Atlas should shrug

Forty-five years ago when I was sixteen, I read Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged. While Ms. Rand doubtless qualified as a Narcissistic personality of the most Olympian stature, and her non-benevolent view of humanity has been condemned to hell by many, being a member of her “cult of individualists” back then probably saved my life. It provided an “inflated balloon” (Masterson) of false ego to substitute for my complete absence of one. And so, I still have a warm feeling for Rand’s philosophically bent heroes.

Though I haven’t picked up the book since then, during certain moments of therapy the titular encounter between Hank Rearden and Francisco d’Anconia comes to mind. I may relate the encounter to my client, after giving a synopsis of the novel’s theme and plot-line. For those of you who don’t know the story, Rand conceived, in her narcissistic gaze, a world where “the men of the mind” go on strike in order to starve a leeching, authoritarian government of its lifeblood. Not the ordinary workers on strike, but the entrepreneurs, business owners, creators, geniuses, great artists. Inspired by the Einsteinian polymath John Galt, they hide away in a mountain fastness to watch the disintegration of society, which Rand compellingly portrays to be held up by them – the righteous providers of life, light and right.

What I want to convey to my client is not the epic moralistic theme, but the counsel that d’Anconia gives Rearden, a noble industrialist-inventor who is being taxed, robbed and regulated to death but continues to struggle on. Rearden has not yet been enlightened to Galt’s plot, while d’Anconia is Galt’s secret henchman, the grim reaper who culls not the damned but those worthy of being saved.

Here is the passage:

“Mr. Rearden,” said Francisco, his voice solemnly calm, “if you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down on his shoulders – what would you tell him to do?

“I . . . don’t know. What . . . could he do? What would you tell him?

“To shrug.”

There are times when drama, inspiring drama, seems to me felicitously fitting and likely moving in a therapy moment. A client may be talking about her unquestioned obeisance to family expectations; his multivariate service to a sick aunt – chauffeuring to doctors, medical power of attorney and negotiator roles, frequent bedside audience – and to his abortive live-in adult son and his alcoholic depressed wife and his classes of students; her caretaking of her sister, walking on eggshells around her Borderline husband, handful of charitable outreaches; her carrying her lame husband, adult daughter and son-in-law, mothering of her daughter’s children and financial support of her own indolent son, not to mention planning, buying, cooking and cleaning and organizing and saying little. She will be describing – like those entertainers on the 1950s Ed Sullivan show who spun ten plates on ten sticks – a life of excessive burden and balancing that, though characterological to her, is enslaving and draining. And more, she has described depression and anxiety and a childhood that gave her those legacies: where she had to “grow up too fast” (an actual impossibility) because there was no parent to lean on. This is a life of drastic drama, of running and crisis that has never been named for what it is. Feeling the hidden calamity of it, I reach for my own drama – Atlas – and present the disturbing story of a society and government that mooch and crush the producer. Entitled, blind and carnivorous they suck service from her, until she must do something.

Shrug. Drop the damned thing. Say “no.” Look “no.” Cut the leash which, as Rand said in The Fountainhead, is “only a rope with a noose at both ends.” Parents, family you serve are symbionts like you, not independent and strong. They are babies who have grafted you into their being as their mentally and physically stabilizing force. Cut the noose and both of you will have a chance to grow.

I am aware that an encouragement, even a powerfully stated one, may just ruffle the client’s feathers and not cause her to take flight. But then again, a therapeutic statement such as this may have uncanny force because it names an unavoidable logic: Pain and injustice, through one’s history, must be answered by pain and justice. It hurts to be the freed child, because she is still alone.

Human cosmology

I’ve read enough cosmology* to get the impression that these physicists are very smart but are reaching the submicroscopic bottom of the barrel for explanations of the universe.  String theory with its vibrating superstrings and extra dimensions (“26 spacetime dimensions for the bosonic string and 10 for the superstring” -- Wikipedia).  Lawrence Krauss’s explanation of “a universe from nothing.”  If you think for a few moments about Existence Itself, it is impossible to get a sense of rationality, or even sanity.  How could it be eternal, with time having no beginning, ever, there always being an earlier time?  How could it have started?  -- from when?  How can there be the smallest possible thing?  Everything that exists must have some quality of substance and therefore smaller “parts.”  How can infinity be possible?  No one can actually conceive of pure endlessness.  But how could All be finite?  You reach the end, then what?  And as Leibniz (1646-1716) asked, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”  No, none of it makes sense to the human mind, so I wonder at the conceit of the scientists who are atheists, who laugh at theists for their self-enclosed certainty about, and vague or circular arguments for, the existence of God.  (For example: The universe seems to embody chaos?  That’s what God deemed best!)

With all the reductio ad absurdum conceived by science, why shouldn’t the mirror analogue to the universe’s inexplicability and immeasurability – deity – be the best answer?

Unfortunately, I have been living with the sense that there is an even stronger support for the accidentalism of atheism: human psychology.  Good and evil, death of innocents, the eternal mystery of existence – one can imagine these as part of a Maker’s lofty art.  But to see the blueprint, template and branding iron of human neurotic and psychotic misery in the earliest months of womb and child-life, that in time produce not merely physical limitations but limitations of the heart and the spirit – is to question a divine anything.

Though we are holistic – mind and body a complex identity – psychic injuries are different from physical ones.  Needing corrective lenses, or a walker, or insulin or a colostomy bag, a person may continue to thrive from the buoyant energy of a healthy happy childhood.  But as our psychology is the thematic substrate of our life – our capacity for meaning and our meaning of meaning – the love injuries that occur in the crucible of early development are the alpha and omega: immanent until the moment, at the end, we rage or whimper against the dying of the light.  They are the “superstrings” that vibrate, beneath everything, through our time.

We can prove it to ourselves – that we are what we were – though it’s quite hard to do without desire and practice.  Feel the body-mind emotion-sensations – what Gendlin** calls the “felt sense” – that are evoked by most any image or concern or memory or question in your life, without labeling them, without making thought or attitudinal conclusions about them.  To deepen the process, tell yourself to dissolve the floorboards beneath you, on which your adulthood rests, so that you and your history become a unity.  Sink down through the sands of your time.  Let a recondite but real sensation tell you its meaning, as best you can read it.  In time, maybe “in no time” if you are versed in the process, you will feel your child self.  There may be a possibility of feeling your infant or baby self.  Try to accept that it’s who you are.  Then, feel how this archaic feeling is, even now, within your attitudes about yourself, about others, about “life,” about your past and your future.  Feel how it and others have created your universe’s size, its brightness, its viability or its moribund state.  See that the sober or desperate conclusions of your life are based in these elements formed in childhood.

There are different kinds of optimism within pessimism.  Therapy can help heal injuries, even very old ones.  Present sensations – smell a cinnamon roll, feel love, deposit a paycheck – can seem to take precedence over the younger template ones.  But many people cannot overshadow their injured roots as their seeds were planted and germinated in unnurturing soil.  As the tree grew, the more precarious it became until at its height, it foundered.  Alpha and omega – but not in the way we think of God.

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* (The popular writings, without the math.)
 

** Eugene T. Gendlin, PhD, Focusing, 1978.

Solipsism

In a college philosophy class, 1969, Dr. Sheridan must have described solipsism.  The idea hibernated in my unconscious, because I dropped my philosophy major and never thought of the word again until twenty-five years later when I started seeing clients whose parent or spouse was fully – and here one should add every synonym and magnifier for “fully” – entirely, utterly, absolutely, etc. – incapable of seeing that their child or partner existed as a separate unique person.  This may sound like a poetic or hyperbolic idea, but it is made eloquently forcible by Karen Horney, MD (1885-1952).  She said:

“But through a variety of adverse influences, a child may not be permitted to grow according to his individual needs and possibilities.  Such unfavorable conditions are too manifold to list here.  But, when summarized, they all boil down to the fact that the people in the environment are too wrapped up in their own neuroses to be able to love the child, or even to conceive of him as the particular individual he is; their attitudes toward him are determined by their own neurotic needs and responses.”  (Emphasis added.  Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth, 1950, pg. 18.)

Solipsism in its original philosophical identity is:

“the theory that only the self exists, or can be proved to exist” (dictionary.com).  “the philosophical idea that only one’s own mind is sure to exist” (princeton.edu site with Wikipedia info).  “the doctrine that, in principle, ‘existence’ means for me my existence and that of my mental states” (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://www.iep.utm.edu/solipsis/).

To identify solipsism firsthand is, I suspect, a rare thing: It is known through the victim of it, the invisible and miserable child or spouse.  I first saw it directly in a Narcissistic Personality-disordered man, a plumber who dressed like a Wall Street magnate.  We’d been discussing his twelve-year-old son, my client, whom he had ejected from his home during visitation weekend for wearing an earring.  As an ice-breaker, I casually mentioned that “adolescents, finding themselves, tend to push against their parents.”  The man looked puzzled and replied, “I don’t know what you’re saying.  Children don’t defy their parents.”  After a long moment’s pause of dismayed confusion – had my secret psychosis insanely misperceived a reasonable remark? – I realized that this man had no concept of his son as a person in his own right, a being with a self-will.  His narcissistic solipsism had life-long frozen his eyes, ears, mind and heart to history, events, his surroundings, his child – to the simple truth of human autonomy.

In fact, I experienced solipsism firsthand – my own – in 1975 after I had quit music grad school in Chicago and begun my rather short-lived Greyhound Bus vagabond life.  Alone in Des Moines, I took long weekend and evening walks.  Around midnight – and this was two decades before I could claim the beginnings of psychological awareness – I was returning to my apartment in a poor suburb just outside of downtown.  Looking out at the quiet lamp-lit neighborhoods, I was struck by this idea:  ‘The world is only mirrors.’  With no pre-thought, I had felt and captured the very wrong nature of my personal experience: Everything I saw or dealt with was only part of my mind.  There was no capacity to see or experience anything as itself.  This was solipsism.

At the time I didn’t take the idea, the problem, any further, and I know now that at that very fragile time of life, I wouldn’t have wanted to know what it meant to question oneself; that is, to do “therapy.”

When you listen to a solipsistic person – who need not be a narcissist – you may hear nothing unusual.  He does not know that everything is him.  I knew it, age twenty-four, by chance and because I was alone.  A parent or spouse has a link that fools him into believing he is there for the other person.  And he speaks the vocabulary of care.  But listen to the bent adult child of a Waif or Queen Borderline*; the man whose boyhood existed solely to be his mother’s funhouse mirror; the crazy-made wife whose husband abandoned family Thanksgiving to watch sports at his guy friend’s house, and you will see the effects of a person who, though he looks at you and talks to you, is trapped in his own dream.

“She has come to see that no matter how she expresses her needs or desires – nicely or less so – they are meaningless to her husband.  She has convincingly described him as entirely solipsistic, caring only about himself, engaging sparsely with his four- and eight-year-old sons to the point where neither expresses any concern about his absence ‘for three days,’ and the older one cries outside his door while he obliviously watches television.  He will wake her up from a nap to ask if it is ‘OK that he spends time with [his friend].’  This is not ‘OK’ with her and he knows it, but he persists in asking.”

“Client was aware, during the session, that mother’s solipsistic concern about her was not concern for her: Mother will text-message the inquiry, ‘Are you all right?’ with no reason for concern other than mother’s anxious dependency.  A remarkable observation was that mother has never expressed any hurt over the fact that her daughter never inquires about her welfare, doesn’t call with birthday greetings, etc.  We saw this as a ‘special’ kind of self-insularity: not to even care what the other person feels about you.”

“Client returns with her adult daughter [‘Sue’] to ‘fine tune’ their still-poor relationship.  By Sue’s stammering yet very eloquent description of the nature of her anger and frustration, it became crystal clear that her mother responds to her in a solipsistic, personality-disordered manner at all times.  This was indeed difficult to articulate – at least for me when I tried to help client face her own ‘agenda’d’ manner of perceiving and responding to her daughter.  Sue pointed out that her mother tends to be guilt-inducing, to make everything about herself, to need to be right – and ‘everyone else’ wrong at all times.  As this was not a full-fledged toxic narcissism or ‘borderline’-level self-centeredness, it was not easy to encapsulate client’s approach in clear, understandable terms.”

There are, obviously, many ways a caregiving person, a mother or wife, can exert power by her mere existence.  When I was a counselor in Colorado, 2002, I briefly saw a young man, early twenties, whose daily existence lay in the most unusual twilight zone between sanity and insanity.  ‘Aaron’ lived with ghosts, demons, angels and semi-permeable delusions within an otherwise completely intact insight and sensorium.  He fairly knew that he was partly crazy.  The one other fact I remember was this image he drew of his mother, when he was a little boy.  He would come home from school to find her standing in a room making the most grotesque and horrifying faces, as if she were pulled by unconscionable messages from the pit of her soul.  She was looking in the mirror.

Modrow, in his book How to Become a Schizophrenic, describes the maternal background of his own burgeoning schizophrenia and – harkening back to the pre-biopsychiatric days – cites compelling case histories and research that support family schizophrenogenesis.  If a young psychotic’s mental health improves, his parents’ mental health declines.  Other research shows that when he returns home, “expressed emotion” kicks in and he decompensates.  Theodore Lidz, schizophrenia researcher, “focused predominately on the disturbed patterns of communication and the disturbed patterns of misalliances within the families of schizophrenic patients.  In a chilling case report, Professor Lidz described his work with an overtly delusional young woman, a university-aged student who suffered from clinical schizophrenia.  Lidz reported on a meeting with the patient:

“The mother did all the talking, while the father, a wealthy art dealer, remained silent.  When I directed remarks to him, I gained a response from his wife.  When I purposefully turned my back on her and asked the father a question, the mother intruded before he completed a sentence.  It was difficult to learn much about the patient for the mother talked about herself, her Pilgrim ancestry, and her ambitions as a writer.  When I finally interrupted and asked about her daughter’s college career and her interests, I learned that the girl’s whole life revolved around becoming a novelist; she had a passion for Virginia Woolf.  Her mother hoped her daughter would follow in the footsteps of her idol.  I hesitated before commenting, ‘But Virginia Woolf had psychotic episodes and committed suicide.’  The mother did not hesitate when she replied, ‘It would be worth it.’  Six weeks later, while making rounds of the in-patient hospital rooms, Professor Lidz noticed a brace of novels by Virginia Woolf newly despatched by the young girl’s mother.  The patient explained to Lidz, ‘Mother sent them – she has a thing about Virginia Woolf.'

“Eventually, Lidz discharged the patient, who returned home to continue her treatment on the West Coast of America, where her parents lived.  Heartbreakingly, Professor Lidz subsequently discovered that the patient eventually killed herself, just as Woolf had done, thereby enacting her mother’s all too powerful injunction.”  (Attachment – New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis, Volume 1, Number 2, July 2007, p. 120.)

What does it mean to be locked up in oneself, to be a solipsist?  Maybe the first question should be: Is this disorder so ubiquitous and so invisible – and not so dire as I make it out to be – that it shouldn’t matter to the therapist or the solipsist himself?  I suggest that it is an ultimate problem, the essence of unfulfillment through the lifespan, but may need to be “read between the molecules” by clinicians who haven’t discovered the phenomenon for themselves.  These are individuals who have never moved beyond childhood.  I imagine solipsism’s origin this way: Early on in the child’s life, fear becomes primary and superimposes itself between his attention and his experience of the world.  Fear becomes everything’s reflective surface, so in a way he only sees himself.  He can’t reach out or talk to his parents, is afraid of failure or reprimands or getting hurt, of adults and crowds and bullies and strangers, of rejection by his friends, of taking a chance, of younger children, of deep water, of work, of classrooms with bulletin boards and tests and assigned seats, of showing himself.  Pain coats everything.  Because of this, life becomes for the child introspective even without thought: He is self-dwelling as inner atmosphere.  Over the years, the radical aloneness of being in a “coated” world – where to touch “other” is to touch himself – means he grows older with his early life-and-death dependency unnurtured.  He always needs soothing and filling, and in a world that is only him.  Existence becomes supplies.  People, suppliers.  This is the decent guy sitting before me who protests with heartbreaking harsh tears that he loves his wife, is sorry he ignored her desires and complaints for so many years but is different now, while his wife bitterly turns away, hardened.  How can she be so callous?  But then we see that he can’t shut up, he still can’t listen to what she is saying, he is still seeing her through his fears.  What looked like care is desperation.  What claimed to be solicitousness is control.  Force him to the edge of a cliff, stand him before the firing squad and he will not know how to quiet his needy mind and see his wife as separate, with goals that come from her seeds, not their common soil.

I don’t know how to describe the movement that occurs within a person when the film of Self that has covered life and time dissolves, and real sight happens for the first time.  Where the self does not exist in the other’s presence – whether it’s a person or the universe – but to receive the other: to watch and feel, then think.  That’s the paradox that solipsists of all kinds can’t appreciate: When we are gone we are most there, most full of wonder, pleasure, meaning.  I do have, though, a confident sense of the healing that has to happen for the film to dissolve – almost magically, and maybe in an implosive moment.  It requires an unaccustomed touching of one’s past, a re-owning it, a loving grieving of it.  In other words, it requires the true feeling that we have run away from our entire lives, to become real again.

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* Christine Ann Lawson, PhD, Understanding the Borderline Mother, 2000.

Change

Some days I think that no one changes, for better or worse, as a result of my therapy with them.  Other days I believe that everyone grows at least a little, even from a single poignant disconcerting evocative-psychoeducational session.  Of course, these are passing moods that come from the molecular mess.  The fact is that we are poking a trowel into the earth and hoping to stir the iron-nickel core at its center.

Such pretension, to think that our stuff and our way can change the nature of a person!  Considering that “change’s” definition is as self-created as “good” and “God.”  Many clinicians believe people are sick because of their self-destructive thinking.  Others, because they are holistically injured.  “Change,” then, would be different accordingly.  Most believe that thinking different alters feeling.  I accept the opposite: Pain – feeling – generates thinking.  Irvin Yalom, famous existential psychotherapist, has based his lifework on the assumption “that basic anxiety emerges from a person’s endeavors, conscious and unconscious, to cope with the harsh facts of life, the ‘givens’ of existence,” these “givens” being “the inevitability of death for each of us and for those we love; the freedom to make our lives as we will; our ultimate aloneness; and, finally, the absence of any obvious meaning or sense to life.”  (Love’s Executioner, 1989, p. xii-xiii.)  Yalom – a bright man and beautiful writer with such a stupid idea.  If he were right, then a little girl would be depressed not because her father is incestuous but because she must live on the insubstantiality of pure choice then die alone without meaning.  And Albert Ellis, the joker in his breast pocket, would indict the child’s faulty catastrophic thinking: “My!  Life’s a bummer!”

What is change?  I have recently informed a client, late thirties, that to heal she will have to stop being herself, must give up her one identity as an abjectly needy child-woman, become a stranger to herself.  For her, change would be death followed by reincarnation as a different animal.  I, a sometime hypocrite, know that I will never critically change, transcend to being a highly mature and financially foresightful person.  Despite my self-work I am still wounded and refuse to build a gold statue on balsa wood.

Arthur Janov says that therapy’s goal is not to help someone “become” anything, but to simply be who he was by birthright: a healthy person without defenses, open and free in the world.  But to that end, he might need to become “hopeless,” to give up hope for the loving parent who never existed.  Healing, then, is to cut off one’s gangrenous leg and walk on yet stronger.

There are all kinds of change which we, as helpers, can foster.  If you can get an angry-hurt parent to love his child, he is better and the boy is healed for life.  I helped a medic, soon returning to Afghanistan, realize that the standards of achievement and performance he has levied on his son are “killing childhood”: The boy no longer lives by his heart but by his father’s retribution pain.  This man and I became, in a fine moment, “bonded” sad children as we contemplated what it feels like to be told you are a disappointment.  In a kind of enchanted shock, he asked, “How do you go on after that?”

Change happens when pain moves inside of us: We are given it or we release it.  Test this for yourself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlVfVBFdMaM

Molecular mess #2

Talking about the molecular mess of human psychological nature is not an infinite regress but an ultimately useless regress, because we are led to see that the adult stands with his head in the fog and his feet rooted in a childhood that never healed.  I firmly believe that were we to simply let ourselves feel – that is, sense what the body knows – down through our defenses to our beginnings, we’d know that part of our soul remains in the prison-crib of unmet needs.  Fortunately, the human spirit soars anyway, and the fraction of our atom core that was born positive lets us see and love even so.  But there is that impossibility, that paradox of stuckness and soaring that makes our life ultimately absurd.

As previous posts suggest, our thinking both saves and imprisons us.  To feel fully is to fall into our early self that, incompetent and wounded, could not hold itself together.  You may want to doubt that, but why else would so many come to therapy for help with their emotions yet run away from them into rationalizations and countless words?  Psychologists have seen how people run and avoid their real self, often forever. 

“All knowledge above the abyss is the knowledge of avoidance.” (Vereshack, on-line therapy book).

“Every child has a legitimate need to be noticed, understood, taken seriously, and respected by his mother.  In the first weeks and months of life he needs to have the mother at his disposal, must be able to avail himself of her and be mirrored by her.  This is beautifully illustrated in one of Donald Winnicott’s images: the mother gazes at the baby in her arms, and the baby gazes at his mother’s face and finds himself therein . . . provided that the mother is really looking at the unique, small, helpless being and not projecting her own expectations, fears, and plans for the child.  In that case, the child would not find himself in his mother’s face, but rather the mother’s own projections.  This child would remain without a mirror, and for the rest of his life would be seeking this mirror in vain.”  (The Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller, p. 27, 1997.)

To embody injury, presence and escape at once is “messy,” confusing.  It makes all the gravitas about “being in the here and now” nonsense.  We are not in the now: Our presence – an eyeball – floats on an ocean of injury and escape.  I look at a rose and see my missed childhood.  You watch a child and are angry at her because you were never a child.  (You admit this to no one.)  I pet a cat with extra affection but she is bothered, sensing that the caressing is for me not for her.  His alcohol is the breast, “immersion” in something beautiful*; her chocolate is love, being held.  I walk in a pretty fall day and see the weight of fifty-five years.

In therapy, all this is known but most is ignored in service of the client’s presenting need.  Few come to therapy to regress, and none to feel absurd.  Imagine, though, that you do sit and “let your hair down” and sense the disquiet of the lost ocean within, and it is not a good feeling.  Wouldn’t it be nice to know that someone, your therapist, sees you?

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* Karen B. Walant, Creating the Capacity for Attachment – Treating Addictions and the Alienated Self, 1995.

The molecular mess (a messy introduction)

The DSM-IV describes the Schizoid Personality as a rock, an island: cold, alone, not interested in social relationships, unmoved by either compliments or criticism.  But researchers who have intensively studied this personality (Fairbairn, Guntrip, Klein and others) show the exact opposite is true: A schizoid deeply craves the friendship / love bond but must run away from core fears of dehumanization and exploitation.

Alice Miller believes that “. . . grandiosity is the defense against depression, and depression is the defense against the deep pain over the loss of the self that results from denial.”  Depression is the ice that encases the fire of pain and the light of the true self.

I have seen many intellectual types who are children in their development and in their emotions.  In fact, most intellectuals who come to therapy are still children.  This may be clearest in the borderline young women with their volumes of purple journals and poetry; in the mother who blogs psychology but who is as blind and distant as a rock, an island.  (She journalized pertly about her daughter who was “in the loony bin again.”)  It’s true in countless pontificators whose thinking is the apotheosizing of an attitude.  It’s the chemical engineer dragged, at his request, home from the bar by his wife; the young man writing a novel who wants his homicidal father to finally be nice to him.

It’s impossible to define the molecular mess because its nature is, as far as I understand, the actual molecular complexity of brain and psyche.  It undermines all diagnostic labels, and almost all understandings about ourselves.  “Frustration” is anger and hurt: one thing.  A man can love life and want to die, at the same time.  That is, he can need to, but not want to.  Masterson (The Search for the Real Self) describes how Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy of existentialism was the ideational child of his childhood history.  “Because the adults in his family did not acknowledge and support Sartre’s emerging self, he had to create it by himself.  As a result, he assumed all human beings had to develop a real self without help, in a void, totally alone.”  Janov (if I remember correctly) notes that many PhD candidates drop out just before completing their program: Success would be wrong.  A fourth-grader’s home life is sad and terrible and his grades plummet: Failure would be right.  It respects his pain.

