The word “insight” reigns supreme in therapeutic environments. It connotes an “ah ha” moment and deep, perhaps new, understanding. “Knowledge,” however, receives less attention. The word may actually carry an unfair burden because therapists tend to subordinate “knowing” to “feeling.” Interestingly, “feeling” often connotes a strange kind of knowledge, one present in the idiomatic expression, “I know it, but I don’t know it, you know?” Here, knowing means feeling, internalizing, acting upon. Thus, while I might know (cognitively) that I am a good person, I don’t yet know (feel, believe) it, as is evident through sheepish and/or self-defeating behaviors. The work of the therapist seems to be to attend to the client as he/she/they forms insight, such that the client, fully supported by the therapist, comes first to understand the difference between knowing and knowing, and then acts effortlessly in life such that the knowing bodies forth through behavior. But what does this therapeutic attendance look like? Once supported, how exactly does the client reframe knowledge such that it ceases to be remanded to the field of useless cognition and transmutes itself into the realm of useful belief and behavior? The answers to those questions pass through the terrain of insight, but they require understanding “knowledge” in a more precise way.
​
The two 20th-Century French philosophers whose work helped me refine my understanding of knowledge are Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. The latter, writing about the former, explains that knowledge occurs by bridging two realms, the visible (i.e., the seeable) and the articulable (i.e., the sayable). For Foucault, knowledge does not exist until that which is visible unites with that which is sayable. And this union is no easy feat because each domain is governed by its own rhythms. Artworks provide clear examples of these different rhythms at work.

​I hung a print of this Magritte painting in my office for a while and I used it as a diagnostic tool. I was curious about which clients noticed it, commented on it, questioned it, and attempted to analyze it. Fewer than half of my clients acknowledged it at all. Those who looked at it for more than a few seconds said nothing about it. The small number of people who spoke about it were divided into two unequal categories. The first group, larger in number, made superficial comments, such as “That’s a cool picture.” The second group, including maybe 2 or 3 clients total, produced questions like, “What’s going on with that?” If people said anything about the painting at all, I would ask a series of questions. “Tell me, what do you see?” “What do you make of the broken glass?” “The title is ‘World of Images,’ why do you think it’s called that?” Exactly 0 clients ventured in-depth answers to those questions, and the same number arrived at anything resembling an analysis of the picture. As such, there was no knowledge produced during their engagement with the image. That is, the realms of the visible and the articulable were not bridged.

Not bridging the two realms took a tremendous amount of restraint on my part because the painting produces knowledge that is, in 100% of cases, relevant to people engaged in therapeutic work. The gestalt of the scene conveys a familiar experience, one that some people may even describe as beautiful or calming: A sun setting or rising over/from the ocean horizon. The familiar starts to become strange when one notices that the view of the sun is framed by a broken window. A little bit of thinking leads to the realization that the presence of shards of glass inside the room suggests the window broke inward, i.e., something from outside broke the window. But this logical line of thought breaks, too, since the shards of glass reveal an uncanny detail. The shards are not transparent pieces of glass. They seem to have retained the image of the setting/rising sun. Interestingly, the journey of the eye across the canvas leads from the center of the sun down towards the shards of glass, and if the eye keeps moving in that direction it will leave the canvas and encounter the caption that holds the painting’s title: The World of Images. Magritte has provided the domain of the seeable (the painting) and the domain of the sayable (the painting’s title) but has not bridged the two. The bridging, which I’ll call thinking, is the work required to produce knowledge of the painting. Clients in therapy benefit from undertaking precisely this work—both of this painting in particular and of knowledge production generally—because the strangeness of “the world of images” is usually one of the distressing aspects of daily life that brings them into therapy in the first place.

