Dr. Vincente Garbuglio - The Fragile Phoenix

Chapter 7

How to do Magic!

First, put away your spellbooks. I don’t mean that kind of magic! Brooms only make dust fly, not people. The owl with your admission letter will never come. No matter how many crystals you buy or what rituals you whisper on the solstice, the effect will be precisely the same, nothing!

But you can still do magic! There’s a different kind of magic that is every bit as powerful and transformative as the magic in books. You have the opportunity to practice it almost every day of your life. You don’t have to memorize incantations or cackle over a bubbling cauldron. You don’t even need a wand!

Magic will simply happen if you let it.

For us mere mortals, magic comes in the indelible moments that change who we are. All the electric instants that make up the highest points of your life are magical. Things like:

• Watching the sun set from the peak of a mountain you spent the whole day climbing.

• Putting the finishing touches on a piece of artwork you put your heart and soul into and marveling at what you’ve done.

• Staring into the eyes of someone truly special as you begin to fall in love with them.

All of these moments are magic. They are not only amazing feelings that you will always treasure, they are victories. To win these magic moments, you must defeat the part of yourself that is afraid to go after the things you truly desire.

When you’re down, it seems like these moments are very few and far between, and you’re right! A negative outlook is anathema to magic. When I work with people who are going through a difficult period, I often hear them talk about how nothing works out, no matter how hard they try. Each of these people has a unique problem, a set of challenges only they have ever faced. Yet there is a commonality that runs through every person I have ever helped. Everyone is self-sabotaging their chances to experience magic. Here’s an example:

I worked with a woman who had left a long-term relationship about a year before. Her previous partner had already met someone new and was engaged. My patient had not. Her love life was a mess and she felt like a failure. Though she had dated several men in the year since the big breakup, she told me she didn’t feel a genuine spark with any, and soon lost interest. She had a fear that is very common, that she and her previous partner were meant-to-be, and she had missed her one chance at true love. She felt she had been consigned to a series of increasingly meaningless relationships that would finally peter out, leaving her alone with her cat.

I asked this patient how she went on dates. I wanted to know how she felt before them, what her expectations were, and how she felt afterward. I learned she had set up a series of rules for herself. She was not much of a drinker and didn’t like crowded bars, so she mostly met men through a dating site. She would only go out with a man after they had been messaging for two weeks or more. She would make sure to have something else scheduled right after each date, so she had an excuse to leave and wouldn’t feel pressured into sex. She insisted on splitting the tab and she was careful to let a day elapse before responding to texts so she didn’t seem too needy. When I asked her where she’d come up with these rules, she explained they were a combination of advice from magazines and her mother.

She followed what she assumed was good advice to the letter, and could not understand why she was unsuccessful in finding a partner. She told me that all the good men were taken, that all the ones she met were only using her to get sex and they quickly lost interest when they found out she wasn’t easily won. Though she believed she had recovered from her previous relationship, I suggested this was not the case and recommended a course of therapy to help deal with the lingering effects of the breakup.

We all have a strong drive to avoid things that will injure us, both physically and mentally. Loss is greater than almost any physical pain we can experience. Healing from a real loss is always incomplete, no matter how much time elapses. When we are not ready to move on, frequently we will self-sabotage to prevent ourselves from being hurt again. To the mind, the pain of failure is infinitely preferable to the pain of loss.

When my patient was creating a set of rigid rules to protect herself from predatory men, she was also building a cage around her emotions. Because she feared she could not bear another tough breakup, she was unknowingly creating conditions which made it impossible to form another strong relationship. Our therapy dealt with this fear, bringing it out into the open and picking it to pieces.

Only after reaching a state where we can accept the inevitability of being hurt again are we truly willing to take a chance on someone. In the case of my patient, she responded very well to therapy. She took my suggestion of trying to find a partner through a shared activity group, rather than on dating sites. Though she had never danced before, she did something she was afraid of and took a latin dance class. She met a man there, and found the spark that had been so conspicuously absent in the carefully crafted exchanges of online dating. The two fell deeply in love and have been happily married for the last five years.

Whether your goal in therapy is being ready to form a lasting relationship, or a breakthrough in art, or simply a sense of well-being and harmony, a critical part of it is simply letting the magic happen. Putting yourself in a position where you can fail and being prepared to accept pain is necessary to experience magic.

When you’re prepared to pay the price, you’ll find that everything comes into alignment. What seemed like major obstacles are minor hurdles, your goal was closer than you thought all along. You can fly, you can do magic. You can be truly alive.