Aloneness

Contradictory statistics on this blog’s infrastructure page cause me confusion about my readership.  Per-month stats are robust and encouraging, while day/week stats are dismal.  There is no way the two sets of numbers could ever coincide at month’s end (vampirestat and other robot hits disappeared long ago), though I’m too lackadaisical to actually check.  For certain reasons, I’ve chosen to believe the scantiest numbers, and this leaves me rethinking the nature and purpose of my writing.

I will probably begin creating more introspective stuff, less geared toward objective psychological subjects such as ADHD, feeling-centered therapy, tics, etc.  If this is sad or disappointing to any readers, I won’t know it, because I don’t know if you are there.

The primary purpose for writing introspectively will be future nostalgia, my museum in the mind.  There is a personal story told by Ray Bradbury, great writer of poetic science fiction.  Well into his fame, Ray took a trip back to his boyhood home – Waukegan, Illinois – the setting of many stories including the semi-magical autobiography Dandelion Wine.  He walked the old neighborhood to his old house and came upon a tree that struck a memory.  Maybe now middle-aged, he climbed the tree and found, somehow still stashed in a crevice, a note he had written in the cosmic blush of little boyhood.  Reading it, he cried.  “I remember you,” the note said – implication or clear message being that the young and prescient child was addressing his future self with fondness, some ineffable boy-wonder’s feeling for his old, far away and lonelier self.

That’s what I will do, though without the childhood.

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An old friend of mine worries about leaving a legacy.  I’ve never had any such concerns, assuming that at my end I will blink out unknown (except to my wife), with no ripple in the world, and that this is right.  I don’t know if that is wiser and more mature, or sicker and less mature than wanting a legacy.

Certain people come to counseling with the problem of social awkwardness, ineptness, fear or aversion: They are not comfortable with others.  Some, as teens, don’t really make friends as much as they find affirmations of alienation to talk at, a musical mood they are most comfortable in.  I have long fought or dealt with that incongruity with the world, and have “used” clients the way the awkward teen uses his faux-friends as musical ambience, but also as a means to be the most human I can be.  I know what it is to feel originally, deeply, at core out-of-sync with the world of people, probably even with the world of nature.  Therapy brings connection, which I know I have used well to help others.

Those most alienated are, of course, those who needed to be one with, melt into, the world and another person.  Some basic babyhood immersion in an all-loving, all-protective carrier did not happen, leaving the person one magnet lonely for the other and opposite one.  When a young man, in session, defines “love” to me, while thinking of his steady girlfriend whom he’s only met online: “You immerse yourself in their life and they immerse their self in yours,” he is unknowingly talking about the first sustenance that never happened, leaving him to walk the world scalded, bleeding out and converting these truths to the feeling “love-hope.”  The other boy who has owned the alienation, made it his philosophy, is hardly any different, really no different at all.  They both look at another person and are embattled, inside, not to collapse into the infant who has no words, only sounds, clinging, need.  This internal battle – forced to be in the present but really being in the past – is what makes him inept.

Somewhere between this aloneness carried inside, and aloneness at the end of life, it would be nice to have a fusion with love or some universal mother.  We combat or numb ourselves to this absence with present love, disappearance of Self (orgasm or “la petite mort,” moments of wonder, obliteration of consciousness by floods of experience or adrenalin).  I mostly settle for small moments of immersion in accidental ideas that build on themselves – the writing.  Le petit blog.

Ocean and boat

While I hope to be as serene as Yoda when I’m in my seventies, right now I’m rather cranky and sick of a lot of things.  I am weary of people’s learnèd absorption in foreign matters, as though neurotic demagogues deserve more attention and intellectual gravitas than the corner convenience store robber or used car con man.  At the risk of fitting the curmudgeon stereotype, I’m eye-rollingly ennui’d that each new generation, both sexes, rediscovers and endorses the feminine as a decorative piece of meat.  Often what looks alluring to them looks like pure cartoon caricature to me.  I’m tired of the righteous cyclically amnestic herd fickleness that turns on the political party in power every four or eight years because your imperfect father figure didn’t buy you enough candy or make you feel consistently good – but the other party's candidate will.

Mars Attacks!

And, I’m sick of the culture that talks about “mental illness” as if it were a strange occurrence or disease entity that some picturesque minority suffers from.  An NIH website states: “An estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older – about one in four adults – suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year.”  Congressional Research Service cites the National Survey on Drug Use and Health’s estimate that “the 12-month prevalence of mental illness [is] 40.3% among adolescents” and the “12-month prevalence of mental illness excluding substance use disorders was 18.6% among adults aged 18 or older.”

Mental illness is not what most people want to think it is.  It is not a diagnosis.  It is not a grouping of symptoms that add up to a label like depression or anxiety or anorexia or pedophilia.  Mental illness is a change – any change – from the normal integration of thinking, feeling and acting that is the starting gate of most, and early life of many, children.  Seen holistically that way, mental illness is present whenever you are not: when you are dissociated from normal integrated functioning by mood, attitude, pain, numbness.

