Shifting Gears
By Jenny Honen

Last week my car got a heart transplant.

For some reason it feels right to assume that the transmission is the heart of my car. Though it is relatively young, my car started having trouble in the early spring. Not big trouble.

Well, it wouldn't go forward until it was good and ready.

Ok, so maybe it was a bigger problem than I was willing to admit at the time.

I could put it into drive and sometimes it would sit for a long time before the gear would engage. I would often get impatient and rev the gas hopelessly while the car sat, unmoving. Then, suddenly, I would jolt forward as the engine lunged into gear. As I was catapulted towards the steering wheel wondering about the amount of force it would take for my airbag to deploy, I could almost hear the engine whisper, 'ok, now I'm ready to go.'

There were other times when it would slip right into gear. At those moments the world seemed backwards - what was supposed to happen did. I had just gotten used to what wasn't supposed to happen - a reality shift of sorts, I suppose. My car never had a problem in any other gear. Park was perfect, and reverse worked like a dream. I just couldn't count on the machine moving forward consistently.

So with the problem clearly outlined, let me move on to my proposed solution. I figured that the car is a machine of energy and so am I - maybe our energies could talk to each other and do some healing together. I thought I would try to fix my car through process. After all, I had been learning for the past four or so years at HFI that process was the path to life, bumps in the road and all. In fact it is the bumps that can be the doorways to the greatest sense of self and center. So why not expand beyond the traditional category of sentient beings to automobiles? After all, I had always had a special relationship with my cars. My car felt like a safe place to be, where I could be alone, yet look all around me and see other people, so I wouldn't feel so alone. Cars can sometimes provide a space of connection with a boundary. Of course sometimes your boundaries can get dented in the supermarket parking lot, but that is another metaphor and different story. The point is that I felt very connected to my car, a safe place on wheels with a bunch of cool gadgets to control the environment. What could be better? So, was this a relationship worth saving? Yes.

Of the few I told about my experiment to heal my car through process, all were skeptical and some began to give me strange looks. There was not much support to be had, but I took what little faith I had and pressed on.

I thought about my training at HFI, and asked myself the question, "What layer is my car in?" Not moving into forward, hmmm, I mentally scanned my choices. Not life layer, I was pretty clear that would be represented by actually going forward when in Drive. What would a car look like in role layer? Would we see a Chevy parading around like a Saab? Or a BMW convertible looking beautiful on the surface, yet hiding the vast array of quirky electrical problems underneath the hood that make the car alarm sound sadistically at 2 am? No, no role for my car. It's an earthy Subaru. Death layer? Perhaps sooner for me than the car. Ahh, impasse. Of course. I believe impasse is a layer of paradoxes. It is about feeling stuck, but as lousy as that feels its message is that there is some worse feeling lurking around that corner, just waiting for you to drop through impasse. Ok, so let me own my anthropomorphizing the layers. I couldn't be sure about what this transmission-related impasse meant to my car. Where was it that my car didn't want to go? What did it think about in those moments of suspended animation when it wouldn't move forward? What was the feeling it was trying to avoid by hanging out in impasse?

I've learned in training program that impasse needs to be supported and appreciated.
In hindsight, this may actually be the precise place where my plan broke down (no pun intended).

Appreciation for my own impasse has never been a strong suit of mine. In fact, I often meet impasse with contempt, and, if I am being honest, that is probably the way I met my car's impasse. This probably made my car feel unsafe and unlikely to move out of impasse. Perhaps it felt a little contempt of its own when it met mine and dug its circular heels in. As you can imagine, this made for relationship impasse, you know, when couples would rather have the same argument over and over again instead of dropping into the feelings underneath. Maybe my car was trying to stay away from feeling impotent. It would be misleading at this point not to mention that my own process road was a bit rocky at the time. It was actually being torn up, right down to the bedrock. The plan was for it to be repaved, but I haven't seen that yet. There are a lot of open and deep ruts, no wonder my car didn't want to drive down that road.
I finally got enough support for my impasse to drop into acceptance that my car's transmission was not going to get better through process. I did have to feel my own powerlessness, my own inability to fix the car. I needed help. I needed someone who had been down this road before, who had moved through all of the layers associated with transmission issues. I needed a mechanic, someone whom I could trust, who could appreciate the delicate task I was asking him or her to perform. As I left my car in the mechanic's lot the night before the operation, I wondered what this meant about process.

I wondered what this meant about hearts. I started thinking about replacing a heart. Surely my heart has a lot in common with that old faulty transmission, grinding out metal shavings into the transmission fluid as a self-destructive cry for help. I was no new BMW 525i convertible humming down the great open road. My heart is battle scarred, torn open and sewn back with hasty inconsistent stitches, not meant to hold for a lifetime. Could I live on the triaged remnants of my heart? It can disappear for days or weeks at a time, the only evidence of its presence is my continued life. I can't feel it, though, or anyone else's at those times. I'm stuck and can't move forward even when my brain is telling me I'm in drive. Do I, too, need to follow that path of my car and get a heart transplant, a replacement? Is that the path of healing for me?
I wondered if my heart had been so damaged that the only hope would be a rebuilt replacement part. I wondered how many times a heart can be blown apart before there is nothing left to put back together. I wondered if the message in my experiment was about letting go of trying to fix the creaky inconsistencies of my own heart through process.

I wish I had a better ending for this story. I wish I could say that people are different from cars. The truth is that my road has still not been paved, and as I get stuck in one rut and then the next my faith can run pretty thin. But maybe my experiment was faulty. Maybe process is not about fixing things. Maybe it's not about fixing broken transmissions or broken hearts. In some ways, I wish process were about fixing. I wish I could lay out all of my broken pieces and have some trained professional glue them back together, good as new. If it is not about fixing things, what is process about?
Like I said, I wish I had a better ending for this story. But as I sit here tonight on the eve of Thanksgiving, I think that maybe the ending for this story is in those broken places of my heart. I guess when it is good and ready, we will move forward.

JH
November 2002

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Jenny Honen is a student in HFI's Professional Training Program for Psychotherapists in Body-Centered Gestalt Therapy. Her car is not.