Mortality Hill Revisited

If you read my previous post (which is annoying for me to reread because I sound pretty whiny there), you’d know why I call a particular part of a walking trail Mortality Hill. I still think of it that way and yet when I’m on the trail, the hill doesn’t have the impact it did back then.

Little did I know my mother would pass away two months later, in May 2022. She was eventually diagnosed with late stage lung cancer and dead within a few weeks. Fast forward to the present, late fall 2025. As I’m walking up that hill now, I recall the conversation my mother and I were having that day. It was kind of typical in that our differences prevented us from ever really connecting. I was talking about something important to me and she was dismissing it, once more giving me the impression she didn’t care about my perspective.

I don’t really see it that way anymore, though. Her perspective was just as valid and relevant to her as mine was to me. She hated my husband and I was attempting to share something important about him that she didn’t want to hear. By the time we reached the top of the hill and sat down, she’d had enough of me and my endless talking about things she didn’t and apparently couldn’t understand. At the same time, she was physically impaired by the yet to be diagnosed cancer that would end her life two months later.

If only I’d known, I wouldn’t have pressed the issue. I would have respected her wish to not talk about him, her desire to remain incurious about my relationship with him. My thoughts and feelings about her are so complicated.

I give her the benefit of the doubt and at the same time accuse her of indifference and neglect. Then I look at myself as a mother and see I’m no different from her.

Estranged from my own daughter, I realize she too sees me as all those things I “saw” in (projected onto) my own mother.

I wonder whether there a bridge where she and I can somehow meet in the middle. A place we could rest with one another and just be together, as mother and daughter. I can no longer do that with my mother.

Does she think of me with compassion or care, or is it just resentment and contempt? Maybe some swirling mix. I think of her often and wish her so much happiness, joy, peace, contentment, and fulfillment.

Maybe one day I will understand the complexities of this most perplexing mother-daughter dynamic.

Sometimes (now, for example) it starts to feel like navel-gazing. The relationship a person has with a dead parent is as complicated as it was when the parent was alive. The things I wanted to understand then are still elusive and now, it seems, impossibly out of reach. At least when she was alive we could try to connect in a more meaningful way.

Thanks for indulging me here. I don’t know who still reads this blog or how someone might find it. Do comment, if you have thoughts or questions about any of this.

Mortality Hill

Hello! I’m curious who might be reading this as I haven’t posted in a good while.

I had an experience yesterday and just wanted to put it into words. First, my habit is to avoid “Mortality Hill,” my nickname for a stretch of trail that branches off the main trail at a local park. This elevated arc detour is the place where my mother once lost consciousness, bubbling at the mouth and scaring the shit out of me. We had been walking and, at the top of that hill, had to stop and rest on the park bench. In a panic and mind racing, I wondered how we would make it back to the car. Long story short, we did, and my mother recovered, although she says she’s not been the same since then.

Now you see why I avoid that particular area. No need to unnecessarily re-traumatize myself. So, yesterday while walking the park I bypassed the treacherous route. As I looked ahead on the trail, I noticed two women walking together. I had seen them twice earlier and, the first time, noticed they were too deep in conversation to acknowledge my presence as I walked by. I said “hello,” perhaps a bit too loudly (although not intentionally), and they both seemed to startle as they returned the greeting and kept going. (Side note: A pet peeve of mine is people on the trail who won’t even make eye contact. Just one more reminder of how unnecessarily isolated we can be from one another.) The second time, there was no mistaking their rudeness as they approached while “forcing” me out of their way by refusing to follow basic trail etiquette of staying to the right, as we do in our vehicles on the road. So, when I saw them in the distance, approaching for the third time, I made a quick decision and abruptly changed direction to follow a branch of the trail that led out of the park and onto the sidewalk of a busy street. Since I didn’t want to leave the park, I ended up trekking up a dirt and rock trail that jutted out from the paved one. Well, guess where that led?

