Teacher Complex

I’m not sure how this happened. I feel like I did everything I could to avoid it - but it seems that somehow, somewhere along the way, I’ve become a kind of teacher.

To my mind this is both terrifying and audacious. But probably more honest,  accurate and better fitting than any other label that I’ve tried on of late.

All this seems probably obvious and no big deal to most people. I’ve been “facilitating workshops” for the past year or two functioning as a de facto teacher in my own little pseudo-school of Martha. But teachers, alive or dead, in real life or in books have always been “the grown-ups” that I organized myself around, the surrogate parents, the keepers of the golden elixir that sustains me, curing my ills. Teachers are entities that I have so deeply revered, real ones, good ones, that to think of myself as among them, as one of them, even at this age and stage of life feels a bit like sacrilege.

School absolutely saved me, in a million ways. I yearned for teachers to recognize me but was also hesitant to make anything other than superficial contact with them lest they fell from their pedestal too ignominiously.

Knowledge, learning was my primary nurturance, and I didn’t want anything or anyone to fuck it up.

And of course, with all my ambivalence -  my schoolgirl admiration, my desire to be seen but not too exposed - male teachers, especially in high school would quickly become too stimulated by the stars in my eyes. They could smell my Daddy-hunger and many of them would try to cross lines that should not be crossed. One sent me what he fancied to be an “erotic” poem – although no one who actually read it would call it that. Another would ask too many creepy questions about my romantic life. One even showed up at my home over the summer, while my mother was at work, and suggested we go for a swim in the apartment complex pool. I was generally protected on the one hand by my total obliviousness, and on the other by my desire to be appreciated only for very specific reasons. I wasn’t looking to be flattered, or told I was special. I wasn’t interested in feeling beautiful or powerful or seductive. I just wanted to sharpen my sword. I wanted a teacher to give me more books, or ask me harder questions, or challenge me or show me some new world of ideas. When they strayed from the path and offered me unwanted attentions – I crossed them off my list.

College, grad school, and post-graduate training thankfully offered me more consolidated teachers with cleaner boundaries. Some offered to sponsor my advancement into academia or initiate me into psychoanalytic institute training, but those environments had too much extraneous nonsense – competitiveness, toxicity, for me to bother with. I just wanted the book lists.

Working as a clinician and my time in my own analysis offered me teacherly connections and teacherly outlets of my own – but for the most part I settled into a self-taught life, forming deep and private imaginal attachments to my favorite theorists, analysts, philosophers, theologians, metaphysicians. Reading and re-reading through their cannons, reading the development of their thoughts from early papers to their last books gave me a sense of growing together, alongside each other.

And these remote or perhaps dead teachers never needed me to manage their hunger, or firmly assert my boundaries. They didn’t feel threatened by me nipping at their heels or rejecting their ideas outright, never dismissed my own thoughts, or tried to put me in my place. I could receive what they had given, feel validated and understood when they named notions that I had intuited myself, and let them show me whole new worlds of ideas.

New galaxies even.

I would of course, now and then, take various continuing ed. classes, non-matriculated, for my own edification, or for the educational units required by my licensure. I tried, whenever I could, to find true elders, masters at their craft, and master teachers, sometimes even those whose books I had already devoured. I’d sit in the auditorium silently fan-girling.

I began slowly sliding my clinical skills toward group work, and leading groups for other therapists: supervision groups, eco-therapy study groups, and Jungian reading groups. I slowly began broadening my scope to “facilitating” workshops open to all in a few spaces where I felt I finally consolidated enough to have faith in what I had to say: living with dying and tending to dreams. I was petrified when I started and am very grateful for the patience of all the participants who signed up for the early iterations of these groups – as I was finding my sea-legs. And although I now trust that many of the people I have worked with in these more didactic formats have found them to be generally valuable, I still struggle with some silent insecurities here:

How can I inhabit a role that I over-idealized for so long?

Who am I to hold forth on such subjects?

I have no academic publications, no endorsement or affiliations with any school, church, or institute. Could my decades of auto-didacticism be worth anything to anyone else?

Those who have followed me on social media or read this newsletter know that this is a very present conflict for me, I mean, lord almighty, do I have a teacher complex or what?

I mean, just this past fall I was excited to have been accepted to the Living School at the Center for Action and Contemplation. And although most of my fellow students seemed to have enrolled to find a community of peers, I only applied because I was still (probably pathologically) hungry for more teachers: Dr. Barbara Holmes, Mirabai Starr, James Finley, Richard Rohr. When the administration eliminated accommodations for immunocompromised/high-risk people – I made an initial attempt to advocate for myself, but quickly realized that it was beyond silly for me to keep clinging to the role of perpetual student.  And when I looked back at my class notes, I realized I’d been observing how these teachers taught such subtle and complex concepts to laymen far more that I had been attending to the subjects they were teaching.

I was deeply sad to have to withdraw (compounding pandemic losses) and still am at times, but I must admit it kicked me in the seat of my pants.

I am nearly sixty years old. With a confounding dormant “wait and watch” cancer in a pandemic. There is no more time to dither. No more on-ramp. I don’t need to search for elders anymore.

I am an elder, ready or not. And it is time for me to act like one.

It is time for me to become the teacher I needed. Those who need me will find me.

I am deeply aware that just as I was and am finely attuned to the foibles, failures, and ego-injuries of the teachers, keenly observed from the position I assumed at their feet - that I will also have to encounter all the shames and personality flaws that will be revealed to me and others in this new role. There will be new ways to fail, different from my failures as a therapist, new ways to show people my ass, new positions for putting my foot in my mouth, new ways to disappoint and displease.

I’ve got no school, institution, or community of fellow-teachers to collaborate with. No religion or institute or club. I am self-taught in the things I love the best. I’m making it all up as I go along.

 I’ve seen a lot. I’ve done a lot. I’ve read a lot.

More than most. And more than many who have a PhD or who found the mojo to publish a book or who see themselves as experts.

I teach without that authority, and I imagine it is the only way that I could ever bring myself to teach at all.

It no longer feels audacious. It feels like sharing some few things I’ve learned in case it is of any use, with people who challenge me, and ask hard questions and share their ideas, and who, more than any teacher I’ve ever found, truly help me to sharpen my sword.