Listening to Lauren



She was dying, but refused to give in to the breast cancer which had returned to ravish her small body. How could she be dying? She had a loving husband and a four-year-old to raise. Her high-powered job was waiting for her to return. People who are smart and successful and have lots of friends simply don't die, she reasoned. This could not be happening to her.

Lauren was my client. Some years before I'd been her therapist while she worked through a situational depression. I knew her courage and determination. She was accustomed to being in charge and expected a winning performance from herself. Now that the cancer had returned, she was characteristically casting about for the solution to her problem.

What was the cause? she needed to know. Was it the result of her depression a couple of years before? Has she done something to cause the lethal rogue cells to rampage through her body? Her physician told her the original deadly tumor had started growing at least ten years before; before she had marital problems, lost her mother, lost her job or suffered from depression.

Lauren had no religious connections and had never been interested in spiritual matters. Now that she was fighting for her life, this common-sense oriented, pragmatic businesswoman began grasping at straws. Maybe she just needed to have faith in Light or prayer or one of a hundred "cures" that were brought to her by a myriad of new age healers. I stood by, half hoping and half caught up in the promises of magic.

My role as her psychotherapist was complicated. Personally I believe in the power of prayer and the power of Light and Love. Professionally my contract with Lauren was that of a client-centred, Focusing-oriented psychotherapist. She'd chosen me to see her through her illness because she trusted the way I work. She expected me to keep her company in the process, so that she could access the inner knowing she'd learned to trust in the course of our work together.

Also, it was my experience from working with very sick and dying people, that it is almost impossible to embrace new knowing when you are frightened, anxious and in pain. Even if she did get temporary relief from new spiritual concepts, I worried that these shalow plants would not have deep enough roots to sustain her in the end.

From the beginning of our Focusing Oriented Psychotherapy, the felt sense of a strongbox in the center of her body played an important role. Lauren told me the box contained all the feelings which would have kept her parents from loving her. There were absolutely no cracks in the sturdy box.

We set out to establish a relationship with the box, to get to know it. Over time, the box agreed to work with Lauren on ways she could let out small amounts of the hot spewing volcanic eruption it held in, without blowing up and harming her. At last enough of the boiling contents had been released to reveal other stuff held in the box. The box, it turned out, also held emotions of gentle love and passionate caring for others. The box continued to empty and the feelings contained therin continued to flow into and become one with the body.

At last the box was empty. When we shone a light in it, a warm glowing patina shone back. It was a clear space that invited its host to seek peace there. Lauren could curl up inside the box whenever she needed a safe place. She said the box took on the comfort and security she had felt on her grandmother 's lap when she was a small child.

Month's later Lauren's condition took a turn for the worse. Suddenly she was weak, in pain and struggling to breathe. She felt scared and abandoned in her determination to live. The cancer had spread. Chemotherapy was prescribed, not in the hope of healing, but just to relieve some of the suffering caused by a growing tumor.

I assured her that whatever the outcome of her struggle I would not abandon her. If she could not manage to live, I would still walk her journey beside her.

Throughout her illness, Lauren had been bouyed up by her certainty that she was not dying. There was a huge sunny part of herself, bubbling with energy. "I am strong," she repeated over and over like a mantra.

As she became weaker and as the suffering loomed over her, she felt confused. How was it she was so strong, yet too weak to walk on her own to the bathroom? There was the fear and pain and there was this incredible strength.

Our last sessions together were remarkable. Lauren was very aware of the strong part as she lay there. The strong part was not very interested in what she and I were doing together, she noted with a laugh. The strong part was somehow separate from her weak, wasted body.

Her last days were truly a gift. Lauren was at peace and cheerful. She reminisced with her husband and put the finishing touches on the book about her life that she was leaving for her child.

At my final visit with her, she tried to find words to explain to me that she was strong, no matter how she appeared, and that she was no longer struggling. She was, she said, joined to some unifying force which was bigger than anything she'd ever experienced. She was strongly joined to that, and not very interested in what was happening around her. Lauren died that day.

"Listening to Lauren", The Focusing Connection, Vol XV, No.3 May 1998.