Dr. Avraham Cohen’s Field Notes

October 1, 2025

Field Note #78

Avraham Cohen, PhD, RCC-ACS, CCC

dr.avrahamcohen@gmail.com

Personal Notes

about

Themes and Variations

on Human Suffering

plus

Finding the Great Blue Sky Beyond

***

Quotes:

This too shall pass.

~~Persian Proverb

Why do fireflies have to die so soon?

~~Setsuko (Grave of Fireflies)

There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in…

~~Leonard Cohen (Anthem)

Ichi-go ichi-e

(One time, one meeting)

~~Japanese Proverb

Recording of Field Note:

(Please note a note a short gap after the quote from Setsuko. The Japanese Proverb picks up after that. The Leonard Cohen quote did not record properly. So, I deleted it from the audio)

There is a joke about counsellors and therapists, that they enter this field to solve their own problems! I believe there is great truth in this statement. I can’t say that is what brought me into the field consciously. However, I am now clear that unconsciously I knew what I most needed and that being in this field was going to be very helpful for me. Originally, consciously, I was fascinated with human beings and how and why they were the way they were. And I will say for sure that being in the field has been germane to my deepening understanding of what was lurking in Shadows of my unconscious and subsequently growing into the person and the therapist I am up to the current moment. And, the journey is still unfolding. I believe that all humans are wounded, and I believe all therapists are “wounded healers.”  The historical Buddha, no less, agrees. He taught that human life was replete with wounding experiences. Suffering is a preeminent existential condition for all humans, even for the luckiest and most privileged.

When I look back on my now astonishingly, at least to me, lengthy life, I must agree totally with the Buddha. I had the good fortune of being born in Canada, a country known in recent history as civil and liberal, into a caring family of with a benevolent mother and father. We had a comfortable house, and my mother made sure that three meals were served every day at regular intervals and appropriate hours. I lacked nothing, materially. Yet I suffered, at times badly. What happened to me?

What is coming into my view, as I reflect on my life, is experiences of loss, disappointment, despair, the inevitability of such experiences, and the resurrection possibilities and ways that I have learned about and from through the process of these many difficult experiences.

What stands out as important to this process of resurrection is dreaming. Although the word ‘dream’ was not used in the way I was raised, I was essentially encouraged to dream. My Dad used to say that the main limitation for most people was their ability to think about it. I have learned to see life as about dreaming that provided alternatives to my experience of delusion, loss and disappointment, great and terrible happenings, and that showed the possibilities of recovery and becoming more of who I am.

Reflecting on the many clients that I have worked with over the past five decades, I see similar existential themes and patterns of suffering being played out. Here is a certainly incomplete list of life ruptures that have affected me and been a major factor in my own inner work, my work with my clients, my personal relationships, my understanding of culture, world history and its implications, and the effects of consciousness and unconsciousness:

1. Primal Loss

I believe the foremost and, in my view, mostly not-recognized loss is the transition from the oceanic safety, security, and boundarylessness of the womb to the bright lights and differentiated world into which I was born. Otto Rank, one of Freud’s original students wrote about this in his book, The Trauma of Birth (https://archive.org/details/b2981828x). Rank’s work was far from universally accepted. When I imagine the visceral shock to the fetus that I once was, of being in a warm oceanic environment for months and that begins pitching about and contracting increasingly strongly and that eventually propelled me into the birth canal, I believe this was a visceral shock that my body remembers even though I have no cognitive recall of this event whatsoever.

Of course, I had no prefrontal cortex function available to make sense of this. I believe it is reasonable to say that the seeds of claustrophobia and many other psychic disturbances are seeded here. The sudden emergence into the world of others, light, and being handled while completely dependent seems almost inevitably to be an enormous shock to the newborn that I once was. This may be seen as paradise lost, a journey through hell, and then for better or worse, a rebirth. I believe this whole experience is the laying down of a pattern of loss, fear, confronting total helplessness, then emergence into a strange land where the support and its quality was crucial for my development and growth. Perhaps think of this as a primal pattern that influences all that followed for me and you in life.