The dirt trail wound around the woods and spilled right out onto Mortality Hill and the bench I had been avoiding since that awful experience with my mother. Of course, by then I needed to stop and rest. There I sat, feeling like a fool on the hill.

How did this happen? Not ten minutes earlier, I had intentionally avoided that hill and now I was there, having arrived by a back route after (intentionally) avoiding a couple of women who had annoyed me out of either ignorance or spite, who knows. (Did I really say “hello” too loudly?) So, there I sat, contemplating life, death, and synchronicity. Those oblivious women had successfully – even if inadvertently – redirected me to exactly where I didn’t want to be. After a brief respite, I ambled down the hill and on my way, rattled.

That’s it. There’s more, but you get the gist. How often do plans go awry? We intend to do one thing and end up doing something totally unexpected.

Thank you for visiting today.

Part 3, Change

This will be the final post in the series. I started out enthusiastic but am losing steam. Ventura did such a good job of describing the wisdom of psychotherapy's elders that my attempt to summarize is going to be inadequate, no matter what. Will just quote a few more things and call it a day. My mental health is suffering enough.

Since I’m not an insider, but not exactly an outsider either, my “voice” might be of limited value. Still, as a person, I deserve to be heard. Pages 5 and 6 of the Elders document are about therapists taking positions on social issues. “The very fact that you’re neutral is a position,” said Hillman. There is nothing neutral about a political act, and taking a stand is political. A therapist’s mission is to awaken a sense of responsibility. How is this done? Erving Polster suggests extending psychotherapy into communities of large therapy groups, available for a lifetime. Therapists would “institutionalize friendship and group connection… and become, in effect, therapeutic community organizers and leaders.” Another elder, Mary Catherine Bateson, said, “All of us are complicit in a world system that maintains poverty and leads to environmental degradation.” To the question of political timidity, she said, “we’re using a lot of our energy to repress and stop thinking about the asymmetries in our relationship to the rest of the world.” Etc. Etc. Etc.

As mentioned in part 1, I attended the 2009 conference. When it was over, I spent my last night in California at a bed and breakfast in Newport Beach. It was a relief to be out of there, quite frankly. Although the training was superb, ultimately I would walk away from an internship and abandon the idea of becoming a therapist.

The End

(Newport Beach, 2009)

Part 2, A Moral Choice

The way we deal with our need for power is key, says William Glasser, another one of my personal favorite elders. The question of whether power is treatable is an interesting one. Continuing with Ventura’s article, he describes elder Thomas Szasz as “the longtime gadfly of traditional psychiatry.” An annoyance. Szasz sees pharmacology plus managed care as a deadly combination.

Yet another elder, Cloe Madanes, sees our violent behavior toward one another as the culprit. Because of this, “relationships are the battlefield of treatment.” Interestingly, in her expansion of the idea, she actually – maybe inadvertently, or not – advocates something that would ultimately lead all potential clients away from psychological services. “We have to organize people to help themselves, and organize them to change their relationships and determine their own future,” she says.

The gadfly took it further. Since the government controls managed care, Szasz says, therapists would in essence be colluding with “the government-instigated idea of who fits in and who doesn't.” Standing against that would mean risking their livelihoods in pursuit of mental health for all.

At this point, nobody cheered and nobody booed. Seems the audience was being asked to make “a moral choice that they were unprepared to face.” But a “collective national strike” is what another elder suggested was needed. James Hillman has made numerous appearances in my blog. While the topic of power as a treatable problem had already been raised, here was Hillman suggesting audience members use their power as essential workers to strike. The demand of the mental health care workers would not be monetary. It would be “for justice and compassion toward their patients – strike against bureaucracies, strike against managed care, strike against pharmacological quick fixes that often don't work.”

Political engagement is reactionary, though. People trained in anger management are by that very training cut off from staging a strike. Hamstrung by professional ethics, therapists typically don’t concern themselves with their clients’ political lives.

