Good intentions as mental abuse

My counseling center’s diagnostic assessment form includes, as one would expect, the abuse and neglect question. I ask, Do you know or suspect that you may have been a victim of physical, sexual or mental abuse? Though many people, even today, convince themselves that spankings or even whippings are not abuse, and many more are not familiar with the concept of “emotional incest,”* the most ingenuous denials follow the mental abuse option. I help new clients understand mental injury, in part by explaining shaming. But I want them to know a lot more.

Did anyone in a caregiving position ever hurt your feelings? Were you compared unfavorably to a sibling or another person? Were you held to a gold standard of performance, achievement or productivity? I could ask even more questions targeting insidious effects in the child’s psyche: Was your mother depressed or anxious? Was there empathy; were you visible or audible to your parents? And sub-issues: Were they pampering, which is neglect? Was mother self-sacrificial? Were they immature, Borderline, crazymaking, narcissistic? What was the atmosphere of home: warm, repressed, empty, fake-happy or otherwise insincere, skewed or schismatic,** tense, alienated, angry, enmeshed?

It is terribly easy to hurt the undefended heart, to confuse the undeluded mind of a child. Anything said or withheld that damages the crystallizing of self-esteem or sells bogus reason may be considered harmful. This includes failure to hear your child or to give “positive parental identity messages.”*** This includes feeding him ideas you like but which are not verifiable by his own lights, such as your moral truths, your global attitudes, your religious certainties.

I believe that standards are a kind of mental abuse that can kill childhood, and instantly.  Standards – a bar over the child’s head, a blood supply his heart can’t reach – take airy substances – love and intelligent spirit – and replace them with fear and opaque thought. They create a different life form. I love tossing a ball around with my friends, but is my form right? I love learning things, but am I getting A’s, am I superior? It’s fun to be silly, but is it unbecoming behavior? I want to help dad, but he says my efforts are inadequate. I feel spontaneously, but I now must think about that, I must think before that. Once conferred fear and thought pollinate the child’s spirit, he is never himself again. He becomes an anticipatory person; he becomes a concept of a self, a high bar through his head that he cannot reach.

He becomes you, father, grafted inside, now pleasing or appeasing two people or none for the rest of his life.

Client described how his wife’s determination to end their marriage has left him with no purpose. He is a man, he said, who lives by goals and purposes, and now he has nothing but a void. All of his goals and purposes, he said, concerned his wife and family: making her happy; providing for the family’s welfare. He has been, in profound ways, a selfless individual. At work, he is ‘take-charge,’ can run things. At home, his wife – by her own extreme need for control and by his complete acquiescence – is the determiner. She chastised him for taking some leftover food from the freezer which no one had claimed. He offered to wash the dishes, she peremptorily told him to leave it: She will do it later. He has ‘disappeared’ himself to her consistently, following the dynamic that can infuriate a spouse: If she were to ask him what he wanted to do, he’d reply: ‘I don’t care, dear – whatever you want to do.’ Therapeutic intervention addressed client’s admitted inability to live in the moment, to feel a natural value, as he is driven only by beliefs and ‘goals.’ He talked a little about his childhood, where he had no friends, no fun, always associated with the older family members and therefore became ‘mature’ early. We looked at the negative aspect of ‘standards’ which can ‘kill childhood’ as they supplant the natural, spontaneous enjoyment of things: The child must now have a high bar in mind and a struggle to reach it. Client, now in his unwelcome loneliness (by his wife’s command, neither their children nor their respective families have been told about the break-up), may need to ‘find himself,’ learn what it is to feel something with no purpose but to experience or enjoy it. Take a walk, sit at the coffee shop and look around, smell the roses. I did ask him to consider reaching out to his family, letting the chips fall where they may.

Mental abuse as a subject to be defined, perpetrated and lived is crazymaking in its complexity, in its obscurity. What interferes with the inviolacy of the child’s thinking and feeling and worth? Shaming, valuing (“I’m so proud of you!” versus “You must be proud of yourself!”), father’s narcissism, mother’s depression and worrying, teacher’s insufficient patience, birth trauma, a parent who soothes:

Mommy, mommy . . . the teacher was unfair to me today.

Now dear, the teacher was only trying to do his best.