The work required is not that of making the normal (sunset/sunrise) strange (as seen felt in the view of the shards retaining that which was seen through the window), but, rather, of acknowledging the strangeness of the “world of images” and the work of knowledge production typically glossed over by habitual actions (such as, for example, the act of looking). The world outside the room is a world of dynamic forces. The forces seem to have broken inward through the glass. More than that, the image of the sun has burned itself upon the glass, much like light impresses itself upon the film in the production of photographic images. But when the eye returns to the plane dividing the interior and the exterior of the painted room, it returns with a worry. On what now are the forces of the world impressing themselves? My eyes? Who’s to say they won’t burn and break my eyes? Of course, that’s not possible because none of this is as it seems. This is a painting. The force of my seeing is producing each and every “fact” of the painting in front of me. I see broken glass, but there is no real broken glass. I see an impossibility in the form of a scene of the world imprinted upon glass that once framed the same scene of the world, but there is no impossibility here since there is no “real world,” only an image of it. The force of my looking is meeting the force of the The World of Images pressing in against my eyes. My awareness of this illuminates the materiality of my encounter with the painting, which is to say the materiality of thought. Or, as Magritte said in a letter to Foucault, “thought is what sees and can be described visibly” (cited in Deleuze, Foucault, 49). In a beautiful touch, Magritte frames his window with curtains that are reminiscent of those we might see framing a proscenium stage in a theatre. We have here a pictorial dramatization of the theatrical performance of seeing and being seen. 

The theatre event replays itself on a daily basis in a profoundly mundane fashion. I believe that some external force is producing distress in my life. The distress is akin to the burning force of the sun that shatters the glass, throws shards inwards toward my intrapsychic fortress of solitude, and produces a disturbing, nightmarish wrinkle in the fabric of my daily life. As Epictetus pointed out millennia ago, however, it's not things that upset us, but our judgments about things. The supposedly external circumstances that bother me are known entirely through how I see and interpret them. The change one seeks will rarely take place in the world “outside;” rather, it will take place through a process of seeing differently. To return to Deleuze and Foucault, how I say and thus define what a problem is will change once I see the so-called “problem” in a new way. The knowledge of a “problem” is always multifaceted, and yet we typically hold ourselves in one position and continue to appraise the problem from a single degree of perspective instead of circling the problem to encounter the other 359-degrees.

Liu Cixin’s 2006 novel Three-Body Problem (三体) leapt into the imagination of Americans last year when Netflix transformed it into a series of the same name. As with most compelling sci-fi stories, the plot produces an uncanny eeriness by blending an outrageous scenario with themes that are hyperrelevant to people in the present moment. In this case, the themes of perpetual surveillance, the irredeemability of the human race, techno-authoritarianism, and the failed ideals of intellectual progress all hit pretty hard. So even though Liu is confronting his readers with a story of alien invasion, he’s really commenting on something we know too well; namely, humanity is suffering a slow death. What will save us? Math? Science? Extraterrestrials? 
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Even though readers can easily side-step the nuances of the physics and mathematical problems named in the book’s title, I’d like to argue that therapists could benefit from slowing down and grappling with the complexity of the 3-body problem. Why? If you have clients suffering from “co-occurring disorders,” then you effectively have clients suffering from a biopsychosocial three-body problem. 
Consider that term, which therapists use all the time but rarely deconstruct: Bio-psycho-social. Three “bodies” acting upon and within one individual client. We assess our clients’ biological, psychological, and social circumstances as if each of those “dimensions” was exerting its own physical power over the person whose problems we’re helping to navigate. If we add the spiritual dimension, then a fourth “body” enters the picture and the scenario gets even more complex. 

As it turns out, the n-body problem of the Bio-psycho-social-spiritual dimensions of our client is a perfect analogue to the mathematical three-body problem highlighted in Liu’s novel. Mastery of Newton’s laws governing gravity and motion help us map the complexities of one planet orbiting another body, such as the sun. But when another body exerting its own gravitational effect enters the picture, Newton’s laws start to become less helpful. In fact, once a third-body enters the celestial picture, it becomes impossible to accurately predict the precise motions of bodies. As such, it becomes impossible to develop certainty about the effects of each body upon the other. This mathematical problem becomes a “real” problem if you live on one of the “bodies” tangled in the 3-body celestial orbit. And if you’re thinking that such phenomena are relegated to the world of sci-fi, I will politely redirect your attention to the chaos of the biopsychosocial-spiritual reality in which you’re ensconced and point out that, hey, you’re gonna need to brush up on your “math.”