To be holistic is to be natural, and there is the valid question: Can anyone grow up that way, unhindered by culture’s censoring and painful straitjackets?   I’d say “hypothetically yes,” because a parent may not be in pain, and therefore would not inject pain into her child.  A parent may not be depressed, and therefore would not foster repression in her child.  Compassion, respect, benevolence and resilience would thereby be the products of human contentment, not the result of “molding” and restraint.

Mental illness is to have thoughts in your head when you’d like to be quiet.  It’s to not know what you want to do with your life in your twenties or forties.  It’s to want power and control over others.  It’s to eat when you are not hungry, to smoke, to cache money you won’t need, to daydream through your classes.  It’s uncomfortableness in a group, fake laughter, accommodating a bully, arrogance, fear of a parent when you’re an adult, needing to be perfect.  It's "guilt" with no discernible reason.  It’s to value hard work for its own sake, to be ingratiating as a trait, to just feel confused about yourself.  It is to question meaning (Freud said, “The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life, he is sick”), and to believe things that aren’t true.  It’s the need to be popular, to have prestige, to have honor.  Obviously it is to kill for “honor,” which means against shame; and mental illness is to have shame to run from.  It’s to be polite at age four, responsible at eight, intellectual at twelve, cynical at fourteen.  It’s to never smile, and to have a fixed smile, to love your husband but have little to say to him, to marry a deadbeat, to be driven to “success” or to want nothing.

Mental illness is to live with the effects of any splinter in the heart.  It gives us pain, or gives us pause – sometimes a perpetual pause – during which we miss life at its best.

There is of course a danger when the psychotherapist perceives people through the wide telescope of diagnostic labels and entities.  Fuzzy complaints such as “I don’t know who I am” or “I don’t get that much out of life” are ignorantly concretized, reduced to career choice or loneliness or medicable depression.  But to see – almost – life itself as mental illness, as I do, is to sometimes give clients choices they don’t want.  When I was twenty-six and about to fall into a sick marriage, I went to a psychiatrist.  For the first time I’d noticed the vague ocean within that fools would call depression.  The psychiatrist offered nothing; I didn’t know how to address, find words for, this feeling mystery, and the treatment ended quickly.  Now, I don’t know what he might have said but for “Start your life over again.”  Such nonsense dramatics would actually have felt better than to question everything about myself.  But that’s what mental illness is – the everything – the ocean, not the little boat in it.

My hippie moment (swan song dedicated to Barbara)

What should psychotherapy look like in my last thirty-eight years?* People will continue to be distressed. Children will continue to be hurt, and grow up to be distressed. They will want to be happy or content, will have a sense of meaning or will manufacture it. Some will be receptive to influence – by friends, teachers, books, therapists, internal dawning – but many will be unable to be moved. I wonder sometimes if therapy is preaching to the choir: We only help those who want to be and can be helped. Nobody changes those who can’t be changed.

Quite a few clients seek help but can’t grow up. I think that growing up is required to be a helpable person. Yet maybe that quality is also preaching to the choir: Only those who have the innate capacity to be adult, can be. Some people refuse to be independent; some don’t know, in their bones, what that state means. Recently a thirty-eight-year-old man asked me, artlessly, if his profession is a good one. When I asked him why he still lives with his mother, it was a new and mildly startling question to him, and he had no way to answer it.

My sense – though never explored until this moment – of what I’m doing in my work is different from what it was at the beginning. Then, I was enthralled to stay up all night manning the suicide hotline. It felt earth-moving, life-changing to be on the telephone with someone, seemingly touching the thin nerve of their life’s meaning with my delicate fingers. Now, much older, I no longer feel a crusade. An individual leaning toward suicide would, it is true, bring my depth and excitement to the surface. But generally, I see the timescape of distressed people in a general way, undulating along the streets, and wonder what I want to do with them.

There is one strand in me that wants to be the helpful shocker: Ex-Lax and diamond drill at once, wrapped up in a punch to the nose that says: “You want help? Look under your basement to your dungeon, at the demons that are still eating your child alive.” I’d mock-answer the phone: “Little shop of horrors. You are a baby. How do you feel about that?” Another part of me understands that we are all in the same sweet-and-sour trap: good in bad, bad in good are who we are. But that fact still makes me want others to know more about that.

Therapy through the rest of my life seems to extend beyond psychology to existence, but I know that means nothing because everything is psychology. We cannot live the cosmos without feeling something about us. We may believe in an infinite god but feel like a turd in the gutter. We may believe we are just a randomly congealed set of particles embedded monolithically in a bigger pond of particles – animate and inanimate barely different – yet feel as serene as a god. It’s all psychology, the universe.

I hope to see clients for many years, maybe hold some groups. Something tells me poetry may be a part of it, and a kind of intimacy that melds psychological utter truth with the escapist best, love and travel into van Gogh’s starry night. In Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, Ellie Arroway’s alien father says: “. . . in all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.” I would add, “and knowing each other.”

