I had this older T who was fond of poetry and stories. Which I hated. My dad used to tell me stories like that and so I have bad association with that. One day I was feeling so upset and angry about mom and why she won't change. It was perhaps the hundredth time I had mentioned this to my T, about various things I had done to change her, about how she kept shattering my basic expectations about being loving and caring....

Then when I was finished, my T told me a little story. Today when I saw the shorter version on a psych blog, I decided to share it:

"Nasrudin was a mythical figure, a teacher from the Sufi Muslim tradition, who supposedly lived in what we now call the Middle East. One day one of his students walks into a room where Nasruddin was reaching into a bag of hot chili peppers and eating them one at a time. There were tears streaming down his face, his nose was running and his lips swollen and irritated. He was obviously in great pain. 'Why don’t you stop eating those hot peppers?' the student asked. 'I’m hoping to find a sweet one,' Nasrudin replied."

The story had made me tear up. I hadn't cried in therapy for months. I suddenly saw myself as Nasruddin, this lovable fool, going back to mom again and again in search of finding a different mom this time, because I wasn't willing to accept that a thousand interactions of ours had not revealed the real mom yet. It had suddenly become clear to me how many years of my life I had spent thinking about her, how deeply I had wanted her to be a different person, how I had this fantasy of somehow changing her to make her be the mother I wanted and needed. I come back to this story again and again, whenever I find myself insisting on something be something that it's not and can not be, just because I want it to be so.

And to this day, Nasruddin's simple-minded and honest intentions, his dedication to his search, his suffering, brings tears to my eyes. Like a child he doesn't know any better. He doesn't know that maybe he can find what he wants elsewhere. So he keeps eating peppers over and over again. In search of a sweet one. And keeps suffering.