He only says, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbours? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.”
– Robert Frost, “Mending Wall”

Certain spiritual teachings promise transcendence of the limitations of humanity for those who sincerely engage their practices and experience a certain amount of luck, grace, or favor. Why otherwise engage in a challenging, confrontational practice if not for such promises? Eternal life, boundless selfhood, connection with the limitlessness of the divine, or freedom from the mental limitations and turmoil of mundane psychology? It is in people to long for experiences of expansion, limitlessness, freedom and resent experiences of defeat, failure, frustration, containment, or endings—particularly death, that most non-negotiable of endings.

On the other hand, on a psychological level, we crave containment. Once, doing contemplative work, I sensed an ocean of light behind the material world. My sense was—this light was the world, was the truth of our existence, and yet we could not fully know the experience of being in its limitlessness while in this hard, limited, meaningless plane of existence. At the same time, I sensed how much we need this limitation and separation to know anything at all. If there was nothing between us and the light, we would be consumed by it wholly.

When experiences of emotional intensity or physical sensation become too intense and overwhelming, we instinctively seek or create a structure to contain them. The psychodynamic “defenses” are such strategies of containing and managing excruciatingly painful experiences. We deny a painful reality is happening so that it won’t overwhelm us. We dissociate to contain the distress.

I hear people who are reluctant or unwilling to process an ongoing problem because they are afraid of falling apart. I hear people who are afraid to start crying for fear they’ll never stop. “Once this is over, then I can talk about it.” We want to know how the story ends first so then we can know how to feel about it. But there is so much richness in the midst of the story, and so much stress, and so many opportunities to intervene and transform the story.

What we instinctively fear most is eternal torment. In a sense, we already experience it. Emotional distress lives in the symbolic, intuitive right side of the brain, where we have pure experience and depth. It is the other hemisphere of the brain that brings the qualities of language, logic, and time. Often these two hemispheres are not in effective communication—particularly when disrupted by traumatic experiences or other stressors. Indeed, they are more at war, striving to assert their experience and not helping the other to process and transform experience.

Bringing grounded, centered presence into that torment helps the braiding and integration of the two hemispheres. Putting our emotional experience into language is itself a kind of containment, making it a story and not pure experience. And while this languaging and storying carries its own risks of detaching from the psychic roots of the right brain, together they are a potent team.

Folks who run marathons or ultra-marathons inspire a kind of awe and terror in those of us who wouldn’t run ten yards to catch a bus. How can someone run that long, that far, endure the physical discomfort and psychological effort of continuous work? One help is the knowing that this will end. We can tell ourselves, “only a few more miles,” “it’ll be done soon,” “I’m going to make it to the top of the hill.” Framing the pain in a time-bound context makes it bearable. We understand why we’re experiencing it, and for what reason.

Even if those smaller ends stack up in a larger process, they ease movement. Writing is this way as well. We need the punctuation at the end of the sentence to contain the content. We look for the white space between paragraphs to help us frame and interpret the meaning.

So often I notice that therapeutic sessions become richer and more intriguing toward the end. Clients bring up important material while the clock runs out. At times when I’ve needed to have planned terminations with clients, some have had moving breakthroughs in those last weeks. There is a mutual disappointment when the hour or the treatment episode ends. “We were starting to get somewhere.” Yet I suspect that we “got somewhere” because on some level we both recognize the end is close. We have the courage to go into charged, intimate territory because we know we will not have to sit in it together long.

As clients, we intuitively avoid opening up really charged material until we have a sense of the boundedness and containment of the therapeutic hour. When there is a confidence that we can open this material and close it effectively, that we won’t become overwhelmed and devoured by the experience, we can deepen.

In my practice, I am thinking on this need and exploring strategies to bring containment and closure to our distressing material. For some, a ritual to begin or end the session helps. When out in life, a person might write overwhelming experiences and placing them in an envelope or a box that closes, with the knowledge that we will open them later and explore the feelings. One evidence-supported practice for emotional soothing involves setting a timer for 20 minutes and committing to writing about one’s feelings for the entire time, then stopping when the timer ends.

