Friday, January 31, 2014

Long chain enema bag


December 2013 was a poor month for me, and January 2014 was worse.  I’m an independent contractor therapist working at a boutique offshoot of a community mental health center.  My position, on a cup-half-empty day, could be likened to a cold-call salesman hawking enema bags.

“Knock, knock.”

“Yes?”

“You know you want to feel better, more ‘regular’.”

“By far, that is true.”

“Then please – shove this up your ass.  For the next three to six months, maybe a year.”

The vagaries of client attendance are well known to all clinicians, but there may be a little extra looseness for those in my position.  Per-unit income, no salary, no benefits.  No broad opportunity to be one’s own marketer.  New intakes are disbursed somewhat haphazardly, somewhat tendentiously, among all the workers; inflation – more hires – means fewer for each.  Bad economy, people lose insurance.  I believe, additionally, that I may be a demographic magnet for special suffering.  As the male oldster here, I see more middle-aged folk, and more men of all ages.  They have mental health problems, which sometimes include lack of sense of responsibility to make and keep appointments.  And with the younger men, their issues (1) should be solved quickly; (2) are their wives’ and children’s fault.

Another factor is an argument that I’ve invented and therefore pay serious heed to.  “Aren’t” – you say – “the counselors who see young kids in the same boat or worse boat?  Aren’t youngsters rabidly against self-knowledge and improvement and sharing their feelings, and resistant to coming in?”  While that is generically true, I believe a greater force at play is the parents’ need to have their child be the patient, the one with the problem.  This is consonant with Breggin’s observations about NAMI:

“In turn, the parents too often tend to reject responsibility for their children’s emotional anguish.  This phenomenon may well explain the positions taken by the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), a national organization of 100,000 parents of disturbed offspring, whose informal rallying cry can be characterized as “We are not to blame.”*
This being so, the parent is passionately, nobly and consistently motivated to bring her child to therapy.

Yet beyond all these pernicious and self-pitying parameters, I believe that I carry an extra, unique burden.  It is one that can make me feel like the gentle wanderer in Peter, Paul & Mary’s song, Long Chain Onhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhM0hAzrl8A.  This crown-of-thorns is my particular way of seeing psychology and doing therapy; that is, my primal-related, regressive, feeling-centered approach.

As Paul Vereshack says, “the brain hates pain.”  And as Ralph Klein, M.D. notes in Psychotherapy of the Disorders of the Self (though he is speaking of borderline personality), the “patient does not come into treatment in order to ‘get better.’  Rather, he or she enters treatment primarily to ‘feel better’” (p. 217).  My underlying approach asks the client to question almost everything about himself short of the deepest birth trauma.**  To question the defensive behaviors, the defensive beliefs, the defensive personality.  And to feel the results.  And to stay with and work through the feelings.  Though I encourage clients to “get therapeutic momentum” by attending weekly for a while, looking inward causes them to stop the momentum of their running life: the self-evasions, the delusional happy beliefs.  They sit in a quieted pool, and if things go well, they sink.

People are dysfunctional because of injury, the injury is usually child-deep, and deep means a kind of surgery is needed.  The difference is that this surgery occurs week after week, and the patient must remain awake for it – more awake than she has ever been since childhood.

So I do feel like the song’s wanderer –

            I got my hammer and chisel,
            Offered to set him free.
            He looked at me and said softly,
            “I guess we had best let it be.”

– who could relinquish the chains of a methodology that carries people to places they both want to and don’t want to go, but can’t really relinquish them.  We therapists are embedded in our psychohistory exactly as profoundly as a poet is equal to his verse.  Both professions have frameworks and rules and “ethics” (can you call a poem a sonnet if it has seven lines, a loose rhyme scheme, no pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables?), but are transmuted by the idiosyncratic content of the practitioner.  Most psychotherapists want to minimize the dark parts of their soul, appreciate the intoxication of positive and rational (yet sometimes irrationally hopeful) thinking, and they want their clients to join them.  I have a history that formed a severe allergy to delusion, deception and distraction, to ignoring the elephant and the trichotillomanic child in the room.  I, also positive and hopeful, want my clients to join me in the intoxication of deep reality and clear sight, in the strength accruing to accurate judgment.  Or, if not to join me, then at least to see there is a difference.  I really can’t go anywhere else in my helping: That would return me to the child still alone in his room, watching the powerful people blindly walk by, and pulling out hair.

