Reparenting

Reparenting in psychotherapy is a term, and concept, fraught with mischief, nonsense and some valid theory and practice. Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy can regress adult clients back to childhood and infancy by memory-feeling access not hypnosis. They might “call out for Mommy and Daddy” and let “imprinted” pain out, a healing process. Paul Vereshack, a Primal Therapist of a slightly different stripe, sometimes encouraged patients to regress to a child state where he, the parent figure, could facilitate reliving and healing:

A woman in her thirties lies in my primal room, adrift in the winds of time. She unconsciously reaches for my hand and begins to play with my fingers. The object of her touching is not romantic or sexual. It is something deadly serious in her search for growth. Slowly she plays with each finger and then, quite unconsciously, she closes my hand and makes it into a fist. She begins to whimper. She is six years old now and she recalls how her daddy used to beat her with his fist. Unconscious necessity, below the level of logic, has impelled her to arrange a congruence; the fist of her therapist has been brought to match the fist of her father. The tumblers fall, defenses clear away and the original event is re-experienced.

Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis featured, for a long time, a Nazi-like version of reparenting ruled over by cult leader-like Jacqui Schiff. Physical violence and pain, authoritarian power and control were inflicted on adult patients who would be treated like infants and prisoners – diapered, toileted, tied down and beaten. (See “A Most Dangerous Method” by Tori Marlan, Reader, August 10, 2000.)

Most contemporary definitions of reparenting have avoided these extremes. They were, I believe, chastened by the scandals associated with Schiff’s use of Transactional Analysis and, to a lesser degree, the radical nature of early Primal Therapy. Now, reparenting is “the conscious act of providing ourselves with the consistent care and understanding we may have missed as children.” It is “a process where an adult works to meet emotional or physical needs that were not met in childhood.” “By nurturing and validating this vulnerable aspect of ourselves, we learn to provide it with the love and protection . . .” Wikipedia features a throwback definition: “Reparenting is a form of psychotherapy in which the therapist actively assumes the role of a new or surrogate parental figure for the client.” “Typically, reparenting starts with the regression of the client to the child ego state. The therapist accomplishes this by partaking in child-rearing acts such as bottle feeding, lap pillows, and other techniques.”

Steven Levenkron, specialist in anorexia and other self-destructive behaviors, described his creation, “nurturant-authoritative psychotherapy,” as reparenting. He worked with adoles­cents who had lost trust in their adult caregivers, no longer emotionally leaned on them, and came to depend on their own self-soothing and identity-forming behaviors. (An anorexic girl might pride herself on being “especially thin.”) Levenkron wanted his young clients, set adrift within themselves, to eventually regress to the child needy of a strong and caring parent figure – himself. To do this, they would have to reach a crisis of dependency, the stressful dilemma of choosing to remain in their pathological state or giving their pain to their therapist re-parent.

I see reparenting as theoretically radical yet valid and therapeutically gentle yet unlikely to happen. No adult can or should be regressed to his baby on fire in the crib – birth trauma – or to helpless, preverbal infancy. For this to be accomplished, all adult defenses, especially the concept-forming, concept-infested mind, would have to be extin­guished – an impossibility. While adults are, in essence, their inner child as identity and feeling founda­tion, they are nevertheless always in the present and must maintain their adult persona. By default, then, Levenkron’s method of reparenting is the only one that may be possible. His anorexic, self-mutilating and obsessive-compulsive children and teens really do need someone to lean on once they are alienated from their parents. Whether this can actually happen in once, twice, or three-times-a-week therapy is the question. Fairbairn’s theory of “return to the bad object” would object. The child would be at a loss – the greatest loss possible – to forsake her frustrating parent for a new-and-improved professional version.

The obtuse side

I presently see several teen clients (15 to 18) of varying degrees of intelligence, maturity, insight and capacity to engage in therapy. To my prescient lack of surprise, not one of them was able to understand or feel the humorous meaning in the several Gary Larson The Far Side cartoons I showed them. Two of them:

 

I cannot remember what caused me to suspect, strongly suspect, that these teens would be at a loss to grasp the irony of a snake suffering mental distress or an insect named Carl, or the nonsense of a man happily whistling in hell, or the anthropomorphizing of a fly requesting his moribund friend’s stereo system. I know I was struck by a lack of subtlety in their thinking and feeling: Kids today needing therapy live and breathe psycho-diagnostic memes instead of the felt senses in their own bodies. One young man did have a smart insight. He said that he and his fellow teens learn the world through videos, not still images or the printed word. Rather than their mind insinuating itself like a diamond drill into the captive audience of the image or sentence, it sits bovine-like before the rushing freight train. My image was of teenagers milling about the sidewalk as a misshapen wooden cart hauling manure trundles by. As it passes them, a clump of manure falls off the back and that’s what they are left with.