I invite you, dear reader, to engage with what I’ve written here. It’s an attempt at summarizing pages 3 and 4 of Ventura’s article. My intention is to write two more posts, covering the remaining four pages.

Dialogue: The Myth of Psychotherapy
James Hillman, PhD and Sue Johnson, PhD

December 2009, Evolution of Psychotherapy

(I snapped this photo from the audience)

Part 1, A World Gone Mad

I recently heard that a good way to tell a story is to arrive late and leave early. With that in mind, I’m starting with notes I took yesterday about an article written in 2006, one that I just discovered (maybe around the time I heard the chestnut about approaching writing as if you are going to a party). I now wish I’d seen the article in 2009. “The Wisdom of the Elders: Psychotherapy’s Elders Throw Down the Gauntlet” by Michael Ventura is a commentary on a psychological conference that is held every few years. If I had read it before volunteering at the 2009 conference, I would have walked in with different expectations. At the time, I was completing my coursework for a master’s degree in professional counseling. My practicum supervisor suggested I attend the conference as a volunteer, not only for the experience but to get a significant discount on admission.

Ventura’s article starts with a description of the conference site. It brought back my memories of staying in a hotel within walking distance. Both hotel and convention center are located directly across the street from Disneyland. While walking to and fro between hotel and conference, the sound of people screaming on the rides was constant. So, imagine my surprise while reading the opening paragraph:

"The Anaheim Convention Center, site of last December's ‘Evolution of Psychotherapy’ conference [2005], is a monument to the impersonal: antiseptic cavernous halls; inhumanly and impractically high ceilings; enormous, featureless rooms; and escalators almost the length of a city block. Its decor consists of hard and soft grays and whites, relentlessly neutral and acoustically dead. Without a microphone, no one can hear you, even if you scream.”

The screams coming from Disneyland were inaudible inside that “monument to the impersonal,” too.

I need to take a step back here. This is not a report on the conference, and it’s not just a review of the article. It’s my attempt to step back in time to remember a significant event, that conference. There is so much to tell and I don’t know where to begin. I learned in the article that “Patch Adams” himself was a guest at the 2005 conference. Last night, I watched a video of him speaking in 2010. He says this country, the United States, rewards fame rather than intelligence. His clowning has made him famous and on his tours he spreads an impassioned and intelligent message. Perhaps this comment by one of the viewers of the video sums it up: “No price should be placed on well-being, ever.”

Hunter Doherty “Patch” Adams gave the keynote speech at the 2005 conference. The speech was, according to plan, supposed to address mental illness as a normal response to disaster that requires not medication but a call for action to create healthy contexts. Ventura mused upon why a keynote clown was an appropriate tone-setter for a gathering whose stated theme was a call to social action.

Thinking about this today, I wonder whether sending in the clowns might be just the thing. Burn the place down and dance on the ashes with Bozo and his compadres. Why not? We’re never going to “all get along,” so let’s just laugh our way through what’s left. Of course, I’m joking! We need a lot more than laughter, and yet maybe we also need more laughter.

I’m grateful to Ventura for documenting his experience at that conference. I intend to write more about it idays to come. The article, after all, is eight pages long and what I’m covering today doesn’t even include the first two pages. He uses the word “wag” to describe someone he met who characterized the elders as Sinatras. (Frank liked clowns, didn’t he?) Business as usual, the status quo, occupied “much of what was presented,” Ventura writes.

We are now twenty years into the 21st century, which ends at the strike of midnight on the eve ushering in New Year’s Day 2101. In other words, the century is both 20% over and 80% unlived, yet to be experienced. The conference sessions dealing with the historical impact of therapy during these 100 years were mostly led by “radical visionaries... over 80.” The swan song of the Sinatras seemed to be, “What larger role can psychotherapy play in a world gone mad?”

Thus ends Part 1.

