Eyes that don't see

What is the name of the problem where a person – a family member, in the two scenarios presented – sees another family member through a film?  A film not over the eyes but the mind, a vacuformed sheath over every hill and depression of the brain, a film of attitude, emotionalized philosophy, feeling, assumption.  A film of superiority, or of inferiority; of child-feeling, or of false-adult feeling.  A film the seer doesn’t know exists and would, despite a general perspicacity, deny the existence of.  And if they could effect some gracious or intellectual distance from their true nature for a moment and admit the existence of the film, it would nevertheless remain, after the flicker subsided, like a pilot light or a heartbeat.
 

It is a problem of identity because it is carried everywhere, not just to the family target, though it will be even more covert in the general environment than in its assimilation in the family atmosphere.  Does that make it a personality disorder?  It is a problem of identity because it began in childhood, became part of the analgesic self and therefore more and more critical and structural as loss, pain and time went on.  And because it remains part of the self now.

It seems not to be a personality disorder because its essence is projection, one defense.  A shame-bent girl, for example, represses her shame then “sees” the dying and pathetic potential in another person, whom she cannot disappoint in a favor asked or a hope floated, upon pain of mutual disintegration.  Things that I will never know happened in my 1950’s family where some need or hurt in my sister was met by my own passive personality.  I can suggest generic causes – jealousy, absence of love, contempt – but will never know what built her character that must be patronizing and assuming even in its sad and helpless moments, fifty years on.

“Glad you responded to Dave’s query.”

Bestow upon me the blessings of your approval and encouragement, always-older sister!  This is the kind of parenting artifice – pats on the head – that shapes little boy into a good person, as he absorbs these words of moral light delivered from high to low, is altered by them.

It is this subtle and gentle solipsism, this film transparent yet suffocating, that more than anything else led to my leaving the family.

Thinking, now, of a client, there is a poisoning I find hard to describe, where one changes in the gaze of another.  In general, a child reduces herself to fit within the neurotic constrictions of a family.  A result is “pain comfort,” where she feels connected and possibly loved by being the inferior, or reduced, or labeled one.  This is the unruly child, the mild defect, the invisible one, the class clown, the good student or the computer genius.  In an orbiting-moon dynamic, a parent or sibling, hurt but not able to be aware of it, will see one weaker child in a skewed way, thereby making her live that new way, a self-indentation, a delivered identity.  Inarticulate, she cannot dispute the powerful person’s delusional disapproval or branding.  She carries it into the world, limiting her in any number of ways.  But it is in the home, where the seed was inseminated, that the worst regressive effects will happen, where the rape will continue to happen.

The pre-biopsychiatric era concept of Expressed Emotion generally describes this effect:

“Expressed emotion (EE) refers to care giver’s attitude towards a person with a mental disorder as reflected by comments about the patient made to an interviewer.  It is a significant characteristic of the family milieu that has been found to predict symptom relapse in a wide range of mental disorders.  The empirical data show that EE is one of the major psychosocial stressor[s] and it has direct association with recurrence of illness.  The importance of EE depends on research that has consistently established that persons with mental illness, such as schizophrenia, who live with close relatives who have negative attitudes, are significantly more likely to relapse. . . . .

“The construct of EE comprises of [sic] the following factors/behavioral patterns: Criticism, hostility, and emotional overinvolvement (EOI).  Like many other environmental stressors, EE behaviors are not pathological or unique to families of mental disorders, but they can cause relapse of psychiatric symptoms among people with a vulnerability to stress.”*

My client** has never been able to reject her family, a family that is as demeaning and projecting as any I have known of.  Forty years of pain, of being seen through a film that projects her defectiveness, her paper-thin significance.  Forty years of having blind parents and a brother who feel they are all-knowing about her.  Most recently, she raged against the indignity of being replaced in a family tradition by the sister-in-law.  In the face of her mature defense and generous apology, she was attacked:

“We had every right to chastise you for your comment for being outrageously rude to our guest [the parents’ term for the very center-stage sister-in-law].”

“Your inferiority complexes are only in your mind.”

“Are you that selfish you cannot let your brother’s wife to be a part of our tribe?”

“Your feelings of inferiority and insignificance need to be addressed with a support group, religious group or fellowship.”

“I do worry what will become of you.  You have outlined the downfalls of your life.  Now find a way to improve your circumstances.”

“You have excused yourself with your limited apology and your ‘I, me, my’ excuses why you should be permitted to act as you did.  So [your] letter is purely a demand for our sympathy for your ‘hardships’ and your needs to . . . right your imagined wrongs.  That isn’t gonna happen.”

“I don’t know about your memories, since they are faulty.”

