20 April, 2012

oranges and peaches

do you remember that great scene in "party girl" when parker posey’s mary misunderstands a library patron requesting darwin? it went something like….
oranges and peaches? i’m not sure we have “oranges and peaches” but…
no dear, corrects her mother’s friend, the head librarian, origin of species, the cornerstone of evolutionary thought?
mary’s disgusted sigh and eye roll perfectly captures her exasperation for being taken as a fool. it certainly is not the case that she is unfamiliar with darwin, it is just not in her frame of reference…yet…

context is everything. dealing effectively with problematic situations takes practice and tools. this is especially true within an emotional context.
not a month passes without someone questioning my profession. therapy is still held as a little suspect. more than a few dismiss it is needless, useless, ineffective or whatever dismissive adjective they stumble on…that’s ok. it is not my job to defend psychology or even therapy. what i often say to nay-sayers is something i remind my clients when they are in the midst of a struggle.
is it any wonder we need some support, some training, some basic instruction to navigate our emotional lives? only in the last few hundred years has our species had the luxury of having an emotional life. only until very recently homo sapiens were limited to fending off pillages by visigoths, prey to animal predators or deathly vulnerable to simple tooth decay. it was not so long ago we lived in caves! relatively speaking, the kind of emotional and mental complexity we experience in our current life is very new to humankind, let alone the person sitting on the couch across from me in my office.
so it comes as no surprise to me that it is not always natural or effortless to manage every emotional sensation, occurrence or life stage without encountering struggle or confusion. it is no surprise that humankind has yet to perfect ways of coping; that egos and id (new new new concepts!) run amok and our metaphoric hearts have yet to grow armor.
evolution- it is a collective process and a lengthy one at that. i like to believe we are simply evolving as a species one session at a time.
*photo credit "party girl" via f***yeahparkerposey

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