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* Though I could bite the dust tomorrow, I’m assuming that I will not only live ’til one-hundred, but will be working ’til then.

The near-universality of "Attention Deficit"

Many clients tell me that their mind is constantly barraged with thoughts – worries, neutral stuff, what-ifs, any and everything.  It’s the forty-year-old workaholic business owner and the 15-year-old boy who prefers television shows that “make me think”: not for the interesting content but for the inspiration to mental distractedness.  Often these and other individuals are also moving internally, perpetually: leg-shaking “psychomotor agitation,” hand wringing, shifting position.  Or, they have the continuous electric streaming current under the surface – tension – perceptible to the therapist almost as an intimidation: This intent-looking person may receive nothing from me, everything is peremptory, pushy, brittle, already-known, jackhammer.

Within all of them is a baseline: There is never stillness and quiet.  I invite readers to try an experiment.  Without benefit of breathing-focused meditation, which is a distraction in itself, quiet all behaviors, the internal ones, too, to where you are pure, silent awareness, of nothing at all but the fact of silent awareness – no breath, navel or mantra contemplating.  See if you can be absolutely clear and void for a minute, without some microscopic buzz or evanescent numbing wave or thought or self-awareness or image.  The pure silence of deep space.  I believe that most will find this impossible.  Or if not, it will feel difficult and wrong: Something is always happening inside us, and whatever its nature it must be considered a distraction.  A distraction – a quiet pilot light of mood or the nearly inaudible hum of electrical tension – that must always be considered a breach of a bond.  A bond with a desired thought, a piece of music, to a professor’s lecture, a wife’s presence, to self.

We are not all there, as something bends away the light inside us.  We have lost the young child’s ability to just be, without internal company.

I propose that at some level, nearly all of us are “adhd.”  So let us please kill this stupid and quackish diagnosis.

I look at the very bright fifteen-year-old who looks at me, a friendly smile, drumming with tension.  He must rip and ride wild four-wheelers or do “Title boxing” or use phenomenal drugs, or put himself at risk with his dangerous pets, or “think” to feel OK.  His source, his Big Bang, came in earlier childhood when he couldn’t have a healthy difference of opinion with his mother without father literally crashing the scene in crazy rage.  This is what happens when a kid’s hurt is ignored or even contemned.  Not allowed a voice, it turns in, curdles, becomes poison, tension, tics, good drive or bad drive, a chip on the shoulder, a rustling brain, a frozen smile, inability to turn off, inability to calm, to quiet.

It becomes the neurological static interference of injustice.

As a little boy, I had a few respite moments.  A summer day, I would lie on the hill that was my backyard and look at clouds.  Sometimes I would have a project with me: a nice chunk of wood and a good magnifying glass.  I’d make the sun carve a tiny flame into the wood.  It was a wonderful smell and sight, even though my designs were amateurish.  Though that was concentration, it was majestically empty, no agenda, just to burn and create.  There were no clocks, and the day, beautifully harmless, was permanent.

 

Let me know that you can go there now, and I’ll rescind your disorder.

The knot

I recently learned of a therapy failure.  A client whom I’d seen for five months, fairly consistently, thirteen months ago, had fallen deeper into alcohol than he’d been during our time at work.  After his third session I wrote: “Client continues to live in the stratosphere of questions about himself that he can’t answer: Should he leave the marriage or try to save it?  Efforts to help him get grounded in his deeper feelings and convictions – such as, Is ‘commitment’ an idea you viscerally accept? – seem futile."  His ambivalence did not release at all over the succeeding months, as we came to understand that his choice, essentially, was between food and oxygen.  He had fallen in love with a younger woman who “fed” him essential nutrients that his wife could not provide, though he continued to love her, too.

Many men are attracted to much younger women in a kind of romantic haze that I suspect many fewer women feel for boy-men.  I believe this is because men suffer a special kind of immaturity.  As they grow up, family’s and society’s imperatives of manliness and sexual smart-alec-ness make them skip natural feeling parts of their childhood.  These parts remain unloved.  (There is a circle here: If the child were loved, he wouldn’t disappear beneath the macho style.)  They grow up, then, with an abandoned child inside.  He emerges later, gazing upon his recaptured self, recaptured love, in the literal shape of a girl-woman.

My client could not give up his child self or his adult self.  I could not disagree with this, but asked him to see if he ultimately wanted his adult to “win,” and to look at his wife as more wonderful than he could presently see.  Apparently neither was possible, and his indecision became a heavier, frozen pain.  Alcohol became his medicine.

Before him, the only clients I would not welcome back hopefully would be the adjudicated delinquent boys with their burnt-cold personality disorders.  But I may add to the list this very nice man, transfixed in two times, two needs, two loves.  He grew up a caregiving boy, too responsible, then married someone who needed to be taken care of.  Several decades later, his child was returned to him when a young woman in love wanted to meet his needs.  I think if he returned to therapy, we would both be gazing at the Gordian knot, wondering if it were really two strands tied, or one strand twisted: love that could be let go, or couldn't.