My client had appealed to the “tribe”:

“Finally, although I have tried not to carry the negative points of [past conflicts] with my mother into the present, I still feel that it is too easy for mom to overreact in a negative, accusatory manner to something involving me.  Truly, when an ‘incident’ presents, I try to use my better-self to communicate, but there is so much history of disagreement and negative interactions that it inevitably reverts back to a dysfunctional dynamic.”

When this explanation was rejected and abused by her parents, she fell backwards into the film’s projections, and requested an emergency session.

Throughout my career I have found it difficult, sometimes futile, to work with clients who seemed immaturely dependent on bad-object (see post “Strength,” Jan. 17, 2014) parents, seeing this mostly as a developmental abort.  But now, feeling the regressive pull of my sister’s comment – Glad you responded to Dave’s query – I understand how someone cannot fight or even clearly see what is invisible and denied, and in the past.  I see better how a dysfunctional family will always be in its childhood home, the dynamics remain the same, and all are hurt.  The one who is less needy can leave the ring, the needy one will go down for the count.

*      *      *

What is required for someone to see her family member objectively, as objectively as she might see a stranger?  Wanting to is probably required.  The question of why one would want to see that clearly, from a distance, is a personal one.  A more fundamental necessity is to be significantly free of drugs – the drugs of self-medicating projection and delusion.  I could say that’s a desirable state, but in fact it may not be: To be self-stripped of the family feeling, of the comforts of attitude and the cloak of assumption, may leave a person naked and hollow, and returned to childhood alone.  That is because family is forever, even when it is rejected.

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* “Expressed Emotion in Schizophrenia: An Overview,” National Center for Biotechnology Information, Indian J Psychol Med. 2012 Jan-Mar; 34(1): 12-20.   

At http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3361836/ .

** My client has given me permission to quote from her family’s letters.

Two case histories

I once worked with a teenager for over two years, and in most of that time, especially toward the end, I had difficulty accepting that he was as determinedly steeped in futility, dysphoria and negativity as he was.  It hadn’t just been the happy moments in session, where we shared some hysterical laughter, that made me think he hid the sun behind a glum cloud, or tongue-in-cheek.  It was also his rationality – knowing that life after 18 and liberation can be more delicious than anything he’d experienced.  And his normalcy that related to adults nicely, was not regressively stuck on his parents, was modestly forward-looking, and spoke of his crushed spirit in an affable and wise way.

I was solidly aware that this young man’s history had put all the right notches in his soul to bring him to this state.  Included were a parent’s abandonment, formative years of physical and mental abuse, early bullying, severe reversal-of-dependency with the other parent, and very premature autonomy where he fed and got himself off to school, with no “raising.”  And I was forced to admit that the pleasant, mature surface he carried hid within not an ounce of initiative other than to fly to the flame of self-medication.  Still, were a giant of a manly man to swagger and bellow – “I’m a coward, so watch out!” – my confusion over a paradoxical impression would not have been greater.

Most therapists, if not most anybody, will grasp that the mystifiers causing my client’s deceptive impression were his intellect and an inability to feel pain in my presence.  The depression was experienced at home, but in my office it was only referenced.  In three years there had never been a tear, or a child’s expression, or even a request for help.  Only, pure defensiveness so well established at an even earlier age that it had seeped into the deepest part of his psychic foundation and couldn’t remember how to feel challenged.  There had been, actually, one moment at the beginning of therapy when I allowed my frustration at a child’s precocious defeatist philosophy to come out in a harsh tone.  Fourteen years old, he had shown fear, probably of another abandonment.  I quickly finessed, he recovered, and that was the last time his reality showed itself.

Did therapy help him?  Yes, but I hate to say that I believe this possible delusion is true: More good happened in the final hour than in all the time before.  And I hate, again, to say that after that one frightened confrontation, followed by dozens of efforts to impale his sick mantra against the wall, I became both fearful and resigned about revealing the real child under his cover, and never deeply pressed his emotions again.  Until, that is, the last session, when my own childhood and lifelong fears of facing a boy, a man, a male, had to be put aside.  That’s when I could offer him, by pushing aside my own guarded empty place, a hand and more intimate sincerity than anyone had ever given to me in a lifetime.

The circle would close, of course, if I could bring my father back from the grave then do something even harder than that – wake him up – and have a father-son moment.  The kind of moment that makes a boy feel OK to be the boy he is and later, the man.

My heart leaps up when I behold

    A rainbow in the sky:

So was it when my life began;

    So is it now I am a man;

So be it when I shall grow old,

    Or let me die!

