What's with grieving?

There can be a number of reasons why a person can’t grieve well. Many people are emotionally repressed and they can’t break through that repression. A feeling that should be poignant – tragic or sweet – remains dull, stifled, dissociated. Another reason for poor grieving is that the expression of dear feelings – what the griever wants to feel – is sabotaged because those feelings are chemically tied to negative (even angry or hateful) feelings that are more hidden and that the person would rather not feel. The negative taboo feelings hold them all under water.

Another reason for aborted grieving is guilt – valid or false guilt. One middle-aged woman was able to pour out a lot of grief pain, love, need when she could acknowledge and express her mother’s abusiveness. What kept her from successfully grieving was her sense of guilt for having taken her mother out of the old family home so she could caretake her better. It didn’t work: Her mother never got over losing her house, being removed to a bedroom, being disliked by her daughter’s husband.

One more preventive of grieving that I’ve never seen described anywhere may be called “temporal resonant grieving.” When my mini schnauzer died in 2002, I was living alone in a state (Colorado) I had moved to to get away from a sad relationship. Alone after midnight with my euthanized pet, I knew – knew to the depths of body and time – that I would never get over her death. What I felt was Loss itself, all my critical and unfair losses through time, feeling lost in the present day, the state of never-had from my beginning. The loss of childhood, the loss of love then, the loss of youth. Simply because I can’t be the only “resonant” person, I believe that our deepest truths may return with a present death. We are holistic in mindbody and time.

With this being true, we would have to grieve everything sad and wrong, from beginning to now, at any given death or abandonment. To do that, we’d need to be very in touch with our unity in our time: certainly not something most therapy clients will experience until they’ve been talked to for a little while.

Then they may be able to move on.

Sing a paean to Singapore and, well, Hallelujah to Hong Kong

This is to express my quiet appreciation and louder bemusement to the people of Singapore and Hong Kong who have been clicking on this blog two hundred to four hundred-plus times each day for a while now. (Google Blogger provides stats per country.) I don’t know what it’s about as, per usual, no one ever – and I mean evvverrrr, sends me comments about my articles. The mass click appears to happen during my bedtime, which is awake time in Singapore and Hong Kong. My guess, which is wishful thinking, is that these are Psychology classes (with brilliant professors) that have grasped the iconoclastic and food-for-thought nature of many of my pieces. Congratulations! You are right. I have been applying acid to scar tissue and nutrients to sick Cognitive Therapy bodies for ten years. I’m glad someone out there is appreciating my contribution. However, a client to whom I mentioned the mystery suggested that “classes” may be right, but thought they might be for ESL (English as a Second Language) students. In that case, the articles would be held as examples of purple prose poison which students would be taught to avoid.

If my hypothesis is right, I would welcome Singaporean and Hong Kongese comments, critiques and questions addressing specific posts or general ideas described. I appreciate bright students who are willing to face heresy and consider its value.

"This is what I believe!"

A 43-year-old client says that he has found a way to “defuse” conflicts with his wife. He’ll say: “I see what you’re trying to do. I’m just going to step away.” His ten-year-old daughter is distracted when he is trying to teach her math that she didn’t grasp in school. He believes there should be “consequences for her being disengaged.”

A 54-year-old client states that he accommodates his mother’s self-centeredness because he wants to be “a good son.” He can’t bring himself to criticize or get angry with his torturously mentally abusive father because “he’s not here to defend himself.”

A 35-year-old man asserts that his parents had “a very good divorce” when he was five years old.

I described my socially-incorrect ideas about “forgiveness” to a 58-year-old client. He said that “there’s nothing to forgive” because his father’s domestic violence and alcoholism didn’t affect him.

A 21-year-old Asperger’s client says “I hate myself.”

Let’s pour some acid on these clients’ custom-made beliefs.

The 43-year-old believes he has “defused” incipiently volatile conflicts with his wife by accusing her of being sly and manipulative and walking out of the room (Gottman’s famous “stonewalling”). He’s actually made the conflicts worse. He believes his daughter should be punished for not being able to focus on her math and on him. She may have ADHD, may be depressed because of her parents’ continual sniping, may be turned off by her father’s disciplinary “three strikes” mentality. Punishing a child for being hurt or injured is destructive.

This client's beliefs are just threadbare clothing over feelings of revenge for a childhood which he perpetuates by remaining in thrall to a pathological, authoritarian father. Beliefs are adamant, until they crumble into the greater hurt that formed them.

The 54-year-old believes that he must be his mother’s doormat, her eternal accommodator to be a good son. Does it make him a good son not to have any self-care, to back himself away forever? He has adopted some strangely-derived justice not to criticize a father who isn’t alive to “defend himself.” What can that mean? Do we not condemn Hitler because he can’t argue back? Do I not criticize Trump the sociopath because he’s not in the room with me?

He believes he is a good son. What he means is: He is a good little boy.

The 35-year-old man believes his parents had a “very good divorce.” Can he feel what that divorce did to him at age five, how “very good” it was?

The 58-year-old has nothing to forgive as he has banished his real childhood with a violent and drunk father. Hovering above that, he may believe anything he wants.

The 21-year-old “hates” himself because it’s less painful to grow the callus of self-hate – more an idea than a feeling – than to feel the pain of being an unloved child.

I don't know if other therapists believe their clients’ theories of life. I’d advise them not to. A good rule of thumb is: “The feeling is the fact, the thought is the escape.” People will often cling desperately, time immemorial to a belief which could be some airy-fairy, cockamamie conjunction of words their humiliated inner child came up with. What they don’t want to do is feel. Feel the radical truth that defined their childhood. To go there would be to burn away the bland mantra in black, boiling tar. But the mantra is a straitjacket and the tar can be poured out. That’s when therapy happens.

