– On Growing Old thru Mental Health Therapy in Nashville, TN

IMPROVEMENT

By: Danusha Laméris

The optometrist says my eyes are getting better each year.

Soon he’ll have to lower my prescription.

What’s next? The light step I had at six?

All the gray hairs back to brown? Skin taut as a drum?

My improved eyes and I walked around town and celebrated.

We took in the letters of the marquee,

the individual leaves filling out the branches of the sycamore, an early moon.

So much goes downhill: joints wearing out with every mile,

the delicate folds of the eardrum exhausted from years of listening.

I’m grateful for small victories.

The way the heart still beats time in the cathedral of the ribs.

And the mind, watching its parade of thoughts, enter and leave,

begins to see them for what they are:

jugglers, fire swallowers, acrobats, tossing their batons into the air.

THE INEVITABILITY OF GROWTH AND DEATH IN COUNSELING

By: Chris Roberts, MACP, LPC-MHSP (Masters 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.

If you haven’t reached that point in your life where all of the sudden, one day, you notice your mind drifting to thoughts of the reality of growing old and your body decaying, then consider yourself lucky.  Also read: this post might not be for you.  We all, at least intellectually, understand the inevitablility of death and whispering reality that everything is leading towards a finality and an end.  Mid-life is a real thing whether it is at 35 years old or 45 years old.  There comes a point, for all of us, that the perspective changes and we realize we can’t go backwards in time and the accompanying anguish and grief that it can’t.  This poem captures the heartbreak of this reality through an inverted lens.  It sparks to life the mirage that we might find a hidden cure, a special loophole in the movement of time, and our bodies, and life.

If you allow yourself, for a moment, to truly suspend disbelief and embody the hope that your body might move in the opposite direction, then you might be able to tap into painful notion that there truly is no going back.  All of our actions up to this point are stamped in time.  Our bodies are proof of this. We can only move forward, and with that, a shadow of the life that has left its imprint on our minds and bodies.

DO WE TALK ABOUT DEATH IN NASHVILLE INDIVIDUAL COUNSELING?

Strangely, it is not a topic that gets brought up often in counseling for individuals in Nashville, TN.  Counseling should be a place where we not only face the pain of our past and our current situations, but we also address the future that is inherent in our living.  I think we all live with some fear of our demise- mentally, physically, and socially.  It’s at the heart of most religions.  We drive by it most days in our cemeteries.  We actually face it each night when we go to sleep.  That little physical jerking you do most nights as you fall asleep- that’s our body’s way of trying to avert the unconscious state of sleep we are about to enter.  For, our bodies know more physically than our minds allow us to, that moving into that state of unconsciousness is a willful state of disconnection from our life.  Each night we enter a shutting down, a blankness that will, as best we know, resemble what it will be like when do finally meet death in its fullness.  We run as intensely from our “death instinct” as we do towards our “life instinct” as Sigmund Freud so eloquently and painfully elucidated. 

And if we allow ourselves to embrace it, death is all around us.  Death, not in its concrete and final form, but in each moment that passes, each fun moment that ends and each painful moment that ends.  A lot of attention has been given recently to the concept of “letting go.”  And as well is should!  It’s a beautiful concept.  But, we can never truly let go, because that would require an agreement with death and with loss that we cannot bear.  Holding on is both our life instinct, but also our refusal to accept the limitations of our humanity.

ARE GRIEF COUNSELING AND DEATH COUNSELING SIMILAR?

Yes, grief counseling and death counseling are similar.  And in fact, I would argue that they are almost the same thing.  Freud also discusses in depth the idea of death anxiety.  Death is the ultimate and final form of grief.  And final stage of grief is acceptance.  But like, how the hell do you accept something that ultimately renders you helpless and powerless?  The paradox collapses on itself here.  And it is the reason religions and philosophers and psychologists will forever be exploring its depths.  There is no concrete answer to this paradox.

PARADOX AS THE CORNERSTONE OF COUNSELING IN TENNESSEE

The more we are able to tolerate ambiguity, the studier we will become.  The more we are able to handle the inherit paradoxes within this life, the better equipped we will be to deal with life on its terms, rather than trying to force life to bend to our will.  Reality is painful.  And it is also beautiful.  If you love something, you have to let it go.  If you love something, you or it, will eventually die, and rarely at the same time.  A good counselor will not flinch in the face of paradox.  We are all walking paradoxes, human contradictions.  The question is: Are we able to stay curious and exploratory in the midst of contradiction?  Or, do we attempt to narrow it down and explain it in a way that obliterates difference and contrast and paradox?

COUNSELORS FOR DEATH AND AGING AND GROWING OLD IN NASHVILLE, TN

If you notice yourself thinking about or dwelling on the future regarding growing old, or aging, then individual counseling in Nashville, TN might be helpful for you.  Chris Roberts at Two Trees Counseling Nashville has extensive experience working with individuals in these areas and others.  Chris can be reached via email at: chris@nashvillecounselor.net.  Or, via text or phone call at: (615) 800-9260.