The answer is lebensform, but to understand it we'll need to know the question.

Clients in the worlds of substance abuse and mental health therapy tend to share a dislike for slogans. I've played around with this in the group therapy setting by asking clients to only speak in AA slogans, using no other words. "It's all about people, places, and things for me. Just doing the next right thing, taking it one day at a time." Everyone laughs because they think of that one person at the AA or NA meetings who sincerely talks like this. When we pick the phenomenon apart, we get to the conclusion that the general dislike of the slogan and the sloganeer comes from a feeling of insincerity, as if the "bumper sticker" language misses something unique about each client's circumstance. 

And there's the rub. Each person is unique, and yet each person also shares a surprising number of similarities with other people. We are bound together through our cultural affiliations, and we develop our sense of belonging through shared language that helps to identify us as part of the group. Slogans in fact come from this very fact. Why do AA slogans exist? People repeat them as proof of the organization's effectiveness. If you know the slogan, then, theoretically, you know the process that leads to a full understanding of the slogan, and if you have that full understanding then you are likely on the road to recovery. Sadly, however, the slogans can produce the opposite effect. They can be wielded as reprimands that suggest a failure has occurred. If only you understood the difference between progress and perfection, then you wouldn't have relapsed. Or, it sounds like somebody forgot to let go and let God. When words like these are transmitted and received in a careless way, then they can produce the opposite effect for which they were intended. The same is true for mental health problems. Tell a person with anger issues to slow down or count to 10 and you might get punched in the face. Or tell someone with a personality disorder that they aren't working from a Wise Mind and you could get your tires slashed. How do we make sure that we're using language to validate individual difference and promote group belonging instead of accidentally invalidating the unique person in front of us and spurring feelings of alienation?

You have heard that laughter is the best medicine, but have you dwelt on how laughter heals?

Let's start with the admission that pain and suffering exists, which his why we need healing at all. Medical doctors have determined that there is truth in the expression that laughter functions like medicine. But I'm not talking about acute medical problems. I'm interested in relief from existential dread. We live in a world where the Ignorant are in charge and fully committed to setting the conditions for maximal, pervasive distress. Given the severity of the wound, we're going to need a lot of laughter. As I argue in my new book, we need a certain kind of laughter, one that fully embraces the pain as it simultaneously points the way to a new mode of being.

Consider the headline from The Onion above. Again, let's start with suffering. The joke hurts because it presses on a few sore points. First, schools aren't really helping young people learn how to learn. Kids are great at doing school, but, as Mark Twain pointed out long ago, that skill is actually getting in the way of education. So, on one level, the headline hurts because it reminds us that the institution of education in the U.S. has largely failed to cultivate new generations of critical thinkers. Second, of all the subjects of study to lose their grip within the halls of primary and secondary education, history is perhaps the one we ought to grieve the most. True, the joke appears to be about literacy and grammar. But by cutting the "past tense," that means that not only will students need to learn how to read in a new way but they will also lose access to the past. Level two of the joke appears here: we've already lost access to that. Texas textbook revisionism coupled with too strong of a reliance on logical positivist approaches to the past has created a shallow presentism. If history seems to repeat itself, that's because we, as a nation, can't seem to recall the history of mistakes we keep making and the poor decisions we keep making on purpose. Third, and finally, the joke hurts because funding cuts are now chipping away at our vocabulary. If we cut the past tense out of our language, that'll let us function on only 2/3 of our budget, right?

