Breakdown or Breakthrough?

Break-point 20/10/22

I recently decided to take up playing tennis as I thought it was a fairly safe sport. I enjoyed its creative and competitive nature. I was enjoying a game against a friend in the October sun. The trees were rustling. The air was languid. I felt relaxed. There were no clouds in the sky. A young woman appeared to blow away the autumn leaves with a noisy contraption.
My tennis partner suggested we move court to enable her to finish her job. I took a position deep behind the baseline. I was playing looping top spin forehand. My right arm was stretched fully. I was on my toes. My body was twisting through the air. I made sweet contact with the ball.
At that moment I felt the most excruciating pain I had ever experienced. I fell to the ground. I screamed in pain. This was a totally new experience. My mind searched furiously for antecedents. What could this be? What did this mean? I imagined I had snapped a tendon. I recalled many years ago reading an article in a Sunday paper about what snapping a tendon felt like. I tried to feel myself through the lens of words to diagnose my injury. I wondered if the pulsating throbbing sensation in my arm right arm was due to the tendons trying to reattach themselves to my bone. Is this what an octopus feels like when it loses a tentacle I wondered?
Understandably the ambulance service algorithms placed me at the lowest priority. The call handler told me I should make my own way to A and E. Well if I could I would! But I was unable to move. Those around me wanted to lift me up and move me to a car. But any attempt to move would leave me screaming. I settled in for a four hour wait. Other tennis players brought me tea blankets and pain killers.
I felt totally helpless. A club official came to take my name and put it down in the injury register. I found this rather annoying but complied. In my mind I felt like I was on a Netflix drama stuck in a crevice on Mount Everest waiting for a rescue team. Sure it was a balmy 19 degrees rather than minus 40 and yet I had the strange feeling of being in no man's land. I knew something was terribly wrong and yet I could not communicate it in words or experience. I was in an unknown area as were the group around me.
Fortunately the ambulance service were experiencing a quiet time on that Monday afternoon. I was very lucky. After an hour I was attended to by a paramedic and a trainee paramedic I was given a pain relieving gas miraculously I could walk to the to the ambulance. The paramedic was a climber in his spare time, which allowed me to cling onto the idea I was felled by a mountaineering tragedy rather than a fluffy yellow ball. Morphine provided me with further sustenance. The involuntary gasp of the X-ray department team of a local A&E hospital illuminated me further. I had fractured my humerus. Snapped it in two.
Yes I am writing this piece by voice recognition software…
From a psycho analytical perspective the research on fractures is fascinating. Various studies show that there is not a great deal of difference between surgical intervention and the body's own natural healing process. In 80% of cases the arm heals itself. In 48 hours blood flows to the affected area. Overtime a soft Jelly forms. Eventually the bone begins to harden and heal itself. Even with a fair bit of inner deformity the arm is able to regain most of its function. Of course surgical intervention may speed up the healing process. It also leads to slightly higher rates of bone union. So how does one decide between the natural healing properties of gravity and rest versus a knife and metal?
How does therapy work? Should the therapist simply provide the equivalent of a humeral brace which provides a container for the healing arm. The humeral brace exerts a gentle and continuous pressure around the broken bone; The body does the rest. Is this similar to the therapists consulting room? Does the therapist provide a field which facilitates healing? Or is therapy more like surgery? do the therapists interpretations act like surgical incisions? Is the therapist responsible for introducing psychic metal work to stitch together a profound wound? Should the therapist get the patient back on the tennis court of life as soon as possible?
As part of further investigations into my arm I had an MRI. This was an uncanny experience. It was claustrophobic, regressive and terrifying and at moments poetic and sublime. The experience of actually feeling my arm resonating at various moments over the one hour long MRI was a profound feeling. The MRI is clearly a very expensive an advanced piece of machinery. It allows deeper investigation into the nature of bone and muscle. It is more forensic than the data that can be produced by an X-ray. It allows us to examine pathologies that are hidden from even the best trained eye.
Psychotherapy uses an ordinary piece of kit. Well both ordinary and extraordinary. The human mind. The analyst and the patient are constantly scanning each other both consciously and unconsciously. At moments it may be true to say there is a form of magnetic resonance between the two. Uncanny things happen. Suddenly there are moments of depth and infinity. In my experience the unconscious can be a more powerful machine then both an X-ray and an MRI.
In the rich western world MRI scanner sales people are enjoying boom times. Everyone loves the idea of a machine that can see deep into you and tell you what is wrong with you. Perhaps it's also something to do with the fact that the machine does all the work? And yet there is still a place for the low tech kit of the human mind.
Perhaps a really good therapist has a mind like an MRI scanner that can really see into us? But of course the patient can also see into the mind of the therapist. Perhaps a less good therapist has a mind like an X-ray which can only pick out major breaks and traumas. But of course therapy involves the meeting of two subjectivities. it involves it involves two minds and two bodies. Nowadays of course we also assume that the patient has a mind with X-ray or MRI like qualities. Both the patient and the therapists minds are constantly interacting and resonating in the therapeutic field. It is this interaction which perhaps makes the therapy most efficacious. The MRI report from a psychotherapy session is the joint production of two parties.
As I came out of my MRI appointment I chanced upon an article about the famous tennis player Boris Becker. He is currently serving time in a category C prison for tax evasion. According to newspaper reports he has lost seven kilogrammes and he is helping many other prisoners with their physical and psychological regimes. Rather than completely breakdown it appears that his experience in prison very unusually has enabled him to find something deep within himself. At the same time as undergoing some form of self -repair he is finding that he is able to help others. Blessed with superhuman athletic abilities he also has the ability to implode. Yet at least for now his guilt and remorse seem genuine. Rather than evading his predicament he appears to be fully embracing his situation. As I think about Boris Becker dancing at the net, his ability to be highly creative, to transgress, and to come back from the brink, I feel hopeful about the ability of the human body and mind to bounce back. We all face break points in our lives. We may lose. We may breakdown in body or in mind. And yet we may also regenerate and find a way to get back onto our feet. I have a feeling we haven't seen the end of Boris Becker quite yet.

I am part of the long running number 42 group practice.

Please feel free to call me, or email me. I can be contacted on 07925709696 or emailed at ajaytherapy@gmail.com