(Photo taken December 2009 in the Anabella Hotel lobby)

Old Enough

How am I only now hearing this song for the first time? I plucked it off a friend’s Facebook page. A friend who is currently in “jail,” she told me, for what seems to be a ridiculous reason. I won’t even go into it because it’s too stupid and she didn’t deserve it. Part of the song includes a refrain from another song, Wake Up Little Susie.

A tune going through my head right now: “Wake up, little story, wake up.” You’d think, after all this time, I’d have a better handle on “my story.” What if there’s no such thing, though. My story might just be a social construct someone else created to make me feel inadequate. (Ha, just kidding. Or am I?) Surely I don’t just have one story. (Stop calling me Shirley, an old friend just said, in my head.) You see, our stories are always connected to other people. My friend in Facebook jail. My old friend who made lame but still funny “Shirley” jokes. What would Karen say? (Kidding, again.) I do have a friend named Karen and we’ve never once discussed that Karen, the one who has ruined things for all the Karens. (Just google news articles about Karen, you'll see.)

I’m trusting this elusive story will eventually reveal itself. Maybe if I sit here typing for long enough, coaxing it out of its hiding place, it’ll... what, steal the show? Dance out onto the stage? Throw a tantrum? Who knows. I just wanted to post something in this blog today, that’s all. No, it’s more than that. More than a blog entry.

An older post (maybe a few of them) in the archive has recently come to my attention. I’d like to explore why these ideas are coming back to me now, in a pandemic, in a time of riotous and catastrophic events. I’ve written about James Hillman before: here (2006), here (2007), and here (2008).

I spoke to him once. To Hillman. In December 2009, I was part of an audience listening to him speak. When we were given the opportunity to ask him questions at the end, mine was concerning the meaning behind something he had written in one of his books. If you click on the link to the 2007 blog post, above, you will see the troubling words I wanted to hear him explain. When I asked my question, however, he seemed defensive and said something to the effect: I meant what I said and said what I meant. In other words, it was my fault I hadn’t grasped the meaning of what he was trying to say. Later, I found out that book in particular was one he found hard to talk about.

I recently came across this article, written in 2006. Here is where I need to get more clear on what to say. It relates to something I wrote in my other blog, Three Chairs. Need to start a new post, one that isn’t so full of links.

The Ones Who Walk Away

Have you ever read the short story by Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas? It further illustrates the message I was alluding to in yesterday’s post. If you haven’t read it (or if you would like to read it again, as I did), click on the linked title above. It’s a fairly quick read and yet opens a world of thought about demagogues and other beasts.

I tried my hand at writing a follow-up short-short story. Thanks for indulging me. Comments welcome, as always.

What happens to the ones who walk away? Suppose they find each other and start a new community, Salemo. These new citizens scheme and plan how to repair, to make right the city they abandoned. Omelas, the one whose citizens had, for generations, tacitly agreed to torture a single child at all times. Rumor has it that some of the many children who are chosen for the foul basement closet eventually get transferred out. To a special home or institution, a place where the deranged imbeciles can retire when they outgrow childhood. Here they are kept alive somehow, maybe on intravenous drips. Perhaps attendants periodically flip them over in their beds, a feeble attempt to stem infection from the inevitable sores. Further stories suggest the chosen child is typically left to die with no human intervention at all. After the amount of time it would take for the child to starve itself to death, a few obedient citizens of Omelas would come in and dispose of the ruined body. They would then ready the room for the next occupant. The Salemoans had actually completed successful kidnappings of the trapped child. But another unfortunate boy or girl was always in the wings. A replacement offering to the city of conditional joy. So, whether by fatal neglect or compassionate ‘rescue,’ the tragic child situation is handled. The terrible room is routinely emptied then quickly filled. A perennial maintenance plan to keep the vibrant city alive. The ones who walk away can never forget what they left behind. The guilt they were never allowed in Omelas hits them full-on in Salemo.