Wrong. And yet we laugh. What kind of laugh does The Onion produce here? I call the kind of humor at work here a humor of congruence. Dialectically related to the dominant incongruity theory humor, which states that comedy often arises from the incommensurability of two or more side-by-side people, ideas, or situations, my congruent theory of humor suggests we laugh when something reveals precisely how something is. The formula shifts from "this does not equal that" to "this is this." In the headline, even though the scenario is exaggerated, the exaggeration reveals precisely what is the case; namely, the headline reveals how bad off we are in the present due to the failings of the educational institution. The laugh produced astride the recognition of what is the case is a laugh of recognition, and recognition is the first step toward healing. We can't get get better if we don't know we're sick.

As a mental health counselor, I often bring this theory of humor into the group therapy environment. I distribute humorous images and wait for the laughter to erupt. Once people laugh, I ask the question: what's so funny? Take this Alice In Wonderland image, for example. The theory of incongruity suggests that the humor arises from the divergent meanings of "mad." The Cheshire Cat means "we're all crazy here," but Alice thinks she's done something wrong: Are you "mad" (Angry) at me? But this incongruity (mad ≠ mad) is not the only reason, or even the main reason that healing laughter arises after encountering this meme. 

Whether we're in a therapeutic setting or not, insecurities abound. Insecurities come from beliefs about ourselves that we safeguard and try to keep from view. Despite our best efforts, however, the beliefs do in fact show themselves, often through our speech and our behavior. When Alice interprets the cat's "mad" to mean that she's already done something wrong, she is showing us one of her insecure beliefs. She must have done something wrong because that's her thing. She's the one who has always already done something wrong. And the cat et al. know it. In my group therapy sessions, people laugh as they identify themselves with the same core belief. If people don't have that core belief, they tend not to "get" the joke right away. People who suffer from this kind of insecurity access the healing laughter first, maybe because they're the ones who need it. Presumably, the person who made this meme is one of these insecure people. It was made for the purpose of naming this common problem. What is the case? Many people enter spaces with the presumption that they are in the wrong and that everyone either knows it already or will soon find out. 

Invisible and privately held beliefs become visible, and the healing begins. I feel like Alice. Oh, you, too? Oh wait, whoever made this meme really gets it. There's a whole community of us! Uh oh, that's not good. This feeling is a thing. A common thing? Is that what this group is about? Of course it is. I'm laughing in multiple ways now. I "get" the joke + the joke's on me + the joke's not funny + I'd rather not be the person who gets the joke. Do I drink alcohol because I feel this way? No. That's can't be it. Is it? 

Step two of the healing process of this particular kind of laughter reveals itself at this point. Step 1: laughter makes what it is the case visible. Step 2: once visible, laughter unites people who typically suffer in silence and alone. 

Step 3: Healing doesn't just happen. You make it happen.

Once something typically hidden becomes visible and we verify that, yes, this is the case, and once we unite with others who suffer in similar ways with us, then we can turn to the work of producing healing. One of the many drawbacks of Western medicine's reliance on pharmacology is that the pervasiveness of pills and prescriptions fabricate a false belief that something outside of us will fix us. But the pill doesn't do the healing. The recognition that help is required and the behaviors of seeking out and asking for help are the actions that led to the acquisition of the medication that will play a part in the treatment of whatever ails you. Similarly, when it comes to existential dread, the remedy will come about through concerted action. It is not enough, in other words, to sit in a room with people and agree that we "get" a joke about a cycle of thinking that ultimately defeats us, makes us depressed, produced anxiety, or whatever. "I'm amazing. I hate myself. I'm not real. That's exactly how it goes." Good. We have words to name a feeling and a process, but more steps are required. For starters, we need to intervene in the cycle.

One way to do this, after introducing the meme to a group, is to challenge people to ask each other a question throughout the day, "Where are you in the cycle right now?" I hear the question, I laugh, and I respond: "Ha. I'm amazing right now." "Give it time," you'll say. "Let me know when you don't exist." We laugh together. And at what are we laughing? We are laughing now at three things: 1. It is true that I think in this self-defeating and perplexing way. 2. I know others see me thinking in this way, and I know they can see me because they, too, think in this way. 3. We're working together to do something about it. One laugh moves through many states, from the surprise of recognition to the joy of connection with others to the hope of producing a different mode of being. 

