At the age of 86, Dr. Irvin Yalom is still rippling.
I quickly discovered this during my visit to the the Palo Alto home of the influential and beloved psychotherapist and author for a Wavemaker Conversations podcast about his new memoir, Becoming Myself.
Yalom describes how, back in May, he had suffered complications from knee replacement surgery and was so ill “I thought I was gonna die.” The Atlantic magazine sent a reporter to interview him in his hospital room. The story, entitled How to Die, offered this takeaway: “As a psychotherapist, Irvin Yalom has helped others grapple with their mortality. Now he is preparing for his own end.”
It may have felt that way in May. But not now. Having healed from his surgery, Yalom is not finished with his work helping others — with actively rippling.
What is Rippling?
Rippling is a core concept for Yalom — one he finds empowering for people suffering from a wide range of issues that disturb their inner peace —including the existential anxiety of “the terror of death.”
Rippling refers to passing parts of our self on to others, even to others whom we do not know, much as the ripples caused by a pebble in a pond go on and on until they are no longer visible but continue at the nano level.
Becoming Myself reveals that Irvin Yalom’s rippling force is powered by empathy, which is where his memoir begins.
I awake from my dream at 3 a.m., weeping into my pillow. Moving quietly, so as not to disturb (my wife) Marilyn, I slip out of bed and into the bathroom, dry my eyes, and follow the directions I have given to my patients for fifty years: close your eyes, replay your dream in your mind, and write down what you have seen.
What Yalom saw and heard in his dream, what made him weep, was a memory from when he was 12 years old and, unintentionally, hurt the feelings of a girl in his neighborhood. The title of the chapter: The Birth of Empathy.
Only two years later, at the age of 14, Irvin Yalom received an act of kindness which led him to conclude that empathy would be a driving force in his life’s work.
Late one night, his father had a heart attack. Yalom’s mother, with whom he had a strained relationship, blamed Irvin: ”You killed him,” Yalom’s mother screamed, “you killed him.”
The family physician, Dr. Manchester, arrived, cared for Yalom’s father, and paid special attention to Irvin.
(He) tousled my hair, reassured my mother, gave my father an injection .... held his stethoscope to my father’s chest, and then let me listen as he said, “See, sonny, it’s ticking away, strong and regular as a clock. Not to worry. He’s going to be all right.”
No one had ever given me such a gift. Then and there I decided to be like him. I would be a doctor and pass on to others the comfort he had offered me.
The Healing Power of Transparency
In Becoming Myself, Irvin Yalom describes an exuberant life journey in which he embraces a spirit of improvisation and innovation.
When I told him that, after reading Becoming Myself, I was struck by how seldom life’s obstacles left him depressed, Yalom volunteered “....my disease is anxiety, not depression.”
That personal transparency is a hallmark of his therapy, one that goes against the grain of traditional psychoanalysis. He proceeds to share the moving story of a recent patient who believed she was “beyond repair.”
Determined to convince her that she was wrong, Dr. Yalom shared with her an upsetting image from his youth that, to this day, causes him profound anxiety — but one that propelled him to make a better life for himself. The story had an impact on the patient. She was persuaded to continue therapy and engage in the difficult work of self-repair. To hear Yalom tell this tale, 13 minutes into our podcast, is an emotionally powerful experience.
On being transparent about his own struggles, he tells me: “I’ve hardly ever, ever done it with a patient without something good coming of it.”
A Novice At Growing Old
“I’m realizing now there is a vale of tears and pain in me I may never be done with,” Yalom writes to us — his reader/patients — in the final pages of Becoming Myself.
There is that power of transparency again. Just knowing that an individual as personally and professionally fulfilled as Irvin Yalom acknowledges a “vale of tears” in his own life may provide comfort to others.
But now that Becoming Myself has been published, he has a new challenge, captured by the title of his final chapter: “A Novice at Growing Old.”
“I’ve always had a stack of books waiting in the back of my mind to be written, but no longer. Once I finish this work, I feel certain there are no more books waiting for me.”
That sentence feels like an ending — like a death of sorts.
But then I remember what he told me after sharing the story of the patient who thought she was beyond repair. “I’ll write about this some day,” he said.
At 86, Dr. Irvin Yalom is not preparing to die. He is preparing to create more ripples.
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