in Third Culture Kid (TCK) experiences. After several unsuccessful attempts to see various Western therapists over a 15-year period (one attempt lasting 18 months), I had reached my own conclusion that our thinking was incompatible but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why.

I came across the specialist while searching for information on TCK lives. With a PhD in the subject and a psychotherapy qualification, I figured it was worth the wait. Like myself, she had grown up overseas and lived between cultures, and our time together didn’t disappoint.

It is ironic that something I teach my students is a lesson I hadn’t truly practiced myself. “Find a professional who gets you.” I was speaking from my unsuccessful experiences feeling at odds with very nice professionals who were reading me all wrong. They simply hadn’t had my life experiences and instead were squeezing me into Western psychological theories and practices that completely missed the mark. I can say this with a fair degree of confidence given I now teach many of these theories. Unfortunately, in my early days of seeking support, I was oblivious and assumed I was doing the therapy “all wrong”.

 The specialist was different. She got me from the very first session and spoke directly to my intellectual mind. I in turn told her I was done with politely nodding therapists. “Don’t worry,” she replied, “I’ll tell you exactly what I think!”

It was a meeting of two adults reflecting on TCK life experiences, not an adult seeking to infantilise the client. I wasn’t trying to resolve emotional patterns from childhood. Illi faat maat, or what is done is done. I think it’s a futile task to keep revisiting emotional wounds. Leave the wound alone. Don’t poke the fish as it cooks, as the Tao Te Ching says, alluding to the Chinese concept of wu-wei (non-action or effortlessness). Life does the healing in its own time. Rather, I was trying to piece together what Shigehiro Oishi and Erin Westgate call a “psychologically rich life”. Dozens of homes, dozens of jobs, dozens of moves, thousands of people. My intellectual mind needed to connect the dots.

I learned a lot from this specialist, the first lesson being that if you have a specific need, it’s worth waiting to find someone who has the knowledge and skills to address it. I also learned why Western therapeutic approaches might work for others but haven’t worked out for me. I was raised in places where the mind-body-spirit came as one integral whole. To sit and speak of my emotional life doesn’t make any sense to me. Instead, my way of processing emotions is through the act of life itself.

Movement is life, Thomas Hanna once wrote. Hanna was a philosopher and movement educator who coined the term “somatics”. He studied with Moshe Feldenkrais, an Israeli engineer and physicist who theorised that thought, feeling, perception, and movement are closely interrelated and influence each other. I first came across Feldenkrais’s method while working in Tel Aviv. In my mid-20s at the time, and visiting Palestinian political prisoners with the International Committee of the Red Cross, I had noticed patterns of tension in many prisoners’ bodies. I could read them from how they entered the small room where we would sit, and where I would ask them to describe what had happened to them from the moment of their arrest. Their bodies would usually tell me everything I needed to know; their words gave me the evidence I needed to back it up.

The specialist had limitations too. All specialists do due to the process of limitation and delimitation - they limit what they look at then delimit what they don't look at. Her expertise was in TCK narratives and in that regard, she fully addressed my need. Her attention to detail and capacity to educate me was outstanding. But humans are complex and my main interest lies in the body and how it moves. My body holds all my memories, the good and the bad, and like the Chinese fish being fried, most of them don’t need poking. They have their own timing and the less I poke, the more easily the thoughts and emotions attached to these memories flow through me. Unfortunately the Western therapists wanted to poke; their whole mission was to poke the fish!

Feldenkrais was influenced by his years of judo practice. It was through the Japanese martial art of judo that he became familiar with what he later called “awareness in movement”. Judo is a full-contact martial art that requires complete engagement with our senses. As a student coming into judo from karate, one of my favourite progressions was moving from striking to throwing. It felt good to make physical contact and push and pull. I liked grabbing and rolling, and the feeling of throwing and being thrown through the air. It is a completely different feeling to throwing a punch or kick – always with control – and quickly moving to avoid getting hit. All these movements feel good in different ways and my theory is that they feel good because they are forcing us to engage all our senses. Our vision, our touch, our hearing, and this re-awakens our capacity for perception, feeling, and emotion. There is something deeply restorative about sensory engagement ; it brings us back into our bodies.

I’ve nearly always walked out of martial arts classes feeling better than when I entered. With the exception of times of injury, my senses have felt fully restored. I came out of karate class earlier today feeling fully in my body, completely alive, and totally relaxed. It’s a state that no talk therapy session has ever been able to achieve. Not even the sessions with a Jungian analyst trained in somatic experiencing. With full respect for her work, pushing her hands through a cushion to connect with my strength was an absolute miss. I would much rather she had asked me to drop and pump out push-ups. But that wasn't her expertise or mission. She wanted to connect with little me who felt powerless and help her find her power. But she wasn't speaking my language.

I am who I am when it comes to my kind of therapy and it certainly isn’t for everyone. I need to move and I'm best able to process when I'm not being asked the speak when I'm feeling. The speaking can come later, after the movement, if it is helpful.

Perhaps like you, I have had to put in the effort to figure out my way to heal. In my case, less talking and more moving is best. Martial arts win hands down but yoga does a pretty good job too, and why wouldn’t it? These are Eastern holistic practices and the East was where I was raised and spent 40 years of my life. It’s the language I speak and ultimately, this is what matters when finding your therapy. You need to find not only the therapist that gets you but also, the therapist who speaks your language.