Want to carry the work of healing from a group therapy room or a small cohort of friends to the world at large? Don't worry. There's a meme for that.

If I walk through the mechanics of the healing laugh with a group of people in Asheville, NC, and then show them the Tattoo Artist/People Who Need Therapy meme, lots of healing laughter erupts. Working in a substance use treatment center was hands-down the greatest place to produce such laughter because everyone in there, me include, is covered in tattoos. Everyone has some knowledge of the intriguing, medicinal pain that comes through tattooing, and everyone knows that money will sooner go toward the next tattoo than it will toward the deductible on your insurance that enables you to keep going to therapy. 

This meme does quite a lot of work. It draws attention to a visible mark that will show itself out on the streets, and once it makes itself visible there it will have the power to continue the healing work started in the therapy room. I'm walking on the sidewalk and I pass in front of a tattoo parlor. I remember, "Ha, I wonder if anyone in there should be getting therapy instead?!" I look at my own tattoos. I need therapy. This is how it is. The work is continuous, and so many people would benefit from doing it. The knowledge produced through this train of thought is almost totally overwhelming. In certain cases, I would be crying as I thought about how many people are suffering, how many institutions perpetuate suffering, how many individuals seek out remedies, often through non-sustainable means. But right now I'm laughing as I face the same kind of overwhelm. 

Laughter has the power to heal provided that the laugher rides the wave of the laugh into action for sustaining change in a world that prefers repetition of the same to revolution-like interventions. For something to change, a full-on political revolution is not always needed. The change can start from a tiny laugh in a small room with others who are suffering. As long as you know that that the laugh is awaiting you in the world, that you can and should seek it out, and that, once you find it, you will gain a short-lived boost of energy to intervene, then you are prepared to produce the work of healing in the world.  

In The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), Slavoy Žižek treats William Tenn's (aka Philip Klass) 1955 story, “The Discovery of Morniel Mathaway.”

An art historian living in the 25th century builds a time machine to go back and encounter a man who was entirely unknown in his time period—our present day—but later became regarded as the greatest painter of all time. The historian made his career studying this artist’s work and acquired recognition as the de facto expert on this famous but mysterious historical person.

Using the time machine, the historian travels back, eventually locates the artist, and learns that the man is an absolute disaster. He is, basically, in mania all the time. He is deceptive and unruly. He doesn’t care about anything except himself. Eventually, the man steals the historian’s time machine, leaving the historian stranded in the past.

After freaking out a bit, the historian comes up with a plan for how to keep himself sane, stranded, as he is, hundreds of years in the past, broken off from his family, and alone. He decides to paint the famous artist’s works from memory. He teaches himself how to paint and acquires all the materials. Gradually, he reconstructs all the paintings that he had dedicated so many years to studying and interpreting.

After accomplishing this task, it dawns on the historian that it was he himself all along who was the famous painter. The original “man” he had spent so many years studying was himself, though he couldn’t have known that until enacting the time travel, getting stranded, determining to paint the paintings from memory, etc.
Yet, what then is “memory” or “history”?

It's 9am on a Thursday in a substance abuse treatment facility. How do you solicit interest from clients? Try this out:

In 1898, the American author Morgan Robertson wrote a novel called Futility, or The Wreck of the Titan. It features a boat called the Titan that has the following specifications:

• 800 ft [244 m] long 
• Capacity for roughly 3,000 passengers
• Lifeboats for only a fraction of that number of people
• Capsizes after hitting an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean as it sailed from Ireland to the United States

On April 15, 1912, the Titanic (actually) struck an iceberg in the Atlantic killing most of the 3000 passengers on-board. Here were its specifications:

• 882 ft 9 in [269 m] long
• Lifeboats for only a fraction of that number of people
• Similarly upper-class passengers

I then ask the clients two questions. 1.) How is it possible that an author envisioned a significant historical event in advance? 2.) Which of the two events came/comes first?

Voodoo Dolls have a rich and often misunderstood multifaceted history that branches off into different cultures. Rarely does this history intersect with western therapeutic strategies. This group sought to change that.