Occasionally a client points out that 20 minutes is an arbitrary amount of time to give to our feelings. It is. The specific length of time is less important than making and keeping the agreement with ourselves. We agree to be present to these feelings for this time, and when the time is done then we move on to other things. Without this agreement, our emotional distress has no other option but to seek attention in any way it can, at war with our defenses. With this agreement, we take our emotions seriously and give them loving attention but in a way that is structured and contained.

In my younger days, I intuitively did this work by blogging on the kind of personal oversharing journaling system that was popular. While I did not set a timer, I would write out all my complex and confusing thoughts and feelings, then publish them to a locked group of friends and peers who could witness and give feedback. Often my screeds were long and incoherent and I was never sure if anyone read them. What was more important, perhaps, was that I’d put the material into words, put the words out of my head and onto an external medium, and then closed the medium firmly with a publish.

Other times, when working on an academic paper that was not yet completed, I would find myself unable to sleep at night—my mind racing, thinking of more I wanted and needed to say. As a writer, I continue to find a mystery here. When I have written a draft of a piece of writing that is unpublished, I cannot read it with anything but the mind of a critic—does this work? How can I reword this?

But when the writing has been published, I become able to read my work for the first time. The critical mind pops in, but with that is a sense of surprise and awe—I wrote that? Are those my words? I see implications and meanings I hadn’t consciously considered while writing. My guess today is that the closure of publication makes this possible. Now I know this is a made thing, no longer to be modified. Now I can encounter it as though it were another person’s work.

All endings are arbitrary. If we were to tell the story of the first atom of matter, we would see that story is still unfolding—and may well have touched your life. Perhaps that atom was in a piece of food you ate, merging into your body, and ultimately released. If we were to tell the story of your family, we would see that while people die, the family continues, evolving and expanding upon its genetic and historical themes. Your great-grandparent’s life continues in some way through you and the descendants of the people they knew.

All endings are true and final. This moment, once gone, is gone forever. If you’ve ever been a member of a group—even a group you were thrown into, which you felt ambivalent about, like a high school class—you might have experienced those awkward lingering moments at the end of the group’s work. Awkward small talk while saying goodbyes, feeling deeply connected to a few folks, making compliments you don’t really mean to people you didn’t care much about before this moment. “Let’s keep in touch!” “Let’s have dinner sometime!” “I’ll friend you on Facebook!”

Each gesture an effort to avoid the awkwardness of saying goodbye. Little rebellions against things ending, ways to soften the pain. Attempts to convince ourselves that we can hold on to the feeling of closeness and purpose we shared and not face the pain of knowing this is ending and will move into the past. Not that you won’t have such feelings again, or even keep these connections, but the specificity and power of this experience is over.

If experience is a river—an endless stream of sensations and time flowing—our psychological containers are the bottles and cups that hold water still. In the stillness, we can look at the water closely, we can savor it, drink it slowly, or if we like pour it back out. Like water, however, keeping the experience contained indefinitely loses its value. Stagnant experience stops being nourishing and in its way becomes toxic—whether it’s buried traumas, unacknowledged limiting stories, or even nostalgic experience we cling to at the cost of having new experience.

Contemplative practice supports us in drinking in our experience, integrating it, processing it, releasing it. With contemplation, I have that structure and ritual containment that allows me to move into the feeling and out when I’m ready.

With mindfulness, we build the capacity for experience to simply flow through us without holding it too tightly. This observer part of me already senses that all experience changes, and thus the distress of the moment becomes less distressing. Instead of feeling a sense of endless torment, we are able to feel the subtleties of the movement. Even in pain, sensations vary, arise, and pass away.

And I wonder how it would be to love what limits me. To see in each ending, obstacle, and limitation a loving hand that keeps me from moving too quickly, taking in more experience than I’m ready to digest. To see what refines us even in the straining against limitation, the way that lifting a heavy weight at the edge of tolerance tears apart muscle, so they may regrow in strength.

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