• Early Disillusionment

Moments of disappointment and loss with parents/caregivers would be the earliest experience of disillusionment. My own experience was that I was born during the 2^nd World War. My Father was in the Royal Canadian Air Force. My Mother was essentially on her own with me while he was away in a very uncertain time. As an adult I recall my Mum saying matter-of-factly, “I was essentially a single Mother,” which was the reality she lived. I was not aware of this as a child, but I felt the effects of this lack of father presence along with the anxiety of my mother who was on her own and who had also her fears about the Second World War, my Father’s return, and the implications for the world and for us as a Jewish family.

• Loss of the Known

When I was 4 ½ years old we moved from Toronto to Vancouver. This was a huge loss, which as a young child I had little awareness about. Our extended family, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents were all left behind, in Toronto. It was not so much that I missed them as I did not have the influence of their presence on a regular basis.

• Thrown into the Unknown

My new neighbourhood was essentially a white Anglo-Saxon zone; not that there is anything wrong with that. Of course not. The problem was that I was different. It was only a feeling. I did not have any articulation of this difference. I do recall a few antisemitic remarks, but I didn’t make much of these comments as a young boy. I just felt that I was out of place, and that somehow I did not belong there.

• Lessons in Love

Many years on I met the ‘girl of my dreams.’ Unfortunately, we were both not at all mature in our view of relationships and what was required. Eventually our relationship was fraught with breakups, reconciliations, and eventually a marriage that did not endure. To say I was confused, wounded, and lost would be an understatement.

• Friendship Learnings

Many years after my marriage break-up, I met a man who became my closest friend. We were there for each other and shared many experiences, including our interest and practice of counselling psychology. I could perhaps compare this relationship to the paradigm that Rumi and Shems represented. Not that my friend and I were lovers, but between us there was an intense bonding and sharing of our selves.

As some of you may recall, Shems eventually went away and never returned. This was a profound loss for Rumi. Similarly, after several years, my friend told me that he was leaving the counselling field and going back to studying something quite different, which his parents considered to be a ‘real’ profession. He told me that our relationship would be ending as he was sure I would not support him. I could not convince him otherwise. This was a huge loss for me. I was increasingly learning experientially about uncertainty, not-knowing, and impermanence.

• Disasters in the World of Work

I had two substantial experiences in work environments that I considered dream jobs and where I had great success. In both cases the environments were taken over by forces that deemed the culture, and particularly my part in the culture, as ‘the wrong way of doing things.’ These were big and impactful losses for me. It all seemed extremely unfair. Although as time went by, I learned that fairness was not a rule in life, and trust and honesty were not strong values in these environments.

• Loss of Identity and the World as Previously Known

What I will share here could be a whole book. It deals with a radical change of consciousness. I would characterize this experience as a sudden drop into another world, one that terrified me as it unfolded. My view of reality as I had known it was ripped away suddenly. Ground that I thought was solid was not. I will describe briefly the details, the experience, and the shift that integrated these experiences and left me able to re-enter the world of consensus reality but in a conscious way, which made all the difference.

I was 30 years old. I had been travelling in Europe for about 5 months. I was running to make a train in Nice. It was a quite warm evening. I suddenly felt dizzy, and it seemed that everything was whirling around me. I bent over with hopes that this would allow the blood to rush into my head and that my dizziness, really sense of dissociation, would resolve. It did not! Nothing changed! I sat down on the sidewalk. Then I laid down on the sidewalk. People were walking by me. I could see their legs as they moved along. I could hear the French language. I felt my profound foreignness. No one stopped. I was experiencing extreme vertigo. I was terribly and terrifyingly alone. Eventually I was able to get up and make the train. That was the beginning of two years of extreme and altered states experience, not to mention anxiety and isolation. No one seemed to understand or no anything about the experiences I was having.

I had no idea what was happening to me initially and for some time following. I eventually made it back to my home in Vancouver and what I hoped would be safety, which I did not feel again for quite a long time. I learned a lot about extreme states, which was a great learning about my own consciousness and for working with people who were experiencing such states.

• Future Loss

As I age, I am increasingly aware of physical abilities I once had at a top level now becoming much less available to me. I could list many physical changes, which serve as a flashing light, telling me that my physical body is less and I imagined the future to have more of the same in store for me. In other words, I am gradually and unmistakably observing, and experiencing, the diminishing of my physical capacities and abilities, a profound experience of loss.

