This New Year's, Take Time To Heal

As 2017 nears, I’ve been thinking about how we approach New Year’s and how it relates to my NYC therapy practice. Looking toward the new year, we often impose these arbitrary do-overs. I worry it’s not so developmental, particularly in regards to grief.

This year, especially, people have been saying, “I’ll be so glad when 2016 is over.” The idea of something from the past being “over” just seems tough to sit with. This feels especially clear when we think about Trump and the election’s impact not only on last year, but the next four.

Grappling With The Past

As human beings, we’re always trying to grapple with the past, but there’s also a strong impulse in our culture to assume the past is the past, try to stay in the present and focus on the future. Stevie Wonder sings, “Let’s start living for the future.” It’s almost gospel (pun intended) in many inner-city elementary schools–we are headed to the future. But, we can’t have progress other than by reconciling the past.

We can’t really get over the past and we don’t ever move on. I don’t see that as good or bad, but it is vital to be aware of, especially in the middle of grief.

Acknowledging The Past In Therapy

New Yorkers who seek therapy from me tend to be, as a broad generalization, not so into a psychoanalytic idea of therapy as what is perceived to be (perhaps rightly) as a long, slow journey through childhood to identify what features of the past the cause of their current struggles. There's a certain "I don't want to feel sorry for myself" quality to this.

In the 1960's and onward, a whole new set of modalities–more or less related to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy–emerged with the promise that all of this past-business was unnecessary. You can put in this effort and feel better, be freed of negative thoughts, and develop better habits. In many ways, it "works" in as much as people often see measurable changes in these areas. It's not a coincidence that the emergence of CBT therapies coincided with a self-help culture and pseudo-spiritual movement that embraced "being in the now" and positive thinking.

But, it’s important to acknowledge that trauma happened whether the acute trauma of a moment or ongoing suffering. Looking at what happened isn't a sort of self-indulgence. It is healing, in a very literal sense. Physicians don't tell someone who's been in a car crash or who has physical scars from childhood to “focus on the future.” They create the conditions for the wounds to heal–a brace, medicine, clean bandages, time off of your feet. We work to accept what happened, to understand it, and to support the body's natural capacity to heal.

Use New Year's To Heal  

Healing, in emotional terms, is called grief. It is a very complicated and under-appreciated process. The grief doesn't go away, we just learn (or don't learn) how to live with it. It becomes a part of what we carry with us everywhere we go. In a similar sense, 2017 isn't replacing 2016–it's being piled on time like layers of rock from varied epochs.

While in on New Year’s we aren't leaving anything behind, time doesn’t heal all wounds and looking forward doesn't make everything better, New Year’s is a nice time to think about the year past. It's meaningful to take a day and think about what's gone on the last 366 days (2016 was a leap year). Along with sadness and celebration should perhaps be an accounting of where we're at with the process of grieving–take stock and survey the wounds.