I’m sure there are other factors. The world now wants young people to become money-makers not dream-achievers. Social media has decentered them from themselves: They are Nathaniel Branden’s “social metaphysicians,” whose reality ground is not the link between their senses and Planet Earth but their cohort’s judgmental heads. They have parents who have agendas instead of empathy. Whatever the causes are, I deplore that a 16-year-old can stare at a delicately trenchant cartoon and think “duh,” as we children of the ’50s used to scorn our lesser peers.

Recently, another consideration availed itself. Wanting to share and compare my assessment with my attorney sister, I showed her a slightly more obvious Far Side cartoon. It features a few aliens standing in the entranceway of their just-landed spaceship while a crew member lies flat on his ass on the ground, having tumbled down the steps. There are several humans gazing at the scene. One of the aliens in the entranceway remarks: “Wonderful! Just wonderful! . . . So much for instilling them with a sense of awe.” My sister did not find the cartoon funny. Her thought was that she has possibly lost her sense of humor. I wonder if this has happened to many young people today, those in therapy and those not, owing to the factors named, to the toxic social and political atmosphere, to their home and school environment, to lives of appearance and allure. That would be most unfunny.

If Nick Cannon thinks he's healed from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, then he's, well, full of it

The vehicle of a narcissistic personality, the disturbed inner environment that forms his world, is a belief: a belief in perfection, unique specialness, a priori entitlement, absolute ascendency, and differ­entiation and alienation from all other people. The engine of that vehicle is a feeling. But it is not a feeling of perfec­tion: “Perfection” does not exist as a feeling or emotion in the human spectrum. It is a disturbing feeling that fuses anxiety, emptiness, a disabling falseness of the adult self and the dreaded reality of the never-grown child. The feeling’s engine is the truth of, and possibly the sense of, developmental failure in the first few years of life. Something – often the parents’ empty idealization (“you are the best”; “you’ll play at Carnegie Hall one day”; “you are the smartest little boy”) – plants the future means of escape from that truth. The person may have been pathologically immature at fourteen and suddenly falsely mature and intellec­tualized at fifteen. His buried feeling of still being a child will remember his parents’ attribution of specialness. It will not contain love and will feel alone. He has become the solipsist whose entire universe is a mirror.

Narcissistic personality is a delusion, which is a false belief a person is deeply invested in, making it feel true. It is a core delusion, protecting the person from feeling his lack of identity. There are other, non-core delusions that a narcissist may have. He may lose his arrogant certainty that his political party is always right (he may detach and feel that it is not a reflection of him). He may even stop believing his spouse loves him (deciding she is psychologically botched), and his ego would remain intact. But he would not be able to shed his belief that he is physically appealing or that he is perfectly expert in his chosen field. Dismantling these beliefs would cause him to descend into the all-consuming fire of infancy pain.

The most obscure aspect of narcissism is its identity of pristine perfection. Hard work and assiduous effort mean nothing to a narcissist. Excellence is intol­er­able: It doesn’t say he is above all others and it allows for inferiority. A narcissist requires absolute Godliness in one way: There is only one god.

A narcissist who moved away from civilization, who had to survive alone, would be distressed to feel his sense of uniqueness and perfection fading away. He must be unique and fundamentally unlike other people. But literally alone, any sense of self would disappear. With no one to be better than, he would feel nothing but the radical emptiness of the child he was who never grew. He would collapse in a painful void. Struggling to maintain his only sense of living, his narcissism, he might exalt feeble virtues: He walks with perfect stealth on the hunt. He designs the flawless trap. He grows the perfect crop. His thoughts are noble and stern and master his world. Only these conceits could keep him safe. He would eventually, in a terribly lonely moment, give in to the wish that he could just be a person, a feeling person who could lean on someone, cling to someone, fall into someone, a caring nurturer. But there has never been that person. So he had to be alone, not needy, not dependent, unique and impervious. He could only feel pain so he had to become a thought, a belief. Pain became deluded to pleasure. Failure became deluded to success. Inferiority became deluded to superiority.

In sum: Feeling is pain to the future Narcissist, the pain of never becoming. To have human feelings is that early abort. He had to be beyond the human: perfect.

Terse and pithy explanation of Trump's win

Unlike all the pundits, apparently, I don’t have the knowledge and analytical skills to weigh every factor involved in Harris’s loss and Trump’s win. Then again, they all have differing views that are controlled by their feelings, so it’s sort of a wash. My sense, coming from a psychological perspective, is that policy preferences were not the point. I believe the essential factor was Trump’s extreme personality of angry contempt that honored the “bitter inner child” of millions of people then swayed their minds to his agenda. For example, he made them despise immigrants where on their own most of them would have had more considerate appraisals. My few Trump-voting therapy clients are different at the core of their identity from my other clients. Essentially, their deep-seated pain turned right to rage rather than left to tears. Therapists know that clients who can grieve can be helped. Grieving can dissolve the thorns that aggravate their heart. Those who cleave to rage remain unhelped, and impaled.