All in all, it’s actually a pretty light chain.


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* Peter R. Breggin, M.D., Toxic Psychiatry, St. Martin’s Press, 1991, p. 34.

** That is left to “orthodox” primal therapy.

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Happiness (featuring Handel's Conqu'ring Hero)


I’ve realized that I don’t think about happiness a lot, actually hardly at all.  I have it at times, value happiness as a fine thing, and would like my clients to have unpolluted streaks of it.  And thinking of it for a moment now, I’m glad to say I see it as the right “substrate” of our life, rather than suffering or stoicism or, for example, sheer neutrality.  One of the reasons I don’t look at happiness as a very worthy subject is my own mild-dysthymic limitation, which draws life in pastels usually.  That’s my normal state, my world, and probably like most buoyant dysthymics, I don’t say, “What is this wrong world?  I really never go to Maxfield Parrish’s Ecstasy, finding that idea as substantial as a piebald hippogriff (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/43048/43048-h/43048-h.htm).

[MaxfieldParrish-MountainEcstasy.jpg]
Maxfield Parrish's Ecstasy

But shouldn’t happiness be a primary concern of a counseling psychotherapist?  I bet there are books out there that tell how to be happy, what to be happy about, what happiness means, and I will never read them.  Better to read a book on how to have a more perfect bowel movement: At least that, while splayed out on your coffee table, would quicken the spirit, being less vapid.  I guess what I see is that happiness is positively juiced contentment, and contentment is the natural state that happens when we therapists help get the crap worked out of you.

I probably don’t even like it when the occasional client tells me she wants to be happy.  One woman says this as an anxious drone every time I see her, but it’s actually just her disguised carrier pigeon delivering her Depressive Personality Disorder that doesn’t really want to do anything – a-n-y-t-h-i-n-g – to break her chains of infantile misery.  But in general, happiness as a stated goal means that I can’t do my job, which is to heal, not transplant a psychic organ or wave a magic wand.  And it seems to mean you won’t do your job, which includes looking at your life of difficulties, the Purple Hearts you’ve won, and seeing that you are yourself: a spirit that can change but shouldn’t want not to be itself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8p1BedwyFKY – George Frideric Handel, 1685 - 1759, famous for Messiah (1741).


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn6TNWVjZP0 – Telstar by The Tornados, 1962. Early instrumental rock ‘n’ roll. Haunting, romantic and glorious to 11-year-old TPS. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7vcRyBAQZA – Hey Paula, by Paul and Paula, 1963

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4r5C6MUqO4 – Jamaica Farewell, Harry Belafonte

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwJLKdU50KE – Now Is the Month of Maying, Thomas Morley (1557-1602). Warning! This and "My Thing Is My Own" are ancient dirty songs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-RkC6MYT2E – Morningtown Ride, The Seekers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=La1kgKi0Xog – Sussex Mummers Christmas Carol, Percy Grainger (1882-1961). 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRE16QaKFp0 Wedding Recessional March, Edvard Grieg (1843-1907). (What you play when you back out of a wedding.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OP_dplibwY – The Darke Is My Delight, performed by The Baltimore Consort.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0StsRrqTs_c – Widmung, Robert Schumann (1810-1856; Franz Liszt's transcription).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LWgXIwLKXg – Waly, Waly, MairĂ©id Sullivan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdH_OMEjC3k – Well Hall, performed by The Baltimore Consort.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YonkJDrJXgg Coffee Cantata, excerpt, J.S. Bach  (1685-1750).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFsH9n6iU2I – Christmas Concerto, Pastorale, Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWDNrLA8jkU – Autumn to May, Peter, Paul & Mary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFFOUkipI4U – Draft Dodger Rag and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7fgB0m_y2I – Here’s to the State of Mississippi, Phil Ochs (1940-1976).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYGJvuserZQ – Cindy Oh Cindy, Vince Martin with The Tarriers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TGKJ9MgCOQ – The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba from Solomon, oratorio by G. F. Handel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9G0-4TWwew – Sh Boom Sh Boom, The Crewcuts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0085wPebZc – Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring, J.S. Bach, played by the glorious Dinu Lipatti. Also features, at 6:49, Bach's mellifluous Siciliana from Sonata No. 2 for flute and harpsichord.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qory4Jp2y7Y J.S. Bach, Toccata in C Minor, BWV 911, part 2, Glenn Gould, pianist. 
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULySvslHA8s&list=PL28xSHMV9_KR-4KbMv5q9S8S2kvfhb7gg – Salvatore Licitra, operatic tenor, Yiddish rendition. Movie: The Man Who Cried. Originally: "Je Crois Entendre Encore" ("I think I still hear") from Georges Bizet's (1838-1875) opera, The Pearl Fishers.

