The Lid of a Sippy Cup

You should let go and make yourself empty and quiet, clear and calm. - Ying-An in the Zen Calendar (May 7, 2004).

Day 143. I am headed to a wedding. I'm wondering if the bride anticipated 99 degrees and 65% humidity when she picked out her veil.

This was a particularly amazing week to be a psychologist. I am graced with extraordinarily high caliber clients who continually renew my faith in human beings' capacity for courage, change, and healing. That, or staying exactly the same and not caring as much! I am still caught off guard when clients express a perception of stigma attached to being in counseling and/or taking psychotropic medicine. It's been my observation that most people who voluntarily seek counseling are generally higher beings. A lot of the time they are there because someone in their lives - the one who REALLY needs to change - is unwilling to receive counseling of their own.

Without going into a lengthy description of Personality Disorders (Google it, especially Borderlines - makes for interesting reading), I will say with utter conviction that all of us are, have been, or will be greatly pained by a Personality Disorder at some point in our life. A person this damaged is almost inevitably at the center of what ails my clients. The essence of a Personality Disorder is their desperate need to "house" their pathology in the people around them. The closer you are to the Personality Disorder, the greater the potential to be used as a vessel for their emotional rubbish. That's usually because, early in the damaged person's life, circumstances necessitated they develop a psychological defensive fortress in which everything that goes wrong is the fault of someone else. From this perspective, the individual makes sense of painful life events by attributing their causes to others. It is impossible for the Personality Disorder to take personal responsibility; to own their faults without self loathing; to objectively examine themselves. Thus, they utilize extremely regressed defense mechanisms such as distortion, projection, and denial to maintain an internal sense of equilibrium. In other words, "it's always your fault and I am always the victim." Trying, to say the least.

Enter my "Sippy Cup" metaphor. When I detect a Personality Disorder underlying at least some of my client's difficulty, I ask them to recall that TV character dressed like a huge pitcher filled with red Kool Aid. In the commercial, he bursts through a fence yelling, "Oh yeahhhhhh, Kool Aid's here, wearing a smile . . . " Instead of red Kool Aid, however, the pitcher is filled with glowing, green toxic ooze (toxic ooze is always lime green in my imagination). The ooze is symbolic of the all the psychological poison the character needs to pour into the people around him/her. I next describe those sippy cups with the twist-on lids designed to help toddlers transition from bottles to cups. Metaphorically, therapy helps clients "put the lid on their sippy cup" so that the pitcher can't pour ooze into them. It's an image to remind them to maintain psychological boundaries. We discuss how they can't stop the Personality Disorder from attempting to "pour" accountability and pathology into others, but they CAN stop themselves from being a human container of ooze that isn't theirs.

My clients get this. After a time, they come into session with big grins, bragging, "I kept the lid on my sippy cup!" In other words, "I didn't house emotional baggage that isn't mine." The sippy cup metaphor is a liberating and empowering treatment metaphor. It reminds me of the zen (non)aspiration of being empty. For Buddhist principles, I may modify the metaphor to an image of the cup with a big hole in the bottom of it. When I envision my sippy cup like that, it is a reminder to let "baggage" of any kind - whether mine or belonging to someone else - to keep flowing on through me. That way, nothing accumulates. I really dig emptiness!

My cushion calls; I'll likely meditate on Monkey chatter just rattling through and out of me. An empty sippy cup with no lid and a big hole in the bottom. There's an inspiring image indeed!

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc