Wisdom from the Couch. Jennifer Kunst

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      While the resistances to growth are tricky and powerful, they can be managed if one understands and faces the underlying factors. If you are following closely, you can see that one of the main factors that must be dealt with is anxiety. When it comes to resistance, it is a frightened baby who is running the show. We each need to develop a good relationship with that inner baby, so that she can be less frightened and learn how to face her fears. By facing our fears, we have the opportunity to grow up and, in so doing, experience the satisfactions of love, inner security, and peace of mind.

      In February of 2006, I had the good fortune to attend a worship service celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the Graduate School of Psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary, my alma mater. Dr. John Ortberg, also an alumnus, preached a moving sermon about the essential aspects of growing. To an audience of Christian therapists, he spoke poetically and pointedly about the joys and frustrations of helping people change, about how meaningful it is to be part of their healing process, and how difficult the work can be. His sermon was centered on three essential features of the growing process—a formula that he borrowed from another well-known Christian therapist, Dr. Henry Cloud.5 I had never heard of Cloud’s “essential ingredients of growth” and was deeply moved to hear them delivered by such an insightful speaker as Dr. Ortberg.

      Ortberg began by talking about the first two ingredients—grace and truth. He described grace in the traditional Christian way as “unmerited favor,” and by this he meant that we human beings really need to have an engaged, nonjudgmental support team available if we are to do the hard work of growing. I take this to be true for the inner world as well as the outer world. We need parents, siblings, and friends in our external and internal worlds to be there for us, to encourage us to get out of bed, to get born into the world, and to face our anxieties. Grace has a special place in the Christian understanding of growth, too, for here God at God’s best is seen as our chief supporter and most loving, forgiving parent.

      But Ortberg went on to say that grace alone is not sufficient; we also must engage with the truth. He used the concept of truth in the same way that I am using the concept of reality. We must face the truth about ourselves; we must deal with reality as it is. I love that he promoted the idea that God is fundamentally on the side of the truth. I think that reflects a view of God at God’s best too—not a magician taking us away from the problems of the world, but a parent who lovingly holds us accountable to facing the truth about ourselves. It is the combination of grace and truth that is so essential, for grace without truth would never lead to substantial change. And truth is nearly impossible to face without grace, for it is too hard and too painful, and so we wish to avoid it.

      I would have been quite satisfied if Ortberg had stopped there. I would have left the worship service feeling like he had spoken about something substantial in the psychological and spiritual journey. I would have felt that he had validated an approach that I had understood and tried to practice in my life and work. But he went one step further. The next step was such a wonderful surprise, it made me gasp. I’m not kidding. He said that there are three essential ingredients to lasting change and growth: grace, truth, and . . . time.

      I exclaimed to myself silently, “Time!” That’s the ingredient we so often wish to leave out. That’s the bit that cannot be left out. It’s the secret to yeast, to a good marinade, to fine wine. It is the key to making a lasting and deep love relationship, to fighting an illness, to grieving the loss of a loved one, to maturing in faith, to making peace, and to growing up.

      In the presence of someone who is struggling, it is a common, sympathetic response to say, “It just takes time.” That is a lovely sentiment, but it is not quite the whole truth. It does not just take time. It takes grace and truth, too. But it does take time.

      So let us ask the next question. Why does growing take so much time? It is an understandable question, after all. I often ask it. My patients often ask it. We are in good company, because even physicians in Freud’s day asked him the same question. Freud tells the story of a colleague who once wrote to him, saying, “What we need is a short, convenient, outpatient treatment for obsessional neurosis.” Freud commented, “I could not supply him with it and felt ashamed; so I tried to excuse myself with the remark that specialists in internal diseases, too, would probably be very glad of a treatment for tuberculosis or carcinoma, which combined these advantages.”6 Growth in psychoanalysis mirrors growth in life; it takes more time than we expect.

      But why does it take so much time? Growing takes time for two main reasons. The first is that there are many forms of resistance to growing. In the body, resistance to healing is a particularly thorny problem in treating tuberculosis and cancer. Confused, the body fights against its best interests, even against the treatment itself. The same is true of the life of the mind. We get in our own way. Mostly out of fear, we maintain the status quo and turn away from change. All of this resistance has to be worked through and, bit by bit, overcome. One of my patients once told me of a sculpture of Sisyphus, pushing his boulder up the mountain, just as the story goes. But this sculpture added a new dimension to the image. There, on the other side of the boulder, was another Sisyphus, pushing the same boulder back down the mountain. We work against ourselves.

      The other reason that growth takes so much time is because that is simply how it is. That is reality. That is how we human beings are wired. This is an essential part of reality that we must make peace with, and it is a hard one. A story that illustrates this point is an episode from The Brady Bunch television show. In using it I know that I date myself, but I happily grew up on that show and, all these years later, I can see how many wonderful psychoanalytic lessons can be found in its stories. This particular episode stands out to me as a great illustration of the reality that growing takes time, even under the best of circumstances.

      Poor Bobby, the youngest of the three brothers, is painfully overtaken with envy that Peter and Greg are so much bigger, taller, stronger, and smarter than he is. So he tries to take a shortcut in the process of growing. The boys have an exercise high bar over the doorway to their bedroom. Bobby grabs hold of it and hangs on, for hours, hoping that he will be able to speed the process of growing by stretching out and getting taller. This is an image we can all relate to, even though it is quite ridiculous. It is ridiculous because we all know that you cannot speed up the process of growth. It is also hilarious because, even if it worked, he wouldn’t be taller—his arms would just be longer!

      Growing takes time. As someone once said to me, the only way to grow is to eat your Wheaties. All we can do is do all we can do to make the conditions optimal so that growth can take place. We need grace—the committed love and support of others. We need truth—the experience of facing ourselves and our lives, exactly as they are. And we need time—time to face all that we resist and then to let the natural process of growth unfold.