(Adapted comment to a New York Times published interview with Nancy Pelosi)

Today should be named Parents Day

The least interesting and the most valid perspective: If Trump wins, blame the parents of today’s voters for giving their progeny a sense of life that features impotence, bitterness, free-floating anger and a need for superiority over others. This is the essence of it: Trump is the redeemer of victims who became bullies. (TPS published comment to an NYT article – https://www.nytimes.com/shared/comment/42vegc?rsrc=cshare&smid=url-share)

This is why those errant minds aren’t changing on Election Day, why they rarely changed over the course of the candidates’ campaigns or over the last eight years, and why they were unlikely to change over the span of their entire lives. If Trump wins the election, it will be because the parents of his voters (and the parents of their parents) wrote blueprints for their children’s formative years that created angry wounds and a broad landscape where healing couldn't happen.

I see the psychic difference between those who opt for a narcissistic, sociopathic and authoritarian president and those who don’t as a factor of bereavement. Those who could grieve the critical loss in their childhood – essentially, deprivation of their distracted or disturbed parents’ love and bond – would find some sad or resigned inner peace. In that calm, they could see and feel more clearly. They would feel tragedy more than outrage in their own lives and, by extension, in the world. They would know, as Irvin Yalom’s Carlos in Love’s Executioner finally knew, that “everyone has got a heart.” Those who did not have the opportunity or courage to grieve the critical loss in their childhood would remain on fire. They would remain the bitter, defeated king on their underground throne, nursing their rageful pain and projecting it into the world. They would see, through unconscious eyes, other people as better able to flourish, as indifferent to their suffering, as their defeaters. They would find comfort in those people, and that candidate, who justified their inner pain and its projections.

Like many who are voting for Harris, I do not find her powerfully inspiring. Presidential politicians are egoists who don’t know how to fix the country or the world. They use different aptitudes and personality points as their guideposts, and we have to hope that they don’t damage our lives. One-half of the population realizes, however, that Harris is a normal person with normal-range flaws, and that this is infinitely preferable to a man whose errors are more toxic to others than to himself, especially as he vigorously endorses those errors as is the nature of personality disorder.

On Election Day morning, I’m slightly optimistic about a Harris victory. It’s not an angry optimism and is not actually focused primarily on the candidate. It’s more the underlying optimism of someone who sees life, the universe and everything (homage to Douglas Adams) in the benign and sunny way that a cared-for child – or slightly healed adult – would.

My final text during an exchange with a former client who will vote for Trump

I doubt that you’ve been reading the articles I’ve sent. And I’ll confess ignorance: I don’t know what you’ve been sending me after the first day of our exchange. I haven’t read any of it (but I did respond Pavlov’s dog-fashion to the word “cute”). It’s time to stop, I’m sure. Trump may win. He’s human garbage, but a lot of people either like that or are blind to it. In my sessions, the general political situation comes up a lot. I’d say that nineteen of every twenty of my clients are anti-Trump even if they do not love Harris. Before the subject ever turns to politics – and sometimes it just turns to Trump because most clients know he’s the avatar of human corruption – I can almost always predict which clients will be Trump people. They have a subtly bitter and cruel core under their surface, normal presentation. One such client let me know he was a “misanthrope” and would love to be alone for the rest of his life, before disclosing his Trump affiliation. A woman informed me, months prior to election talk, that she disliked “all white women in authority.” A middle-aged man whom I saw for two years raged about his child sexual abuse so viciously and so frequently that one would have thought it had happened last week not forty-five years ago. This is what it comes down to: not policy but psychology. Trump redeems the fundamentally frustrated people who, at the root of their psyche, see their childhood injuries and rage rather than grieve. They stay at the anger level and do not go deeper to the hurt level. This is why I consider them my therapy failures.

🎯

The non-judgmental approach that I bring to all clients maintains its purity throughout their term of therapy. For most of them, it continues outside of that specialized setting. But it does not last for former clients who are working to bring disaster upon this country by means of their psychological projections: the endorsement of Trump. I do, however, take some responsibility for failing to reach them.

Trump lovers are constipated, angry babies

Most if not all therapy clients, from a depth psychology perspective, could be considered immature. Fundamental depression and anxiety are formed in a home where a child was hurt and could not send his pain to a loving and empathic caregiver. This means there is aborted emotional development – immaturity. Most if not all therapy clients, from a depth psychology perspective, have repressed or “leaky” or overt frustration of childhood needs not met, manifesting in anger, irritability, self-blame or other-blame.

