Therapists know that some individuals come to counseling as their balm during a storm, and vanish once the crisis moment has abated at some level. This could happen after one hour’s meeting or four. A man attended his first appointment for help against desperate anxiety and depression, alcoholism and relationship failure, then didn’t return. A couple months later he reappeared, golden-faced and easygoing as could be, under court’s order to have “drug counseling”: He had gotten a DUI. The deep issues had evaporated – weren’t even mentioned – by the interventions of a new marriage and a psychiatric drug. More recently a young woman showed up several months after presenting, in three sessions, a turbid character of dysthymia, abandonment, pseudo-maturity, stillborn rage, and relationship yo-yoing and sabotage. In this case I was pleased to see her again because of her endearing problem: She had shoplifted.
What I liked
was that this long-toiling, prematurely stolid twenty-something who had once
parented herself then carried her husband and captained their ship, had given
in to an urge to finally have something in her hand that didn’t have to be
mixed with thought and responsibility to earn it, something for free, a gift
from the world. She surely deserved this
in all ways but the legal one. The judge
even seemed to understand that her act was poignant not callous, because he
fully emasculated the charge and made her consequence that I could see her
again.
This is one
of those areas where two realities live together as parallel universes: the
child-in-the-adult needing the free gifts of life: love, attention, food, a
bicycle, a necklace, sports, overnight camp, a pet. (Another dimensional parallel would be social
versus real justice, where for example someone is jailed for rape, that you feel
deserves death.) This is not the world
of healthy adults – the several who are probably out there – but of the rest of
us, who traveled through their youth with critical things missed, arriving at
adulthood less with “unfinished business” than with empty baggage. Conceiving their lives this way leaves the
therapist with a correspondingly scant bag of resources: We can’t really give
them the gifts they need, as their baggage needs to be filled by the past.
So I saw her
one-time shoplifting as a crime of passion, not the best
solution, but maybe the only one. The
non-gifted child can't be deeply healed by any school of therapy. My own
approach probably contains a kind of magical thinking, where I hope that my addressing the immanent child, even seeing
her inside the big person, can make her alive and restored in both parallel universes, past
and present, at the same time.
- - - - - - - - - - -
March 5, 2013
To: Municipal Court
Re: “Cathy J.”
From: The Pessimistic Shrink
Cathy J. has asked me if I could support her appeal to have her Misdemeanor expunged, primarily to enable her to work in the health care field. Ms. J. has been my client in counseling / psychotherapy since August 2012. List of attended sessions:
. . . .
My assessment, based on these ten sessions, is that she is not at risk to re-offend (in a legal context) in any way, including shoplifting or any harm to person or property. Her offense was, in my view, a form of psychological stress-release based in lifelong unmet needs for nurture and support, childhood to recent. Cathy’s primary defense mechanism as someone who had to "grow up too fast" has been to become excessively responsible and hardworking – to in effect carry herself and others (including her ex-husband), denying herself and worrying continuously about money. I believe that her theft of earrings was a one-time “break” and symbolic of the gifts of love and goods that all children need, but which she had been denied. Client and I have worked on this and related issues, including her dysthymic depression and money insecurities. I’m confident that her openness to process and insight, and her desire to make something excellent of herself in a Nursing career, will inoculate her against any potential future legal transgressions.
Please feel invited to contact me (with client’s Release of Information) if you have questions or concerns.
Yours truly,
TPS
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.