​Németh (2018) reports that "The earliest extant reference to magic dolls is made in the foundation oath of the settlers of Cyrene [Libya]" (179). These dolls, in fact, show up in fragments of text throughout the classical Greco-Roman world. But these dolls, while similar in purpose and effect, at least on first glance, to the "Voodoo Doll" of African and Afro-Caribbean figures, are in fact quite different. When we approach the topic of magic dolls and the Voodoo religious practices, we run into difficult territory. David Frankfurter (2020) explores these difficulties at length. He argues that term often applied to hand-sized, human-like dolls made of fabric or straw, and used for the purposes of inflicting harm on a human identified by the miniature effigy, is "fundamentally misleading in its history of applications and especially egregious in the current debate over the openness of classics to people of color."

His argument is worth citing in some detail because the primary points of contention are all valid. First, he shows how "the term Voodoo Doll implies that it is the law of sympathy (“like affects like”) that is the prevailing assumption of the artifact’s users. But these laws of sympathy belong not to the various worlds in which people have used ritual figurines and curse-poppets but rather to the “armchair” synthetic theories of Frazer’s Golden Bough, which strove to comprehend primitive religion in a general, if uninformed, way" (53–54). Second, citing the work of Joan Dyan (1995), he acknowledges how “anything diabolical, irrational, or superstitious became materialized [starting in the 18th century] as the spirit of blackness" (cit. 54). Ultimately, Frankfurter's claim is clear and simple understand: "The term Voodoo Doll should be abandoned, as many more precise ones have long been available to scholars" (54).

​I don't disagree, but I also chose to use the oft-misused, sometimes offensive word for the title of this group. I had two primary reasons for this choice. First, the milieu of group therapy in substance use treatment facilities is populated by many types of people. The effort to find a "common language" while also teaching and doing valid therapeutic work is substantial. I gravitate toward scholarly sources such as Frankfurter's essay, but I have learned through thousands of hours of experience that most of my clients do not. Since I am well-trained in the art of teaching and have the ability to translate scholarly concepts into different modes of discourse, I frequently lead groups on heady and challenging topics. But, I always pepper those groups with copious pop culture terms and references in order to speak to as many people as possible all at once. In the case of this group, "Voodoo Doll" is accessible as a concept, and so I used its accessibility as a rhetorical gambit to entice clients (aged 19–61) into the hard emotional work that I'll explain below. 

Second, if and when matters of race, gender, sexuality, stigma, offensiveness, political discord, religious trauma, etc., come up, which they do quite frequently, then whatever gets initially branded as "offensive," regardless of who says it, becomes an invitation to a therapeutic discussion about the emotions that arise around the particular brand of offense one experiences. Nothing occurs in the treatment environment that is devoid of therapeutic value. All problems, especially racism and similarly charged -isms, have the power to reveal something that was previously invisible to one or more clients, even to the clinician(s). So, having hazarded the use of "Voodoo Doll," I was prepared to drop my plan for the group and pivot to a processing group on racism and cultural appropriation. As it turned out, that need did not arise.

Clients were at first hesitant about the prompt to construct Voodoo Dolls, but the hesitance dropped away as I provided the set-up and rationale for the group. I began by talking about the difference between self-defeat and self-destruction. Clients were quick to point out the main difference. Self-defeat is a thought-based, self-talk problem. Self-destruction is a behavior that causes harm. For example, self-defeating thoughts take the form of core beliefs such as "I'm not worthy of love." One self-destructive behavior that could follow from that belief is the self-imposed prohibition on making any attempt to connect meaningfully with other people. The harm caused by this behavior is the harm of isolation. Without meaningful connection, the self fails to grow. Another self-destructive behavior, however, could be much more severe. To prove to oneself that one is not worthy of love, a person could inject fentanyl into their neck with the hope of numbing the pain caused the lack of meaningful interpersonal love. In either case, the self-destruction hurts. What's more, self-defeat and self-destruction work together like tag-team wrestling partners. The behavior often doubles as proof that the core belief is correct, when in actuality the "proof" is made for the purpose of reifying the belief. My plan was to use Voodoo Dolls to address this problem, a problem with which all clients were very familiar.

