Trees. And Facing Our Fears in Therapy

Trees

by Howard Nemerov

To be a giant and keep quiet about it,
To stay in one's own place;
To stand for the constant presence of process
And always to seem the same;
To be steady as a rock and always trembling,
Having the hard appearance of death
With the soft, fluent nature of growth,
One's Being deceptively armored,
One's Becoming deceptively vulnerable;
To be so tough, and take the light so well,
Freely providing forbidden knowledge
Of so many things about heaven and earth
For which we should otherwise have no word—
Poems or people are rarely so lovely,
And even when they have great qualities
They tend to tell you rather than exemplify
What they believe themselves to be about,
While from the moving silence of trees,
Whether in storm or calm, in leaf and naked,
Night or day, we draw conclusions of our own,
Sustaining and unnoticed as our breath,
And perilous also—though there has never been
A critical tree—about the nature of things.

-       Howard Nemerov

Article below by: By: Chris Roberts, MACP, LPC-MHSP (Master of Arts in Counseling and Psychology.  Licensed Professional Counselor with Mental Health Service Provider designation) Two Trees Counseling Nashville.  Relational Psychodynamic Therapy Certified Therapist Trainer and Consultant.

THE THINGS WE FEAR MOST BECOME THE THINGS THAT CONSUME US

It is not a trivial task to notice and acknowledge our fears.  In a strange paradox, we all, almost always, live in a state of fear, but very few of us can recognize and name those fears.  At least, not in an intimate way.  What does your fear look like?  What does it taste like?  How does it move?  Without realizing it, we spend most of our lives avoiding those things that we fear…yet, we rarely have any awareness of having done so.

WHAT DOES FEAR HAVE TO DO WITH MENTAL HEALTH THERAPY IN NASHVILLE?

As a mental health therapist in Nashville, TN for over 16 years, it’s disheartening to think about all the fear that lives inside of the clients that have walked through my doors.  It’s even more humbling to recognize the amount of fear that I have had and continue to carry throughout my career in this small little corner of the universe.  Fear is inherent in almost everything we do, to such an extent that we don’t even notice it anymore.  Therapy, among many other things, wakes us up to that fear.  Not that we will be scared.  But, that we will finally face it head-on.  We will identify it and name it, and then, and only then, can we begin to focus more of our attention on the things we actually want in our lives!