At the beginning of each group therapy session, we held hands as we "checked in" with our current feeling/emotion and requested the amount of time each of us expected we'd need to cover whatever agenda we'd prepared to discuss. Even the therapists requested time at the start of the meeting for their agenda. Rarely was all of the session time fully accounted for, but if it was, we'd adjust as we thought we could to accommodate each other's agenda. One night after I'd been meeting with the group for a few weeks, and after I'd been briefly suspended over a misunderstanding of the program rules as they'd been communicated to me via two different channels, I was sitting next to one of the two therapists who ran the group sessions. After everyone had checked in, she observed that my hand was "really cold."
"That's a sign of fear, you know," she said matter-of-factly. The feeling I'd checked in with is lost in the fog of the intervening years, but I certainly hadn't checked in with "afraid." Maybe "calm." At any rate, I was pretty sure I knew what I was feeling and that it wasn't fear. In retrospect, I now recognize that I was always "nervous" (yes, this is one of the terms we use to make our fearful feelings more palatable) going to any of my therapy sessions at that point in my treatment. An important role of the counseling team, indeed of the entire therapy group, was to challenge our misperceptions of reality, but a good therapist knows that there are effective and not-so-much ways of doing that for each patient. Kate was about to give me a giant shove along my journey to emotional health. I don't know how conscious she was of how important this moment would become for me, but I was completely unaware and, as always, utterly convinced of my "rightness."
"Nah, my hands are always cold," I answered dismissively, not realizing that something deeply transformative was about to begin for me.
Being right had been the most important thing in my life for as long as I can remember. It was my defense against an adoptive father who never accepted my athletic shortcomings and a group of peers with whom I never fit in, and was the chief source of my self-image. I was pretty sure that I knew myself, even though I couldn't yet begin to reconcile that self-concept with the reason that I was in this therapy group. I was confident that I was right now, too. Kate was as cautiously non-confrontational as she could be, recognizing that my self-assuredness was more central to me than a mere tool in my arsenal to commit my offenses, yet was also the latter, and had to be dealt with.
She turned slightly toward me. "When we experience fear," she began to explain, "our fight-or-flight reflex kicks in. The body's natural response learned through ages of experience is to prepare for a possible injury to the vital organs, and more blood is directed to them, all located near the center of our bodies, leaving less blood available for our extremities. As a result, our fingers and toes feel cold because of the reduced flow of warming blood to them."
She was as sure of herself as I was.
"But I've had cold hands for as long as I can remember, all the way back to my childhood," I protested, still feeling dismissive. I couldn't figure out what point she was trying to make, nor understand for the life of me why she thought this was so important.
She turned to face me almost directly. "Tom," she said, making sure she had my attention, and speaking with unmistakable sympathy, "I have no doubt that you've been afraid for as long as you can remember."
I still get chills, over sixteen years later, almost as strongly as I did that evening when I immediately recognized the truth of her words. I remember little else from that session, but in that moment I knew something about myself that had always been true and that I had never recognized before.
And thus began my progress toward health. Oh, the journey had started months before, and I'm certain that evening couldn't have happened without the groundwork that had preceded it.
Today I found myself thinking of this key milestone in therapy as I "checked in" with myself concerning an upcoming trip, looking for any physiological signs that I might be deceiving myself or others about my own intentions. They are noticeably absent.
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