Vereshack says, “This failure of empathy can leave, in the end, as much pain and disability as actual physical harm,” and “This lack of allowing the child to explore its feelings, when they occur, tens of thousands of times across the growing years, seriously disables the supple processes of the young mind.”***

Forcing or even inspiring standards of performance in a child causes a remove – a quiet remove – from the love of being and doing to self-manipulation. Alice Miller describes the difference between love received and approval (the parent's standard):

. . . it is impossible for the grandiose person to cut the tragic link between admiration and love. He seeks insatiably for admiration, of which he never gets enough because admiration is not the same thing as love. It is only a substitute gratification of the primary needs for respect, understanding, and being taken seriously – needs that have remained unconscious since early childhood. Often a whole life is devoted to this substitute. As long as the true need is not felt and understood, the struggle for the symbol of love will continue. It is for this very reason that an aging, world-famous photographer who had received many international awards could say to an interviewer, “I’ve never felt what I have done was good enough.” And he does not question why he has felt this way.  Apparently, it has never occurred to him that the depression he reports could be related to his fusion with the demands of his parents.*****

Certainly there must be such things as healthy guidance, encouragement and inspiration. I think their essence is the parent’s loving and happy feeling shown the child, rather than an injunction to achieve or “do your best.” A happy, loved kid will enjoy doing things – “best” be damned.

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* Dr. Patricia Love, The Emotional Incest Syndrome – What to do when a parent’s love rules your life, Bantam Books, 1990.

** Terms from pre-biopsychiatric era schizophrenia studies, in which parents were understood to be the cause of their child’s psychosis. See: http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/article.aspx?articleID=146555, and the work of Theodore Lidz.

*** Term from Levenkron, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders, Warner Books, 1991.

**** Vereshack’s online primal-related psychotherapy book (quoted several times in this blog): http://www.paulvereshack.com/paulcvr.html (from Chapter 2).

***** Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child, pp. 35-36.  Basic Books, 1997.  (Also quoted in earlier posts.)

Last post of year one

If I could make myself believe something fantastical, it would be that there is a key in the form of some scientific or emotional or philosophical insight, or even attitude or character transfiguration that, by someone’s arriving at it, would physically open the door to the true universe.  Like an incantation spoken that unearths a secret passageway, this piece of knowledge would bring the trumpet choir and peel back the cosmic surface, revealing the Insides of meaning and happiness.

Unfortunately, this is not only an impossible fantasy, it is a sick one.  It is sick because of a paradox: When a person is blindly one with himself and blindly attached to the world by being it, there is all meaning because there is none.  For him, like a child, it is impossible to even conceive that there is a truth or value exterior to what exists.  This is the difference between a held, loved baby and one in marasmus and shock.  The child in shock, split from himself, will someday need meaning to fill the absence, will be a thinker, a searcher.  He will hope for something richer than him, and Self defining.

I’m saying it is errant to try to find meaning in one’s life.  Look, instead, for what you love, as I, age seven, once loved a summer night with fireflies and friends, and the little turtles.  In some residual way, they remain the bedrock love of my life.  What is the bedrock love of yours?

We, old friends, are ninety years old and sitting around a campfire.  The smoke floats into the night sky, but not up to heaven: It’s curtailed by our world, the arc of our own time.  We talk about the happy and sad things and the people in our lives.  But I propose we also invoke the bedrocks – a summer lightning bug night, a first puppy, puppy love at nine years old on vacation in the Poconos, square dancing in third grade, the first feeling of goodness about people.  The beginning in the end, the permanence, the given meaning.  I think here we’ve captured the jewel beneath everything: the answer, that the universe joins.

Why the world is so screwed up*

Unhappiness, while related to suicide and homicide, is not their determinative factor.  Pain, related to suicide and homicide, is also not their determinative factor.  Is there a third factor, linking unhappiness to pain, that centers us in destruction?  I believe so.  It is the absence of a peculiar kind of love: love at the beginning of life.

The state of the world – ISIS genocide crusade, Jew and Palestinian hatred, Ferguson, Missouri racism, and the infinite variations on our perpetual doomsday clock – is proof of the necessity of selfishness, what psychologists call primary narcissism.  If the child’s selfish needs for loving touch and touching love are not met, there will be pain and emptiness.  Both together – there should be a word for this emptiness kind of pain – lead to a later person who is the embodied loss of all the beautiful human potential, who senses it but probably doesn’t know it.  His sense of it, of his death in life, must, absolutely must become the way he exists in the world.

He could be Robin Williams, with emptiness depression and its palliative of love and humor.  He could be Adolf Hitler, with emptiness rage and its palliative of delusion and murder.  He could be any of us, with a flawed birth of forceps and incubator, caesarian and drugged labor, abuse, shell parents, all the rest.  And we may never kill or be killed, yet it sleeps in us, remains the choice embedded in our chemistry.

