Therapy Works: Softening Harsh Judgments with Grace

I had the most fun with a patient, I’ll call her Mandy*, today.

*Names and details always altered to insure anonymity

She opened the session stating that she wanted to share something, a change in herself, from therapy.

(Let me here add a small background note here … Mandy has for a while been increasing her awareness of a trait that stems from her family of origin. She tells of coming to dinners and seeing a heavy frown of disapproval on her mother’s face if she was late. And now, Mandy is growing in her relationship to herself, and increasingly able to notice, become aware of, when Mandy is applying a witheringly critical inner gaze to a situation or another person. Indeed, Mandy’s increasd awareness of this family-of-origin based judgmental attitude has even given rise to a useful shorthand. Mandy now calls this the “Family Glare”!)

Although she has been doing deep work on this awareness of an inner critical gaze, Mandy on this day in therapy was beaming with a smile and had an infectious laugh as she reported feeling “more generous” than ever before with her husband’s “foibles.” 

She gave the following example.  In the morning her husband mentioned that he had neglected to start the dishwasher the night before and Mandy replied to him, “I forgot to start the dishwasher!”  And then a relative for whom they are caregiving, who is not physically able to start the dishwasher chimed in, “I forgot to start the dishwasher!”

The feeling of relief and kindness towards her husband, rather than a family of origin pattern of being witheringly critical, was palpable and joyous.

(I mentioned to Mandy this reminded me of the powerful scene in Spartacus where, under penalty of death, people in the crowd begin to say, “I am Spartacus!” www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKCmyiljKo0) 

I’ve heard it said that if you have to explain a joke, then the joke has fallen flat. And it may well be that the chortling, energized laughing spell this brings on for me cannot be communicated successfully. Yet, I will try just a bit. Here is Mandy with a history of being very critical. Her husband apologizes, appropriately, “Sorry, I forgot to start the dishwasher.” Mandy is NOT caught up in a critical, judgmental stance. Instead, she experiences a calming sense of empathy and thinks that she herself could have started the dishwasher the night before, as well as her husband, so she graciously says right back, “No, I, I, I forgot to start the dishwasher.” What a relief and kindness this would be for her husband. And, the relative who is staying with them, can somehow even pick up in the air that something extraordinary, something gracious, is happening and chimes in with the both crazily nonsensical yet emotionally 100% perfect comment, that “No, I forgot to run the dishwasher.” In the zany, wonderful space taken up by someone who isn’t fully physically capable of turning on the dishwasher, yet being so full of human grace and care that they would voluntarily take up on their shoulders’ a responsibility for the dishwasher they could not actually start … well, to me, this creates a scene of generosity and warmth that had me laughing until I had tears in my eyes.