 
World Instability

I have always been fascinated and engaged with world events and mostly did not take them too personally. Even the holocaust, which I have explored extensively, did not affect me in a very personal way for the most part, and I think I know why. My parents didn’t talk about it. Neither did my relatives. I was essentially removed from it. Hence, there was no personal emotional witnessing and involvement in close quarters I have had thoughts like this, from time to time: “If I had been born in Germany in the early 1940’s my chance of being amongst the dead was very high.”

In recent years, I find myself much more shaken by current events: wars, political polarization and violence, the rise of antisemitism, a multitude of attacks on people related to skin color, gun, vehicle, and knife violence, education that is increasingly focussed on the basics and diminishment of studies about the arts, philosophy, literature, culture, and so on.  Am I getting old and emotionally vulnerable? Is that the reason why the world is getting to me? Just as my skin is becoming thinner and gets easily bruised, my protective abilities seem to be weakening. And I do recall the night following the events of October 7, 2025. There was a large march southward on the Cambie Street bridge, which is very near where we live. I could hear a bull horn but I could not make out the words. Suddenly a sentence stood out clearly and audibly, “Did you kill a Jew today?” It was unmistakeable what this was about, I recognized this as very personal. People wanted to kill me!

I am certainly hearing about the world increasingly from my clients and their fears about the future for their children, themselves, loved ones, the climate, wars that don’t seem to be so far away now, and the ability and willingness of those in positions of power to do anything meaningful. I am more readily thrown into fear and anxiety. And I am able in my calmest moments to see that the macrocosm and the microcosm of my life are mirror images from which I can learn and from which I can do my own tiny bit to help locally, and to learn about myself and life, and the issues of being human on this rock we call Planet Earth.

The patterns of life and its disappointments and challenges are, I believe, universal and thus supply us with life themes for our work within ourselves and in the world. With that in mind, I continue to enquire how we may work with the inevitability of disappointments and losses so that we can learn to go beyond the conventional and consensus views of reality. And I invite you, dear Readers, to perform your own re/search (again/search, i.e., search again). If you resonate with the existential themes that I listed from my own life, please do use my list as an aide to your own inquiry and exploration.

I believe that we are all trapped inside our own experience by multiple factors. The details differ, and surely the dynamics have played out ‘perfectly’ to produce the circumstances that we see. I do not mean to imply at all that we as individuals, or even that the most directly impinging circumstances are the direct cause of the problem. Things are far too complex and complicated for us to talk simplistically about “direct causes.” I prefer to think in terms of association in time and place. Nonetheless, almost certainly investigation into our own history and dynamics that contribute equally to the identity, and action or inaction edges you and I find ourselves up against and that offer clues about ways out and/or through. These ways involve turning the light of our awareness towards our inner and outer worlds, and the evocation of memory that offers suggestions about associated history and the patterns of such history that may shed light on the present. As well, enhancing our view of the macrocosm, that is how the current state of the world and the history of the world have all contributed to our state of consciousness and our challenges and successes in the world.

So, I am encouraging you to re/search seeing and being beyond the rigidity and confinement of reified patterns of thought, feeling, and being. A great possibility for this re/search may be manifested by taking up opportunity to contribute to the growth of those within our reach within the contexts of personal communities, families, workplaces, religious organizations, and educational settings. I believe this important contribution, provides the opportunity to make a difference and to foster growth towards authenticity, multidimensional contact and connection, and the development of communities with ethical integrity that are more fully alive.

Warmest wishes and shalom to you all,

Avraham

PS As always, my great appreciation for Heesoon’s stellar support.

PPS I am pleased to let you know that Neelam Oik will be the guest Field Note author for February 2026.You can find out more about Neelam and her practice on her website: (https://www.lifewiseclinic.com/about-neelam-olk)

*** https://thejapaneseshop.co.uk/blogs/japan/one-time-one-meeting-%E4%B8%80%E6%9C%9F%E4%B8%80%E4%BC%9A-do-you-know-four-character-idioms