I proposed that anger is the primary emotion that accompanies self-defeat and self-destruction. The problem with anger, in this case, is often that it gets directed toward the self instead of directed towards the actual instigating object. With this possibility in play, I asked clients to make a Voodoo Doll that represented a person or a specific situation toward which they had unresolved anger and rage. Once they made the doll, the clients were to use thumb-tacks, scissors, and markers to make surgical wounds on the dolls. Each mark or stab had to relate to a specific instance of anger. I asked clients not to hold back. And they didn't. A few minutes into the creation process and the clients were expressing their anger.

But then I introduced a twist. I reminded them that the name of this group is "You will suffer." Offered as a fact, not a threat, the group, as the clients know by now, derives its name from Buddhist approaches to wellness and recovery. Suffering exists. It only causes more suffering to pretend that isn't the case. What would it look like to operate from the certainty that suffering will happen instead of avoiding suffering or refusing to admit that we all suffer? In accordance with Buddhist principles, however, each act of violence we direct toward others is an act of violence committed against ourselves (since there is no real self-other/subject-object divide). With that thought in mind (treating it as true), I invited clients to take another look at their dolls. I asked them to watch as the identity of the doll transforms from someone else or some outer situation and becomes a representation of themselves. I asked them to notice: You are already dinged up. Your anger has hurt you. Following from that, I asked them to add more marks to the doll. I asked them to add a new mark/cut/tear for each self-defeating belief and self-destructive behavior they’ve enacted in the past 6 months.

Each person in the room groaned and audible sighed. The weight of the idea landed in their bodies. Perhaps reluctantly, each client took up the invitation and made their marks.

Another twist. Buddhist approaches to recovery also invite us to meet suffering with compassion. We suffer more when we fail to accept that we cause harm, that we defeat ourselves, that our self-defeat leaks out onto others. As such, I instructed the clients to take a look at their dolls and slowly, with great care, attempt to return the doll to its starting shape as one (or more) plain piece of paper. I asked them to smooth out the wrinkles the best they could. I asked them to do this with the same sensitivity that you might use to wash a baby. In a metaphorical sense, that's exactly what they are doing. They are caring for their dinged-up and disheveled selves, and they are offering the care because they are deserving of it. 

Next, we observed the wrinkled paper. We imagined ourselves as the wrinkled paper. I said, take a look at that paper. It’s you. You are wrinkled and torn. And since we can never untoast the toast, so to speak, we will never return to a state of pristine paper. But the clean sheet is an illusion anyway. Nobody ever attains it (addict or otherwise). Unless we start from where we are, meaning in this wrinkled and torn state, we cannot truly accept ourselves. I then asked them to keep looking at the paper while I asked some questions. I invited them to feel what comes up when I asked: Do you think anyone wants this wrinkled piece of paper? Do you want to be the paper in this shape? What allows or prevents you from accepting that this is it?

If you'd like to see what kinds of responses arise after a session of this sort, I invite you to try out the group in your own environment. This was the second time I conducted this group, and the pleasant surprise that hit me this time came at the very end as I pondered what to do with all the paper and related material. It felt charged. I didn't want to throw it away. To preserve the memory, I gathered it all together and invited clients to think about the pile as our collective pain. When most people think of anger, they think of the color red, of punching and kicking, and of steam coming out of cartoons' ears. But nobody thinks about this tattered stack of paper. And yet, in under 60 minutes, our group had created a beautiful representation of collective suffering.

References:
Dayan, Joan. 1995. Haiti, History, and the Gods. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Frankfurter, David. "" Voodoo Doll": Implications and Offense of a Taxonomic Category." Arethusa 53.1 (2020): 43-58.
​Németh, György. "Voodoo dolls in the classical world." Violence in Prehistory and Antiquity (2018): 179-94.