Paperback "I Forgive" and Other Delusions

My book is now in paperback form. (The Kindle ebook has been out in the world for a couple months.) I had tremendous difficulty with the professional formatter. The simplified reason is that I paid $149 to Word-2-Kindle instead of the $1,200 that Wordzworth Books asked. I’m a retired typographer and know that a book that’s already ninety-eight percent meticulously formatted at Microsoft Word (for MacBook Air) should not need a thousand dollars-worth of finishing touches.

 

A consequence, though, is that I uploaded the paperback to Amazon from a state of exhaustion not confidence, and I can’t help but fear that I missed some substantive errors in line spacing, indenting, indexing, page numbers, etc. I’m half-afraid to look at the final product.* So I am encouraging readers to purchase the paperback “I Forgive” and Other Delusions in order to look for embarrassing goofs to throw in my face (by email and blog comments).

 

Of course, there are other reasons to own. How can people – including potential clients and therapy students and their teachers – not be sick of the cognitive-therapy fluff that has covered the earth worse than covid? Thinking does not heal wounds; it only burdens them with falseness. Therapy must go to the source of pain and let that pain out by the tools of justice: remembering, weeping, raging in a room where someone finally hears and cares.

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* Follow-up: I purchased two copies of the book and have found two blatant flaws. The text blocks are not centered on the pages but are shifted toward the inside of the book (the spine: too little white space) and away from the open end of the book. To me it's an eyesore and necessitates almost cracking the spine to read easily. Also, the type, which should be black, is a washed-out-looking gray. Despite my haranguing everyone, neither the book formatter, nor Amazon Customer Support, nor Lulu (the publisher that apparently sometimes prints Amazon's books) has accepted responsibility for the flaws. I continue to email these sources in search of an adult.

Know thyself before it's too late

I’ve encountered many, many people who do not know what it means to understand themselves. They believe that if they have a feeling as a reaction to something that happens, or as companion to a thought or a belief, that feeling is “who they are” and has no deeper cause or reason. The feeling says what it is and all that it is.

 

This error is understandable by the nature of feeling. It seems like identity. But if we cry at a happy moment, or rage at a tangled computer cord or a slow driver, or get anxious if our fourth-grader brings home a “C,” we should wonder who we really are.

 

Of course, people also believe that their assumptions and convictions, as well as their feelings, are who they are. They are often disabused of that notion in therapy where mantras like “I love my mother to death” and “my parents did their best” and “I’m never good enough” evaporate in a bleak epiphany.

 

It is rare for a parent to say to herself: Why do I want to punish my child? What is this feeling inside me that wants to deprive or hurt him? It is rare for an adult to ask himself: Why do I enjoy being sarcastic, even when I can see that it hurts someone’s feelings? It is rare for a person who says “I don’t trust people” to ask himself: What is going on inside me that makes me think that most people are untrustworthy? It is not quite so rare, but still rare for “people-pleasers” to wonder if they really care about the people they serve, if there may be something self-serving and self-preserving behind their altruism.

 

These and countless other feelings should be explored. They may not be what they seem.

 

Right now I am most concerned about all the people, millions of them, who feel good when they think about the psychologically disturbed and morally malevolent Trump. It is rare to nonexistent that any of them wonder what makes them glad about violence; why their intelligent discernment is not embarrassed by Trump’s fatuous ignorance; why a hating person makes them feel redeemed. If they could look inward, they would find the life they had to bury in their adolescent years if not earlier: injustice and unhelped loneliness and a need for some kind of revenge. This would still be boiling and churning deep below, a turbulence that they cannot see through. Were it to subside, by the gifts of care and self-compassion, their vision would be cleared and they would see a sick man whose medicine is hate and delusion.

Comments to bad news

In response to a recent George Will article in The Washington Post.

 

What a silly George he is. I recently told a Trump-defending client the following: If Biden manipulated the economy in such a way that I got an extra dollar, and Adolf Hitler manipulated the economy in such a way that I got two, I’d still opt for Biden. Psychopaths aren’t a good bet, regardless of the ephemeral prize. Everyone who claims to prefer Donald Trump over Joe Biden because of a given policy or ideological principle is showing the world that he prefers a narcissistic psychopath over an imperfect though normal person. He is revealing a special wound: that the bottommost part of his soul is retaliation pain.

🌀

In response to a New York Times article.

 

In this poisonous Trump climate, a paradox has emerged: The mentally healthiest among us have anxiety, verge on “learned helplessness,” and suffer the insidious trauma of crazymaking (as sociopathy and delusion gain great status), while those  – the Trump Republicans of today – whose fragile balance requires projection, delusion, hate and infantile dependency feel powerful and “happy.” How, The Times asks, do we support our mental health? Go to therapy. Preach to the choir. Know sanity and know that any individual MAGA child-in-adult's-clothing could be undone by a simple Socratic dialogue, that it’s only the epoxy of the masses that makes them strong.

📝

In response to Maureen Dowd's New York Times article, "Here Comes Trump, the Abominable Snowman."

Maureen writes: "I'm puzzled about why his devoted fans don't mind his mean streak." They don't know it now, but on their death beds, today's Democrats will say: "I'm at peace. I loved life as best I could." Today's Republicans will say: "I'm angry." At the seat of people's souls is – reaching into the quiddities here – what good was given in their childhoods and what pain was never healed. It becomes a turn of mood. "I made it work" versus "I remained a victim seeking revenge."