Fireflies

Welcome everyone. It's a pleasure for me to be with you today. I'd like to share with you a story. It's a story that happened several years ago now. A woman came to my office to see me for psychotherapy. I'll call her Alice. She was 35 years old, though she looked worn out and quite a bit older. She was plainly dressed, spoke very softly and hesitantly. I think was shy and embarrassed to be seeing me in therapy. Occasionally though, Alice would break into a smile, a warm smile, and I could see a sparkle in her eyes. Alice, as I came to know her, was a very kind woman. She rarely had a critical word to say about anyone else, though she could be quite self-disparaging. When able to, she liked to bring her therapy dogs to children and adults in hospitals and hospices. When I met Alice, I just liked her right away.

Kenneth Pargament, PhD

I learned that for almost 20 years she had been dealing with bipolar illness. Her life had really been a roller coaster of moods. She was frequently immobilized by periods of depression that were so severe that she had been unable to finish high school, unable to hold on to a job, and unable to sustain long-term relationships. She lived with her mother and was on disability. Now, Alice had been seen by really a whole army of mental health professionals over the years, but she'd never been able to experience stability in her moods.

So she came looking to me for the help that she'd been unable to find through other psychiatrists and psychologists. And I have to say that for the first few years of my work with her, I was no more successful than anyone else. In the first year of our work, for example, I had to hospitalize her three times for suicidality. Now I tried everything that I could think of to help her. I tried to energize her when she was becoming vegetative. I tried to help her identify and avoid the triggers to her periods of depression. I tried to talk about her troubled past, including an abusive father and brother. I helped her find a psychiatrist that she was comfortable with. And I tried to help her draw on her coping resources in ways that might foster hope for herself and sense of greater control or mastery of her life. But none of my efforts were successful. I just wasn't able to help.

One day she came in upset. Once again, she was crying hysterically and she was talking about killing herself. She had a very concrete plan in mind, so I had to take this quite seriously. Once again, I knew I was going to have to get her to the hospital. And I was just feeling awful and frustrated with myself that I'd been unable to help this, this kind woman who was suffering so much. And at one point in her tears, Alice began to wail. And she wailed, “oh, when will my suffering end?” Alice had said earlier that she wasn't particularly religious, but those words had a biblical sound to them. So I decided to respond in a similar way.

And I asked her, “Alice, where do you turn to for solace in the midst of your suffering?” And I usually don't talk like that. I'm not a solace kind of guy. But she hesitated for a few seconds. And then she said, “well, I trust you, so I'm going to tell you something that I've never told any of my other therapists before.” She then went on to tell me the story of her very first hospitalization. She had been only a young teenager at the time, and in the hospital she was placed in what they called the rubber room in restraints. The rubber room was a room with cushions on the walls to prevent their patients from hurting themselves. Alice told me she was very confused at the time. She didn't know what was going on, but she felt like her life was ending.

And she couldn't stop crying.

And then she said, “I started to have this warm feeling. It was a warm feeling in the center of my chest. And then it began to spread all over me, all over my body.” And then she said, “that feeling, that feeling, it spoke to me.”

I was stunned by what she was saying and I asked Alice, “what did the voice say?” And Alice said, “the voice told me, ‘I'm with you. I'll always be with you.’”

I asked Alice who was speaking and she said, “oh that was God. God was telling me he'd be with me no matter how bad things got.”

We both stopped talking. Her story had really taken my breath away. And Alice too seemed to be deeply moved as she recalled her experience so many years ago.

And after a while I asked Alice whether she had ever had a similar spiritual experience like that since that time. And she said, “oh yeah, I've had it when I feel like I've hit the very bottom and feel totally hopeless.” I said, “do you ever feel it other times?” She said, “well actually I do. I feel it when I'm with someone who truly cares about me.” She hesitated and then she said, “like now. I feel it with you.” And then she asked me, “do you feel it too?”

Now, now in the mental health profession, we're trained not to share our own personal feelings with clients. But Alice, I thought, had taken the risk of sharing something with me that she had never mentioned to anyone else. And I felt like I had to respond to her in a personal way. And when I checked myself for what I was feeling, I realized I was experiencing something precious. This was a precious moment, a sacred moment, in which I was feeling a deep connectedness with Alice. She was seeing me, and I was seeing her not as client and therapist, but as human to human.

I was also feeling that we had shifted from our ordinary experience to an experience that was something really extraordinary. She had shared something, I think, of profound meaning, power, and truth for her. And I think we both were experiencing the emotional power of the moment, the sense of awe and uplift. And I know I felt tremendous gratitude to Alice for her willingness to be really vulnerable to me by revealing something so private, so sensitive, so important. I knew this experience would stay with me for a long long time and it has even now and we're talking about decades later, I can recall this precious moment, this sacred moment as if it happened yesterday.

So back to that therapy session, I noticed that after Alice began to share her story with me, she had stopped crying. She no longer seemed distraught and she was just much more composed. She wasn't talking about suicidality and that was striking because in my years of working with her, I had never found a way to stop her once she started spiraling into suicidal depression.

We talked about her spiritual experience for the rest of the hour. But towards the end, I asked her whether she was feeling suicidal still, and she said, “no, I think I'm safe. I'm not going to hurt myself.” So on the way out of the office, I asked Alice, “you know, you said something that really struck me. You said that you'd never shared your spiritual experience with any of your psychologists or psychiatrists before. I'm wondering why not?”

And she said, “well, they already think I'm crazy.”

What a sad commentary, I thought, that Alice had withheld the single most important experience in her life from her mental health professionals. But this sacred moment was a turning point. And in our work together, we shifted in our focus of treatment to helping her cultivate this capacity, this capacity for sacred moments that she could access her spirituality more fully. Not just when she hit bottom, but at other times in her life. This is the most helpful thing I did with her in my years of work with Alice.

Over the next 10 years, through our work together, she became more stable, she became more able to involve herself fully in her life, and she was only hospitalized one more time, and that was when her dear mother died.

And with my strong encouragement, she began to cultivate another path to the sacred, which was her love for writing. Now, Alice had never finished high school. She had always loved to write, though. And for her, I learned, her writing was a conduit to a sense of connection with the sacred, with God. That, I think, was a key to her recovery. I stayed in touch with Alice for many years and she would often send me her poems. I think I'll stop by sharing one of the poems she wrote. It's called Fireflies.

Remember when you were a child? Remember when you were a child in the summertime at night? There were tiny yellow lights going off and on continuously. I always thought they were flies carrying lanterns so they could see their way in the darkness. Sometimes the fireflies blend in with the stars. Remember when you feel in the darkness, look around. There's always a flicker of light. to give you a glimmer of hope. Think back when you were a child and remember the fly carried his lantern. He found his way. You will too.