Follow Up – Aging without Makeup

On Tuesday, I wrote a blog post entitled Blogging without Makeup discussing some emails from a mailing list of Group Psychotherapists that I read. On Thursday, I celebrated my fiftieth birthday and wrote about turning fifty. Both blog posts have received a lot of comment and I would like to try and combine some of my reactions to this in a single, somewhat coherent blog post.

Anthropology Professor Dave Jacobson of Brandeis wrote about the question of what is the ‘real self’. Who is the self real to? Ourselves? Others? Some combination? How does it change based on context or time? To me, it seems as ‘self’ is a function of both our own experiences of ourselves and the experiences others have of ourselves and that it is constantly changing as we grow and have new interactions and experiences.

One experience that a friend from the mailing list suggested is blogging with makeup; that is presenting ourselves as something other than how we currently see ourselves. It seems to me that this is a valuable insight in how we might change ourselves into something we would like to be.

Another person brought up the image of Pygmalion and the modern musical version, My Fair Lady. It seems like this is a very powerful idea for therapy. To the mailing list, I wrote:

Your comment about Pygmalion particularly jumped out at me. In Pygmalion, like My Fair Lady, the hero creates someone else. Yet isn't that, in a certain way, what we do in therapy?

When I was younger, I resisted therapy because I was pretty happy with who I was, in spite of my own issues that I really needed to work out. At one point, however, I came to realize that these issues where impeding me and making me unhappy, and that I needed to, shall we say, recreate myself into an image closer to what I would like to be. In short, I was my own Pygmalion.

Isn't that what we want from people entering therapy, an exploration into who they could be if they addressed their insecurities, their inabilities to properly control anger, drinking or drugs, their need to be in the spotlight, their difficulties finding joy and happiness, etc? Yet doesn't this also bring up interesting issues of where transference and counter transference come in? Who is the patient trying to recreate themselves as? Their own vision? The vision of their therapist? A vision they gain from a group or society around them?

To return to My Fair Lady, perhaps we can change one of the songs just a little bit to
"The gain in pain is helpful to obtain"

In a discussion where myself and another person were being wished happy birthday, one person noted that so many of the birthday wishes focused on youthfulness. To this, I wrote:

It seems like we live in a culture that values youthfulness more than it values wisdom. Why is that?

Perhaps some of it is the fear of our own mortality. Each year the older we get, we are a year closer to death. As we get older, various parts of the body stop working as well as they used to, which can result in the loss of some pleasures and an introduction of new displeasures. I seem to recall Yalom talking about that in one of his novels and about how if he ever got to a particular difficult impasse, he would ask the patient how the patient would want to be remembered at a funeral. As an aside, this fits nicely into the Pygmalion thread, how do we choose to envision what we would like to be?

So, what about wisdom, or perhaps to use the words from another email, "being old in spirit"? I must admit, it is the wisdom of this group as opposed to any youthful spriteliness that I find so attractive.

Perhaps I am sensitive to this because here in Connecticut a reporter has brought an age discrimination suit against a local television station. The station is alleged to have repeated demoted women when they have gotten into their thirties to have younger, more nubile reporters. Personally, I think our news would be much better with the wisdom of older reporters.

With that, let me return to the emails and again thank everyone who shared birthday wishes. What a wonderful world it would be if we could aspire to the wisdom of older members of this list instead of youthfulness of the 23-year-old female reporters.

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