Narcissism is a glorious shell that surrounds emptiness, and emptiness comes from years of heavy, substantial loss.  Our raging is our crying, and our crying – a thousand miles under the surface – is . . .

“She straightens baby’s undershirt and covers him with an embroidered sheet and a blanket bearing his initials.  She notes them with satisfaction.  Nothing has been spared in perfecting the baby’s room, though she and her young husband cannot yet afford all the furniture they have planned for the rest of the house.  She bends to kiss the infant’s silky cheek and moves toward the door as the first agonized shriek shakes his body.

“Softly, she closes the door.  She has declared war upon him.  Her will must prevail over his.  Through the door she hears what sounds like someone being tortured.  Her continuum recognizes it as such.  Nature does not make clear signals that someone is being tortured unless it is the case.  It is precisely as serious as it sounds” (Jean Liedloff, The Continuum Concept, pg. 63).

How do we even know what we are that needs help?  How can a therapist?

We must all give it some time.  This is no ten easy lessons.

The problem of the toxic umbilical cord

Today in session, the toxic umbilical cord was broken.  I rarely see this so poetically and decisively happen.  Probably much of the time my efforts to help adults separate from a mouse-that-roared parent fall on scared deaf ears, or maybe seep into their soil and incubate underground for a little while then die.  There are different levels of success.  A dad used to shame his little girl and watch his own father shame the little granddaughter – rather than confront his lifelong emasculation and the old man who did it.  A girl continually betrayed by mother finally faced her, at age forty-nine, and cried out her lifelong anxiety.

Mostly, though, the toxic umbilical cord is (dramatically put) the rape of karma.  A parent’s failure should not reap her benefits.  But a mother remains powerful, owning her child even into old age, precisely because she failed: She did not grow a healthy, free child.

Then again, failure is often the very essence of the parent’s power.  A man quakes in rage at his ten-year-old son’s defiance, or maybe even at the boy’s initiative.  Inspect this quaking: It is fear.  X-ray the man: He is a little boy in identity collapse, abandonment terror.  If he were actually bigger and stronger than his son, he would smile and understand.

Today, it was an evocative offering of an intrapsychic principle, that of “splitting off and projecting,” that helped the young woman break free.  A child buries intolerable pain and forgets it, but then sees that exact pain in the world.  Sexually abused children may, for lack of an enlightened witness “who helped them to recognize the injustices they suffered, to give vent to their feelings of rage, pain and indignation at what happened to them*,” split off their pain and self-sense of hopelessness and later see (project) them in all manner of stray animals.  A trailer, a “cat lady,” and her hoard.  I can only vaguely remember traces of a moment or two of personal ruin in childhood where rejection pain, so overwhelming, caused me to disappear it.  I became a person who could not hurt another’s feelings, knowing his or her soul would die at the words “no” or “sorry.”

The client was the thrall of a mother whose power was her hateful projection of her own crib-death, her own absence of self-generation, self-creation onto her daughter.  This manifested in so many ways – in the atmosphere of years itself – that weakened the child and made the umbilical cord necessary, but most recently in her judgment that she – a bright college graduate – was unable to make decisions.  This was another final blow to this condemned person.  The unexpected break came after an old process that melted from under her her cerebral perch.  This was the process:

“Now, I want you to accept the following situation.  You are lying on a bed in a hospital and you are dying.  You are your present age.  You are not in physical pain, but you are aware of the fact that in a few hours your life will end.  Now, in your imagination, look up and see your mother standing at the side of the bed.  Look at her face.  There is so much unsaid between you.  Feel the presence of all the unsaid between you -- all the things you have never told her, all the thoughts and feelings you have never expressed.  If ever you would be able to reach your mother, it is now.  If ever she would hear you, it is now.  Talk to her.  Tell her." **

She was silent for a full ten minutes or more, talking to her mother, rejecting her and a lifetime of being unseen.  Following, the explanation of her mother’s condemnation, being only a mirror that woman was trapped in.  She has never, ever seen you.  There was a look in the eyes and a physical feeling in the throat named both fear and “excitement.”  She felt free.

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* http://www.alice-miller.com/index_en.php?page=2

** “The Death Bed Situation.”  Nathaniel Branden, PhD, The Disowned Self, 1972.