For a child, other-blame, also known as externalization of responsibility, is right. He did not cause his problems and he is right to blame those who hurt him and left him with no other recourse than to misbehave or inflict pain on others.

Many children, owing to some shard of decency in their lives, are able to grow up and face, in or out of therapy, their emotional immaturity. They are desperately needy but challenge their codependency. They see that their anger comes mostly from their past and they cease blaming it on others in the present. They have achieved adequate separation-individuation not to fall on their knees before heroes. They have achieved enough independence of thought not to form delusions about other races, ethnicities and sexes.

These are not Trump lovers. Trump lovers have not faced their emotional immaturity. They have not done deep grief work in therapy. They continue to blame others in the present, though their perpetrators are in the past. They cling to dependencies – heroes, victimized wives, groupthink, rally mobs. They had to bury the starved need for warm benevolence in their childhood and viscerally hate it now, believing that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are hateful, terrible people. Lacking a caring hand, an “enlightened witness” in childhood to guide them out of their self-breathing and self-reinforcing bubble and into the real world, they suffer global delusions about millions of individuals they have never met.

My therapy clients who are Trump admirers are self-declared misanthropes, bitter rejectors of groups of people or of all people. They are rage-filled children still drowning in adult bodies. Beneath a surface which may feel benign about small things and about like-minded people and about the families they protectively own, lies a lava field of unhealed pain and injustice. They, the child, will forever be out of sync with themselves and the world that grew up around them.

It is impossible for a healthy or healing person to admire a sociopath and narcissist like Trump.

Preface to a barely conceived future second book (not a joke, probably)

In America’s present psycho-culture, the term “evidence-based” has become the favored hypnotic buzzword of my hypnotized profession. Implying rigorous science, it is the imprimatur of instant trustworthiness and value. It is applied primarily to various species of “cognitive therapy” including cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), rational emotive therapy, EMDR (“Phase 5: installation of new cognitions”), reality therapy, existential therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy. What is the nature of this evidence that equals tacit proof of effectiveness? During or after their therapy, clients and former clients tell someone they feel better.

I submit that they do not tell themselves they feel better, not for long, not within themselves at the deepest root of their sense of self. This is because thoughts – the medium of exchange of cognitive and most other therapies – can’t change the physical history of the body and mind and feelings. Thoughts impotently, fickly, restively color then pass through the cloud of the head. One has to force, over and over and over again, positive or “rational” words into consciousness to believe one has improved, become a different person.

In psychotherapy, the only true evidence of improvement is inner experience. No one outside of you can fully know who you are or how you are, even while analyzing you, even while knowing you for years, even if you are rich and full of laughter and surrounded by friends and love, or poor and alone. No one else can know. To understand your psychic status is to feel yourself, not just your surface changeable feelings, but those embedded in your inner childhood, the emotional themes of your existence.

My previous book, ‘I Forgive’ and Other Delusions, is a collection of ten years of therapy blog articles based on established principles, client work and brutal introspection. It features many case histories and, admittedly, a title that is bound to separate the men from the boys, or more accurately, the seekers from the hiders. Illustrated Dictionary of Contrarian Depth Therapy aims to establish a foundation of insights about the human psyche that I believe can only be contested by wishful thinking. I am disgusted that people’s need for healing has been turned into smiles and brute-force hope by a profession that should be intransigently reality-based. Psychotherapy has become the most deceptive of self-medications, a bait-and-switch where hurting people may initially be profoundly heard, possibly for the first time in their lives, but then quickly guided to bright-paint and spin (“reframe”) their lifelong pain, pain that needs, above all, to be expressed exactly as it is to a caring person.

Stacked deck: The Colt Gray matter

Response to Megan Stack’s September 6th New York Times article, “Blaming a Parent, Again, for Failed Gun Laws.” The article’s title itself (which she may not have written but doubtless inspired) is an étude in tendentious illogic. The article shows that Ms. Stack wants to understand nothing about mental health and illness. (Comment is actually at The Washington Post as Ms. Stack's article didn't include the comment function.)

It’s adults, not young teens, who are prone to turn their childhood injury, such as parent’s shaming or physical abuse, into an emotional illness of global hatred and destruction: “All (ethnicity or color or age or sex of choice) should die.” Children haven’t experienced the cumulative years of injustice to degenerate into such a global delusion. So imagine what this boy must have gone through by age 14 to be so full of hatred for self and others that he must kill random people and end his own future. Warning signs? Probably every single day of his young life.

Yes, it probably takes a motley village of abusive, and blind, and overburdened, and impotent, and distracted, and uncaring, and ignorant adults to produce a child murderer (with the possible exception of the “callous and unemotional child” turned psychopath). But the line of acceptable disconnection and irresponsibility must be drawn somewhere. In the case of Colt Gray, the father appears to be well over that line.