So many of us long to move on from pain and suffering through developing nuclear or friend families of our own, finding a career, or just being able to make some sense of “my life now despite all that I have been through”. As a therapist using my anecdotal evidence from 17 years of listening and holding space for people, I would say most of us are hashing out some version of “what is it exactly that makes me feel like it is not working somehow?”. The collective moving on is not working despite us all doing it in some capacity. I can tell you for certain that the thing that connects most therapy goers is that we are all struggling from a certain percentage amount of not having moved on. Whatever your percentage of this is does not matter, it is the felt sense of time running out before you have no time left to be who you were meant to be, or you just have to settle with the way it is.
Even when I am not a therapist, I am an emotional empath. I can feel people and get into conversations that end up being like mini therapy sessions frequently because it helps me understand if what I am picking up on is separate from what I am going through or related somehow, directly or indirectly. The conversations I get into with others sometimes lead to someone telling me they regret not having shared something or known what to share or say regarding a relationship. They tell me the “nots” and how that lead to the ball of unresolved and the relationship is like a stuck experience, unfinished. We move on timewise and we don’t emotionally somehow. This sense that we all have a phantom conversation that we are not having because it is too late or too long or some other “too” is something I pick up on and relate to from my own incomplete network of things that are moved on from but not behind me. That is why I created this special tool for my Toolbox Approach to inner work.
The Toolbox Approach is a set of tools in three areas: 1. Detecting your misshapen narrative about your life 2. Reprocessing or reshaping your narrative 3. Relationally healing your relationship with self and others. The Narrative Tools found in area one help you explore what is hard to put into words. For example, people come to therapy and say, “well I grew up with divorced parents from age 5, one of whom was a recovered alcoholic from age 16 on”. That can seem like the narrative to focus on for “I think that is why I never got a real childhood and have so many control issues today”. Somehow, all of that doesn’t help a person change that narrative and only reinforces, “so how do I fix that”. Of course, you can’t fix the way you grew up, but you can understand the meaning you made of it and held on a subconscious level, beyond “control issues”.
This Narrative Tool I created, The Phantom Conversation, is one of those tools for understanding the meaning you made out a relationship in which you have a lot of unspoken and unresolved things floating around. You may have defined yourself out of this relationship subconsciously because it was subliminal feedback on how you are received in the world by others. You don’t think of it as a thing that you can work on but even reading this it is starting to well up in you, “I know this has affected me”.
You are not going to know in the traditional way that you need to work on this relationship, in fact it is VERY POSSIBLE you cannot work on it. This person could be gone from your life in various ways, and it is not possible to have an actual conversation. Conversely, they may be in your life, but the prospect of a healing conversation is akin to “when pigs fly” or somehow very unlikely or inconceivable. It may be a relationship with plenty of conversation or interaction but never that “thing”. It may be a relationship where you tried to talk about it, and it went poorly or damaged the relationship to bring it up and you are afraid now.
The Phantom Conversation Tool starts like this:
Close your eyes and cultivate calm by breathing gently in through your nostrils and then lightly blow out your mouth like cooling down a hot drink. Feel the sense of it in your hands and that you have all the patience in the world to let it cool until it’s ready. Just cultivate that kind of calm, the kind that you sense will reward you and feels natural. Then gently start to consider someone else is there starting to pressure you in some way. It is not a nice pressure; you feel like you have no time suddenly and there might not be a way to stay in the comfort and peace of this. Look to who it is, this person is not easy to talk to lately or historically, they don’t or haven’t understood something. You will need to explain it if you are to stay in the calm patience you had. This person is a Phantom version of the person they really are today most likely. They are in the place of your most misunderstood moments with them. You will need to start a Phantom Conversation to get them to resolve the pressure. You will need to put down the drink and take a bracing breath for the Phantom Conversation. Open your eyes, here is some structure:
I saw and heard you _______________________________________________________________________ The story that has been happening for me from all that is _______________________________________________________________________ Over and over again this feels like __________________________________________________________________
I tried to tell you that I need ____________________________________________________________________
But you ____________________________________________________________________
I don’t even want the things I used to, but I still feel ___________________________________________________________________
I want you to understand what it has been like for me, it has been _____________________________________________________________________
I want to release from this because _____________________________________________________________________
You can help me release from this by
______________________________________________________________________
I can accept you may not help me release from this by
______________________________________________________________________
I know I never told you like this before because
______________________________________________________________________
This is private and I think now I need to let myself
_______________________________________________________________________
Take some time to enjoy this inner work you have done. Exhale and feel it as a job well done. Below is an example and don’t feel bad if you have skipped ahead and not done the work yet. Use the example, if you can, as encouragement, this is from a combination of individuals using it in therapy.
“I saw and heard you say I was not going to finish college if I dropped out and tried to go back. The story that is happening to me from all that is that you wanted to bring me down for some reason and you did. Over and over, I feel like you saw something in me that was both true and not true and I wondered if you loved me or hated me. I tried to tell you that I needed encouragement, but I don’t think you got any from your parents and you didn’t want to give anymore. You were out of giving; from someplace that I think was there once, but before me. I don’t want the things I used to; I don’t want encouragement from you, but I still feel thrown away by you. I want you to understand what it has been like for me, it has been like I can’t connect to anyone correctly now, I am always afraid they will toss me away. I want to release from this because it makes me care too much and then isolate myself and I want to find release to focus on myself and self-acceptance. You can help me release from this by telling me you know you will not change, and it has nothing to do with me. I can accept you may not help me release from this by focusing on going to therapy and writing. I know I never told you like this before because I was afraid you could hate me in a more permanent way I don’t entirely understand even now as I write this. This is private and I will not tell you most likely because I know now, I need to let myself heal in the present and figure that out.”
If you were not able to do the activity, try again now using the support from the above example based on the past year of use in over 1,000 therapy sessions. While I have conducted well over that amount in 17 years, I reformat the tools based on my own inner work. That is “patient zero” for this tool I brought you today. Work on!
The Phantom Conversation