Mixed Messages

As a psychotherapist, my job is to listen to what I’m being told and even more importantly to listen between the words of what’s being said. We all know that how somebody communicates something can be even more revealing than what they are actually saying.
 
People speak in code. Language is deceiving; it can sound like one thing but mean it’s opposite. The person can say “I want help” and really be saying “Stay away from me. I don’t want your help!”
 
Have you ever received a hug but you felt that the person was actually pushing you away?
 
Did you ever have the experience of having someone speaking endlessly to you as if you were an object or weren’t really there? Have you ever thought that if you just got up and left that the person would just keep on speaking and not even notice that you’re gone?
 
In psychotherapy, people sometimes use their speech to ward off and try to “checkmate” their therapist. A therapist may feel that he can’t ask a simple question or get a word in edge-wise. The person may say: “Please let me finish…I’m trying to bring out an important point right now.” And then they have another important point and another important point that they feel compelled to talk about.
 
At other times, people camouflage what they really want to say to see if you care enough about them to figure out their code.
 
Let’s take a quick example:
 
Can you decode the following communication and find its embedded messages? As you read, ask yourself: “What is this person’s underlying struggle?” “What is this person really trying to say?” Keep in mind that this person’s words were spoken with great pressure and intensity at a very rapid pace. His predominate emotion was anger. His secondary emotion was sadness. For most of the session, he spoke almost non-stop in the following way:
 
“I remember the first day of kindergarten…I got on the bus and I felt right away that I was not going to like school…In fourth grade, I developed seizures – you can imagine how embarrassing that was!…when I was in high school I hated being there so much I would scream in class…everybody  hated me…my parents abused me…I’ve been to so many therapist’s but I never got anything from any of them…when I was a child I was never picked for sport games…I’ve been diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder…Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky said I had a fast mind and should be learning Talmud…Now I just walk around the streets doing nothing…I want to be somebody else, anybody but myself…have you ever helped someone like me…how long will it take?…what do you think I should do?”
 
So what did you make of this communication?
 
Here are a few of my thoughts. Keep in mind that these are only possible explanations. Indirect communications always need to be tested and clarified to see if they are really true.

1. He wants me to prove that I care about him by holding myself back and just listening to and absorbing all the pain that he’s been through in his life.

2. He is stopping me from speaking because he wants to control the process. He is testing me to see if I can understand and accept his need for control.

3. In effect he’s saying: “You’re no different than my former classmates, my parents and my teachers. You also hate me and don’t want to deal with me.”

4. “See how complicated and messed up I am? You therapists aren’t as smart as you think you are. You’ll never be able to figure me out.”

5. “I have a tremendous potential for learning but nobody knows how to help me bring it out.”

6. “You really don’t know what I should do, do you Doc? I want you to feel what it’s like to feel inadequate; only then will you understand what I’ve been going through my whole life.”

7. “I want to bombard you and overload you with my misery so you will not want to work with me. This will hurt, but it will confirm my ‘reality’ that just like I was never ‘picked’ for sports, nobody wants me now either.”

I hope that you noticed that in all of my above hypotheses I read a positive intention into what he way saying. If I didn’t believe that there was something good behind all of this then I would be “checkmated” for sure. There is no doubt that the biggest “test” that I was getting through this man was whether or not I had enough emuna to work with such a broken soul.
 
The best way to know what’s going on inside another person is by how you are feeling in that person’s presence. Oftentimes people communicate by projecting their feelings into you. They are hoping that if they can get you to feel what they are feeling then you’ll be able to understand them better. People doubt that words alone can say what they really want to get across, so they feel that they must induce an emotion in the listener.
 
Because of our great distance from G-d, he also prefers to “speak” to us though indirect channels.  Once in a while, we get a straight message, but more often we need to do some deciphering of G-d’s communications to us to know what we’re supposed to do.
 
The closer that people get to each other, the less they need to speak in riddles.  People who are intimate can communicate their thoughts and feelings directly to each other without code.
 
In the coming days, may we become more “intimate” with G-d, and may He then speak more directly with us as He did to his trusted prophets in days of old.