I love when what I’m reading stops me in my tracks and I have a bodily sense that it matters to me. I’m guessing you all know this experience.
Recently, I re-read Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879). The play caused outrage at the time because of the final act. Nora, the respectable wife of a respectable husband, leaves him - and her children - in order to find herself.
As I read that final act, I could feel something stir inside. Nora and Torvald have the first real conversation of their marriage, resulting in her waking up to herself, and seeing for the first time how she has been merely acting a role, living as a ‘doll wife’ in a doll’s house created for her by the men in her life.
The phrase reminded me of an expression used, so many years later, by Timothy Leary, a former Harvard professor in the 1960s, in describing his first experience of LSD.
LSD gave him new insight into his relationships. His interactions with his daughter had been robotic, not alive. They had been relating to one another like two ‘dolls on wheels’ squeaking back and forth. They were merely living out roles society had prescribed for them, like little dolls.
It’s clear to us now in 2024, that in 1879, people were conditioned to play certain roles - the role of devoted wife, sweet mother, hard-working father.
What resonated with me is how hard it can still be to know who I am apart from my conditioning. But Focusing has helped me with that.
I was always intellectually aware of being constrained by my conditioning, but I could not feel the aliveness that was me. Focusing has helped me experience myself.
I like how Carl Rogers put it: "the client can let himself examine various aspects of his experience as they actually feel to him, as they are apprehended through his sensory and visceral equipment, without distorting them to fit the existing concept of self.”
It’s immensely freeing to notice and feel your own experience as it actually is, rather than trying to make yourself feel something else.
When Nora declares she is leaving to find her real self, her shocked husband, Torvald, asks if she will return. I loved her reply: “How should I know? I’ve no idea what I might turn out to be”.
Yes, how could anyone who is committed to knowing themselves know who they might turn out to be?
This reminds me of another keystone in Focusing philosophy - we are not fixed entities, but rather, we are ‘in the process of becoming’. We cannot ever know how that will turn out.
I love how the arts or stories can stoke something in us.
Are you reading anything right now that is stoking something in you?
If yes, maybe it is a worthy starting place for a Focusing session.