Psychotherapy can be described as too-late love.  This makes it no different from the rest of the world, which we could also hold up like a mirror to see ourselves, also lean on.  People reject therapy, they reject the world, they can't find themselves, and the clock ticks on.

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* See "The shootings," post September 16, 2013 for related ideas.

Childhood, sensory deprivation tank, hallucinatory voices

I once had a middle-aged client who heard a voice – his father’s – telling him he was “stupid” and useless.  The voice polluted his days and his years since he left home after trade school.  The man was not deeply schizophrenic, though he did have other telltale symptoms.  His manner – at least as he sat in the chair here – was distracted and underwater, a disembodied expressionless head, eyes bobbing here and there.  But he was able to work every day in a problem-solving technical job, and compatibly with coworkers.  He had a long marriage – a within-normal-limits bond both functional and dysfunctional.  They had raised a daughter who could carry out her life independently.

I am not psychotic, though there were once moments when I wished I could be taken by a halcyon fantasy – basically make myself insane – to forever escape the feelings of reality; and other evanescent states in which I wondered what reality was.  I am pretty sure that our lucidity is a microscopic matter, that insanity can be one molecule or more that sits between two billion sane molecules.  My client had started off in life as many children do – in pain and in a sensory deprivation tank where there is no one to talk to.  An older neighbor boy had overcome and raped his will, and therefore his voice and self-care and ability to feel joy, and he fell into the tank, to become silent for the rest of his youth.  Even if there are good parents, it is too easy for a child to fall into this silent underground cavern, because as long as there is a secret, or feelings unshared or even not the right words for them, he will be lost within a whole world he is disconnected from.  Floating, all dark, no sound.  I believe most of us carry and live within this silence at all times, even with our partner, our mundane or exciting occupations, our busy and loud life.  We have never really shown ourselves and reached for help.

A person in a flotation tank sometimes hallucinates.  There is nothing for his senses to join and his mind feeds on itself.  The boy had come home after a rape, where his parents avoided him and he formed an imaginary friend.  I never learned if this wight was like the alters of a multiple personality – one, the guardian, one a pitiful child, one violent, one abusive to the victim self.  Its voice, though, lingered after the friend faded away in adolescence, and it was now abusive – “stupid,” “dumb,” “you can’t think on your own.” It became a mantra that echoed in the silent tank and seemed, well, insane – What does the ruinous message have to do with his grown-up, walking-wounded decent life?

Therapy asked the man to see beneath the voice to the message, as the hallucinatory medium really didn’t matter.  It may as well have been nightmares of monsters and grand dreams, or the misreading of people’s looks, or the feeling of being ill-equipped for the real world, or the felt conviction of being stupid, or incapable of knowing (he would ask other internal voices to make decisions for him).  Owning the meaning, “I am stupid, I am dumb,” he could now leave the sensory deprivation tank for the first time and tell me how much it hurt to feel this way, ache to his parents to make him feel like a cared-for child.  Until he spoke to them, until they helped him, he would be the truth of their voice.

Most pessimistic before the dawn

This is a “real-time” posting, thought-through in the writing of it.  It may, for all I know, end as bleak as it starts.  The “dawn” is the beginning of this blog’s second year, next month.  Hopefully it will break optimistic.

When doing therapy, I have to ignore the fact that I believe the client’s words, thoughts, manner and mannerisms are false.  Everything is a life-front.  He may act mature and be a thumb-sucking child.  She may say love and be hate.  He may raise his eyebrow and smile knowingly and be naïve as a baby.  He may be muscular and arrogant and tremble like a sissy inside.  She says sweetness and feels bitter enough to chew her mouth off.  He says “depression” and is really a sixteen-year-old, already a shell, lost for years.

Even the most radical psychologies – Freudian and Primal – which see the child beneath all, like to believe the adult is valid in his own right.  Defenses, said Freud, are necessary for the adult, though they are reality-bending.  Exorcise childhood pain, in Primal Therapy, and what is left is a more “real” person.

This is necessary, I suppose, but no different than the necessity, for most people, to believe in an afterlife.  It is, in fact, more necessary to hold to our adult existence.  Despite the unreality, the going-through-the-motions we may vaguely feel about our grown-up pursuits; despite the childhood pulls in our marriage – I need, you need; despite all our deep and complicated thoughts that are just variations and embellishments of love-and-need-and-hurt themes – we must slap its face, this child, and walk tall, on our stilts, ’til the end.

