I'm dancing as fast as I can

Make Them Stop, make them stop!!!
Celine’ Journey to the end of the night

I’m dancing as fast as I can
Barbara Jordan

Sonia was a 45-year old woman who had a couple of tapes that wouldn’t stop playing in her head. That’s what she came in discussing anyway, and she wanted to know if I could hypnotize her and make these tapes stop playing.

From my initial impressions of Sonia, I knew immediately that this was going to be a fascinating case. I have always found that these “tapes”, these little songs and phrases that get stuck in our heads, often provide amazing insight into a person’s inner world. I have had many such tapes playing I my own head, and thinking about where they came from and what message my subconscious was trying to convey to me has always provided me with amazingly instructive information.

To back up for a second, Sonia was a college professor at a local community college who described feeling a “half step behind” her life at all times. She was divorced, had 2 kids, and had arrived at this period having accomplished a lot of what she had set out to do. Yet she was harried and she was frazzled and she couldn’t quite get caught up on all of her various projects and obligations.

In these cases, the therapeutic prescription might be to help Sonia organize her life a little better. Journaling, short-term goal setting, some work on the issue of time-management and mindful living, these were all things that I knew could be of use to Sonia, but I also knew there was more. The difficulty with Sonia is the she wanted a quick fix, and discussed how she really didn’t have time to do more than 10 sessions with me at this time in her life.

So I had to find out about the tapes, and the relevance they may have to the things that were holding her back from living the life she wanted. She was a professor of sociology, a close cousin of psychology, and I hoped that I could help her reach a deeper level of understanding by appealing to her knowledge about people and their inherent need to find belonging.

So we talked about the tapes. The first one, at the beginning of this story, comes from Celine, a French writer known for his book Journey to the end of the night. In this book, a young boy becomes filled with a sense of dread after watching and reflecting on the frenetic pace of the city in which he lived. He had an urge to scream, “Make them stop” at the top of his lungs. It was literally a desire to stop time and make everyone slow down and pay attention to how fast life was passing them by. It was a short little passage in this book, but one that had gotten stuck in Sonia’s head and that she couldn’t seem to shake.

So we talked about what it was she wanted to make stop, and this question released a floodgate of emotion in Sonia that she hadn’t expected. She wanted her kids to stop getting older so fast, she wanted the wrinkles on her face to stop getting deeper and deeper each day, she wanted birthdays to stop reappearing on her calendar so fast, students to stop coming in and out of her life so quickly, and most of all she missed the things that she never gotten to experience in her rapidly fleeting youth.

Here at last was the key. It wasn’t just that she missed her own life, it was that she also felt a kind of longing for all of the things she never got to do. This is a particularly painful kind of nostalgia, as we wistfully miss an imaginary life that we are sure everyone else has experienced but us. This can create a dangerous kind of personal isolation, as we have assigned superior memories to people that we don’t even know to be true. In comparison our own lives look incomplete.

I wanted to know more. What about the other portion of the tape in Sonia’s head? In this case it was a single phrase “I’m dancing as fast as I can,” which was a book from the 70s later made into a movie, about a career woman struggling with an addiction to Valium and her deteriorating mental health.

So now I had two extremely powerful insights to work with regarding the state of Sonia’s inner world. She was in deep pain about getting older, missing a life that never was, while all the time fearing she was going a little crazy in the process. These were powerful pieces of a puzzle that weren’t in her immediate awareness, and weren’t at all visible to the people in her life, who simply viewed her as a successful professor and an amazing woman.

So we began a deep and comprehensive dialogue about what it was that made her feel like this, and the root of it all came back to unfinished business from her childhood. She had been the child of a divorce, felt a tremendous amount of shame from this, and became in effect the “smart’ girl who always had her nose in a book. Meanwhile she missed out on several rites of passage growing up, and had an amazing amount of regret that she never went to her High School prom. Now, with kids who were getting to this age, she was also divorced, and seeing them go through some of the same things she had stirred up some long forgotten feelings of inferiority.

So we began a discussion about this. These long forgotten feelings had somehow surfaced just to the level of her preconscious mind, and sent a message “make them stop, make them stop.” It was kind of fascinating actually, and as we began to explore this issue, Sonia was able to add a number of her own insights as we continued. What was perhaps the most interesting thing, was this woman, who had not been able to find belonging as a child, chose to dedicate her life to the sociology and in particular the study of group behavior. It was a fascinating compensation that had for the most part served her well. She was very well liked by her students, respected by her peers, and was doing very well financially and professionally.

But as is the case with many things we don’t deal with from our pasts, feelings of inferiority from childhood had arisen to cause Sonia a significant amount of distress. The “I’m dancing as fast as I can” tape seemed to indicate a fear that she was slowly losing her own sanity, which Sonia eventually confirmed. Another part of this particular phrase was that she was, quite, literally, intimated by the word “dance.” Seeing her sons navigate the minefields of dances and proms was very anxiety provoking for her, but there was also something in her own life that was provoking this anxiety.

It seemed that once a year her college had a major party for the faculty to drink wine, dress up, and generally rub elbows outside of the school environment. For years Sonia had avoided these things, but this year was a little different. An attractive economics professor had hinted around at taking her to the party, and had mentioned dancing to her a few times as well. The tape in her head got much louder when he was around, and she even found that repeating “I’m dancing as fast as I can” helped quell her anxiety in these situations.

So we broke this down. In her life, quite literally, she was working very hard to simply maintain her home, and her career, with very little time for anything else. She was doing the best she could, sacrificing for her kids, but still dreamed about a life filled with love, adventure, and romance. Yet this was just a fantasy at this point in her life, and now a man had come along and hinted that this life that she had never had could be a reality. It was a recipe for distress, but yet, just out of her immediate awareness. As we continued to talk, Sonia was able to laugh heartily at her own life, and by our 4th month together had made real progress in putting to rest some of her long-forgotten feelings of inferiority.

I’m pleased to report that this story has a happy ending. Finally, and improbably, Sonia got to have her prom experience at the faculty party, where she and her new boyfriend tripped the light fantastic on the dance floor and were the hits of the party. I even saw them as a couple recently, where we all talked about the pressure of balancing dating, raising kinds, work, etc.

“By the way,” he said at the end of the session, “I have this song, I knew the bride when she used to rock and roll, playing in my head, do you think you can help me with this?”

But he already had his answer.