Therapeutic references:
Feen-Calligan, H., McIntyre, B., & Sands-Goldstein, M. (2009). "Art therapy with substance abuse clients: Evidence-based support for a model program." Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association, 26(3), 104–110.
Kabat-Zinn, J. (2003). "Mindfulness-based interventions in context: Past, present, and future." Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 10(2), 144–156.
Malchiodi, C. A. (2005). Expressive Therapies. Guilford Press.

Client's don't often come into treatment with any knowledge of (or interest in) art history, so I try to find as many opportunities as I can to introduce them to visual art. Today's art therapy group drew inspiration from the Impressionist Berthe Morisot and the Expressionist Erich Heckel. I showed them Morisot's Psyché and Heckel's Männerbildnis because I wanted them to use Impressionist and/or Expressionist visual language to produce self-portraits. There was, however, a catch. The two self portraits had to be conceived from the perspective of two people: a stranger and someone who knows you well. This constraint, in addition to the artistic mode of expression, produced the therapeutic effect of the group; namely, creating self-portraits through others' eyes helps to make visible how we see ourselves, how we hide parts of our emotions from view, and how we yearn for others to see the parts of ourselves that we hide. 

Research supports the use of art therapy as a means of fostering emotional regulation, enhancing insight, and promoting psychological flexibility (Kimport & Robbins, 2012; Gussak, 2007; Slayton et al., 2010). The dual self-portrait exercise specifically encourages clients to explore the discrepancy between internal and external perceptions of self, which can be particularly valuable for individuals in recovery who may struggle with shame, self-stigma, and identity confusion (Mezo & Short, 2012; Kim et al., 2017).

Since most clients are highly judgmental, especially when it comes to their own perceived lack of artistic skill, I provided a few extra words of guidance:

• Use of Color: Participants should represent affective states and emotional intensity through color choice (Moon, 2010).
• Use of Line: Use lines to show your measure of self-cohesion and mindfulness regarding present-moment awareness.
• Background Setting: Let the background image or texture act as a metaphorical tool for exploring underlying values, personality traits, and environmental influences on identity.

Here are some of the results:

If you've ever tried to throw a ball with your non-dominant hand, then you remember the feeling. Awkward, alien, confusing. Use your "off" or "wrong" hand to brush your teeth, put your contacts in, or write a few sentences on paper, and the experience is similar. Even someone with five decades of life experience can feel new to their body simply by altering daily tasks in this one simple way. 

Building from that experience, I designed an art-therapy group called "wrong-handed hope" in which I asked clients to draw two different images. One image, drawn with the "wrong" hand, would represent hopefulness. The other image, drawn with the dominant hand, would represent hopelessness. After completing both images, clients placed them in a group that I arranged in a salon-like manner. The group perused the artworks and had to determine which images depicted hopefulness and which ones depicted the opposite. Check out the three gallery images for the results. 

You've heard the factoid about how it takes more muscles to frown than it does to smile, which infers a connection between the (greater) effort it takes to sustain a negative affect compared to the (lesser) effort it takes to tilt toward the positive. Well, the same principle is in effect here. When we produce hopelessness, we tend to do so with the same surety as we bring to drawing a "Cool S" with our dominant hand. By distinction, when, or if, we produce hopefulness, it usually ends up looking like a child's drawing of hope: innocent, naive, shaky, but brilliant, inspiring, beautiful. 
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The relationship between these ideas and the work of recovery will likely be clear to you by now. For addicts, the future can't help but appear bleak. If they base their image of the future on the experiences of the recent past, then the road ahead is daunting. The work of recovery, however, is essentially the work of honoring your "wrong" hand. You are producing a reality with the fine motor skills of a child. This is not a bad thing. Instead, it's a reminder that the fine motor skills of children are what produce the most imaginative artworks of humankind. After all, Picasso is famous for having said, "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child." Such a beautiful reminder for people in early recovery: your aim is not to produce a masterwork like those of the Renaissance elite; rather, it is to play with the aplomb of a child learning what it means to live.