This is our greatest paradox, that we can’t be what we are.  But there are many contradictions that come from it, such as social right versus individual good; conditional love versus what a person really needs, which is unconditional care, loving forgiveness.  Is a mother wrong to want to spare her criminal son from prison?  She is as right as morality.  She is right to hide her son from consequences, because he and she want him to live, because justice is a deep and complicated concept for someone else’s will against mine.

The paradox – we are the child and must be the adult – makes everything including psychotherapy absurd.  This brings to mind a war movie fragment that I saw as a child.  A group of soldiers, maybe considered to be traitors, are about to be executed by a firing squad of their own unit.  One, the fall guy among them, strapped to the post is so terrified that he falls unconscious.  This would be merciful, to die asleep.  But as the moment approaches an officer slaps him awake so that he must witness in terror his last seconds, and other people’s justice.  This is a very adult message.  To allow him to die in his sleep, maybe in a dream, would be to nestle the child-in-the-adult, as Solveig holds the disconsolate Peer Gynt at the end of Ibsen’s play.  But psychotherapy wants the man to know, because he can’t be the child.

Three marital therapy sessions

Marital counseling is a valid but part-wizardly activity.  A client in individual therapy finds it difficult or impossible to change deeply, structurally, yet two can transform to become loving or learn to compromise (for example, Hendrix’s “conscious partnership”*) for the rest of their lives.  Is two simpler than one?  Is there something about wanting to be two that simplifies the one?  Or does marital therapy succeed by leading you down a garden path of wishful feeling that you want to go down anyway?

Depth psychology sees the individual as a walking wounded child, and depth marital process works with this, teaching each partner to be the other’s inner healer.  But radical depth knows the child will prevail, in some way, from cradle to grave.  I am reminded of two middle-aged men.  One, though a well-established professional, knows in his bones that he is destined to end up impoverished and a stumbling, bleeding failure out of a junked van by the river.  The other is instinctively aware that “success” in any of its imaginable meanings is not merely unreachable but meaningless in his life: He was born to never reach the starting gate.  These are psycho-templates, and people’s perinatal and early lives plant them as the universe planted its laws.  A husband can grow branches and leaves above depressive childhood roots that say, “I don’t like to do things,” and marriage neither sees nor changes them.

A young couple is in therapy because of the wife’s sexting infidelities.  Both had horrid childhoods of drugs and rape.  It’s almost humorously absurd, to me, that they are sitting in these chairs rather than splaying their flesh through a sieve in a cosmic berserker, smearing feces on restraint room walls.  Their version of this, though, is true: He is a drudge with three jobs, does nothing but work and suffers silently; she is a sexual body, starved.  I already know that whatever will be done in therapy, it will have little to do with love.  In only the third session she confessed to not knowing what the word meant.  And a man cheated on by “every woman I’ve been with” doesn’t know it, either.

But still there is a garden path, at the end of a river and fire.  The young husband may be like me, growing a backbone only in the harshest climate, enabling him to leave.  His wife is like a child described in Bromfield’s Playing for Real.**  The girl had been “molested . . . in every conceivable way almost daily since at least her second year.”  Adopted by a caring couple and brought to therapy at age six, she showed her body and sat on the male therapist’s lap, innocently prostituting herself.  My client, with different nerves, felt right about wanting to prove her attractiveness to strange men.  With different eyes, she could not see that wearing half the clothing of other married women was questionable.

Marital therapy is warm and powerful when we promote Hendrix’s “reromanticizing” and “relationship vision” and instruct against Gottman’s “stonewalling” and “defensiveness,” talk spirituality and teach the Couple’s Dialogue.  It’s more difficult when we want to dismantle two lives of defenses and ask the soft child – crossing the river and fire of grief – to complete the full developmental arc to adulthood and selfless compassion for the other’s needs and pain.

That’s for the fourth session.

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* Harville Hendrix, PhD, Getting the Love You Want, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2008, (1988), p. xxviii.  “1. Accept the reality that your partner is not you.  2. Be an advocate for your partner’s separate reality and potential.  3. Make your relationship a sacred space by removing all negativity.  4. Always honor your partner’s boundaries.  5. Practice the Imago Dialogue until it becomes second nature and you can interact spontaneously once again.”

** Richard Bromfield, PhD, Playing for Real, Exploring Child Therapy and the Inner Worlds of Children, Basil Books, 1992, 2010.  Excerpt from Chapter 14, “Going Forth.”