The child is father of the man:

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

(My Heart Leaps Up, William Wordsworth, 1802)

Mungo-psychology, part one

Vexing problem of the day: In a dream, you conceive the construction of a two-person transparent starship whose energy source is the Universal Quiddity, which can carry you a billion-billion times the speed of light, or any possible speed you desire, to every place in the cosmos.  Awakening from the dream, you build the craft, have breakfast, then take off.  Even at the highest speed you dare imagine, it takes you five years to find a planet where sentient and abstract intelligence is embodied in a motile form that you can recognize.  You arrive quietly, surreptitiously, with a good heart, and search for a lone Being with whom you can commune.  You traipse the purple hills, the forests, and finally come upon a hiker or vagabond who, like you, casts off fear and opens itself to the all good of this once-in-eternity experience.  You walk together, learn each other’s language, and share existence.

Some questions:

In your assessment of this situation – Is this wonderful, or is it depressing, or both?  How much do you say?  After some time, do you decide to stay, resume your cosmic travels alone, or with the new friend?  And, with this one objective corroboration, or synthesis, of the nature of mind and the universe at hand, do you and It co-author the definitive philosophy of everything?

Another question: Rather than take a ride yourself, should you have given your starship to a great physicist, historian, or (as Ellie suggested in the movie Contact) poet?  You are none of these things, just a person with an accidental dream.

My own perspective (which of course reveals some of my psychology) is that this experience would be both glorious and depressing.  Another consciousness, even at one of the infinite outposts of the universe, seems to me to accentuate our essential aloneness, not dispel it.  “Well, here we are in this lonely endlessness.”  Consciousness is more a mirror than a window: Looking into someone else’s soul is eventually to be two mirrors staring at each other, it is eventually to just see oneself.

Even if I knew all of human history – origins, progression and decline of civilizations, evolution, wars, science, art, belief – I would find myself telling my star-friend a few details then mostly summaries and principles: “Such is human nature.  There is a germ or a sensitivity that we have always picked up along the timeline that causes us pain, then violence.  Why jealousy and murder rather than benevolence and healing, I don’t know.”  I would want to listen to Its history, too, but probably in the same way: representative jewels then the broad sweep.  Mostly, I’d want to know the philosophy, the feelings, the sense of purpose.

Sometimes I fear that knowing is what gets in the way of our living the “full catastrophe.”*  Since everything about consciousness and genius reduces to one atom “looking” at another, basically our being a reflective-absorptive particle of existence, and all knowledge is just “deeper” layers of appearance dressed up with thought and logic (A = A), isn’t the appreciation of appearance the most human and astounding we, and life, can be?  The reason, I suspect, that the mystery of existence can’t be solved is that there is no one to solve it.  There is no knowledge, that is, only the appearance of it, in the same illusory way that our mind feels free to will.

I might invite my friend to join me in the transparent starship, flip a coin at every corner and go in which direction it says.  This would be a great partnership: No vaporous conjecture for us, just the crazy ignorant joy of seeing one Unexplainable after the other and going: What!?  What!?  What!?**

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* Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, Full Catastrophe Living, 1990, Bantam Dell, p. 5.

** One person I would never donate my ship to would be Jon Kabat-Zinn, master of mindfulness, a practice that I see as imprisonment in the brain.  I prefer imprisonment in the universe. 

Pessimistic therapy laws (#1)

More pessimistic

* We are always consorting with the false self, the persona and shadow words of the client.

* The client can never “get over” his past: It is his core identity, the irritant around which the oyster builds its pearl.  It is his bane, yet it’s the home he lost and forever needs.

* While regression is necessary to reach the childhood splinter that launched disorder, it is also impossible: The result of deep regression would be the screaming shell-less egg dying in the crib or in childhood.

        * Without regression, the client remains her essential defensive self.  We help remove some of the deck chairs on her particular Titanic; she must now stand and have a better view of the dangers.

* Most often the client wants to be different, yet without changing his family dynamic, though family is the anchor holding him under water.

* Clients need the deepest understanding and acceptance, containing and love from us (getting it nowhere else), but they resist accepting it from a stranger.

More optimistic

* Though the ocean has deep and dark mysteries, its surface can play and be warmed by the sun.  Most deeply troubled people can be touched, warmed and seen, and feel better.

* Touching emotional truth without falling into it, entertaining knowledge without fully owning it – this is typically the best help, safest help, and only possible help.  Falling into and owning too much truth may be regressive, stunning, dangerous.

* Abreaction works: Clients who touch the splinter in their heart, who allow their preconscious to emerge, who grieve in company, feel different and better.

I sometimes wonder if there may be little difference between healing and palliation, when it comes down to it.  Primal therapists promote the utter truth of the self, while Slomo (see video footnote at http://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2014/04/wanting.html) believes it’s good to have a “personal delusional system.”  This need not be psychotic or self-blinding.  We see the world full of horror and injustice and can benevolently still love the small neighborhood in which we dwell.  And we may know that our childhood was simply wrong for life – I look back and wonder how I survived – but can still feel good about other parts of our self.  It is the individuals who can’t “delude” themselves with strength and meaning amidst the calamity who are in trouble.