Flash Lightning and the narrative

Someone I work with ... is the superhero Flash Lightning. In this once-upon-a-time, I am CloverGirl. Guess I'm supposed to be a kind of talisman, bringing luck, life, growth ... all while driving a souped-up New VW Beetle ... I can't help but smile. Yeah, maybe I'm just playing into someone's delusion - but then again, just maybe this is that person's narrative therapy. Good time for me to think hard about transferences and countertransference I suppose. But meanwhile ... Flash wants to protect everyone - including CloverGirl - but his one tool is lightning. Powerful yes, but all too ephemeral. I'm watching the lightning in the clouds to the north tonight, the vanguard of a midnight storm bringing fresh, cool air southward. The beauty of it stops me in my tracks, but it remains in the clouds far above where neither you nor I nor anyone else can stop it. Probably none but the very fastest camera could even capture the pale ghost of an impression of it, while a long exposure would capture the glow but none of that here-and-now, of the moment zing of it.

How like this psychotherapy work. I know I'm reading a lot more into that "narrative" than "Flash" does - or at least more than "Flash" is aware of. But it's there in the narrative. There are those who constantly verbalize the belief that these are patients of Sisyphus, that they will never get better, that they will never gain any "real" insight, that they are too far gone to the voices in their own heads and the weird fantastical invisible visions of their minds to grasp concepts in therapy. Plenty of times, I'll admit it, those people are probably right. But for all the moments that's all true, there are these moments - lightning arcs across the horizon, one or two or a handful of the people in the group "get it" - sometimes they can even see one another humanly past the misunderstanding and paranoia and distraction, just for a split second. They can't name it, but then again it's seldom I can even name that fluttering, shimmering, ephemeral butterfly's wing that starts to unfold when this caterpillar (my self) thinks the world might be coming to an end.