Personal Experience(2): Morita Therapy and Hodgkin’s Di...

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Morita Therapy and Hodgkin’s Disease

By M.W., age 28
   
  
  I have been sick for six years. I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease when I was 22 years old. At that time, I was a graduate student, studying for my Ph.D. in archaeology. I seemed to have a very exciting future ahead of me. My professors were enthusiastic about my work. One of them even invited me to go on an expedition to Turkey with him and his colleagues during the summer holiday but my Hodgkin’s Disease was found two months before I was to go. Most people with Hodgkin’s Disease are cured. I thought I’d be cured but, instead, my disease has progressed. I’ve had radiation, five different kinds of chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant. I had to leave school and move back in with my parents. My friends are now professors in universities. They have boyfriends or husbands. I can only leave my home in a wheel chair. I need oxygen continuously and no one but my parents has ever loved me. I am 28 years old and I am dying.

About a year ago, I got very bitter. I couldn’t accept the fact that people who drank, smoked, ate fatty foods and acted nasty lived to be old. I did none of those things. Also, I had studied so hard my whole life. I always knew I wanted to be an archaeologist. I couldn’t believe that my whole life’s purpose was being taken from me. All around me, were people about my age who had no purpose. They did jobs they didn’t care about and watched TV all night but it would be they, not me, who got to live. The other thing that made me bitter was my father’s behavior. He kept saying he loved me and he kept giving me gifts but he wouldn’t spend time with me. When I became very sick, he hired an aide to take care of me even though he was retired and he was home all day. I said, “Daddy, I don’t want the coat you bought me. I already have a coat. I don’t want the car you bought me. Can’t you see I’m too sick to drive? What I want is for you to sit next to me and talk to me and hold my hand. Why can’t you do that?” But he never changed his ways.

Because I was so bitter, I started seeing the social worker every week. She introduced me to Morita Therapy. I have practiced Morita Therapy for 14 months. It has changed everything for me. Here are some of the things I have learned:

You must make a choice whether you want to practice living or practice your illness. I had been practicing my illness, concentrating every day on all the experiences, dreams, strength, weight, etc. I was losing. I was watching myself die. With Morita Therapy, I decided to change my ways and practice living. The social worker taught me a phrase from a poem by Dylan Thomas: “Deaths and Entrances.” She said she thinks of that phrase a lot because life includes so many deaths. She tries to balance every death with an entrance. I decided to do the same thing. When I lost weight, I learned to sew. When I lost the use of my left lung, I started a friendship over the Internet with a woman in Colorado who is also interested in archaeology. Now I have people and interesting activities back in my life.

I learned that all the fixed ideas you have about the world are false and can cause you pain. I thought that goodness (studying, taking care of my health, being kind to others) should be rewarded and badness (being lazy, smoking, being mean) should be punished. I thought that old people should die and young people should live. Over and over again, the world taught me that my ideas were wrong but, instead of learning from my experience in the world and changing my expectations, I kept my expectations and got angrier and angrier at the world for not meeting them. That really hurt my life. It is hard enough to live with huge sickness. If you add huge anger to the sickness, you are likely to have no life at all (what happened to me). I like what Dr. Kora [a Morita psychiatrist] said about letting the unknown remain unknown. I don’t know why the world works the way it does but I’ll accept my lack of understanding and just deal with the way things are. This has freed me of a lot of anger. My father is another thing I’ve had to accept as he is. I would prefer a father who gave me time and held my hand and sometimes put his arms around me and said he knew he couldn’t keep me forever and that made him sad. But I have the father I have. It is better for me not to keep focusing on all the things he isn’t. There isn’t just one relationship called “father-daughter.” There are as many father-daughter relationships in the world as there are fathers and daughters. And, probably, none of them is perfect. Now I’m looking for ways to get to know my father better the way he is.

I will never be the person I planned to be but I have started to become the person I can be. From Morita study, I have learned flexibility. Life isn’t all-or-nothing; archaeologist or useless invalid. The social worker loves poems. They are often very short and yet, in their few lines, they sometimes say more than a long novel says. Until I met her, I only read novels. The social worker would sometimes show me a poem that talked about what I was experiencing. I got interested. I started borrowing her books. Then, since my father likes buying me presents, I asked him to buy me poetry books. Then I started writing poetry. I am also writing a book for children about archaeology. Maybe, in it, I will be able to communicate my love of the profession to a child who will have the opportunity to do what I wanted to do. That would make me happy.

To people who read this, what I have learned and done because of Morita Therapy may seem small. But, to me, these things are not small. They are life. Because of Dr. Morita, I have a life.

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