The voice of Gene Pitney – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJPDFyhMFl4, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDN4L7cAQf0, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tY0rnDery0https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWF3Y2VEl2E. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2jkXROyoI0 – Never Weather-Beaten Sail, Thomas Campion (1567-1620). Julianne Baird, soprano; Ronn McFarlane, lute. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajkgNEO_Yeg – Appalachia Waltz by Mark O'Connor, including Yo-Yo Ma and Edgar Meyer. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Om2GoiUYfw – Farewell to Stromness, Peter Maxwell Davies (1934-2016). 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmLvpJySb50Mazurka in A minor, Op. 17, No. 4, Chopin (1810-1849), played by Horowitz. Artur Rubinstein's interpretationhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idbaPu1gDPg. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pff-UtLsqDU – Irish Tune from County Derry, Percy Grainger. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfQFUIZ6mAM – Edvard Grieg, Piano Sonata, Op. 7, Andante molto movement, played by Glenn Gould (a distant relative of Grieg’s). 

http://www.brownanddana.com/audio/Track09.mp3 – A new link to songs from Brown & Dana’s only album, 1963. Includes a pre-Sinatra rendition of It Was a Very Good Year."


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBRUJrjNJDE – Du bist die Ruh, Franz Schubert (1797-1828), sung by the great Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8oKEx1-J1w, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0AuHYNj8qQ (possibly most authentic), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXt-2BmgVbA – Three versions of Third Mode Melody by Thomas Tallis (1505-1585). And Ralph Vaughan Williams’s (1872-1958) use of it – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihx5LCF1yJY, Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLWFP4OoNcA – G.F. Handel, Keyboard Suite no. 5, II. Allemande. And, my preferred rendition by M. Perahia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmktUuWEDbY.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sslYA1DflME – Ralph Vaughan Williams, Hunt the Squirrel, from First Suite of English Folk Dances.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5WUO7hsgCA – G.F. Handel, Lascia ch’io pianga, with hat-glorious Patricia Petibon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjfTDPhMdTk – Ian & Sylvia, Four Strong Winds, 1960’s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vHDXnkiZC4 – Grieg, Violin & Piano Sonata no. 3, second movement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqV0XfPquDI – Alfred Schnittke, Fugue from Suite in the Old Style.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAbkZdrUwFU – My Thing Is My Own, performed by Custer LaRue, The Baltimore Consort.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_bq5mStroM – Jacques Brel, Ne me quitte pas, 1959.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jmQ2IXtdTE – The adorably and modestly curvaceous Haydn or Hoffstetter Serenade, or possibly whoever wrote Shakespeare. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tmQSWuYwrI – I have to add one of the greatest Chopin pieces – the fourth Ballade, F minor, Op. 52, played by Rubinstein. Must listen more than once: Too oceanic, too dark, too abyssal, too alt-human for a once-over.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHDU1W7cnW8 – Another one of the world’s greatest pieces: Rachmaninoff’s Étude Tableau, Op. 39 No. 5, played by Lugansky. Shakes time and space. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlTbi7yQw9k – Sokolov playing Les Triolets from Suite in G Major/minor by Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764). All that trill ornamentation! – an acquired taste, but a beautiful piece. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4f0cR9sm7LMChopin’s posthumous Prelude in C-sharp minor, Op. 45. Many years ago, I read an analysis of this Prelude, in which the critic called it “recondite.” A pluperfect description of this mysterious piece. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu06WnXlPCY – The masterful Emil Gilels playing a well-known transcription of J.S. Bach’s Prelude in B minor. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMJjo_K8gbQ – Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625), Italian Ground: Allemande, played by Glenn Gould with majesty and majestic trills. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4WrtsUAv80 – Brahms’ Intermezzo Op. 117, no. 3 in C-sharp minor, played by Artur Rubinstein. This piece exists in my cellular or pre-conscious memory. One day in 1975, as I was walking down a practice room wing of the now-defunct American Conservatory of Music, Chicago, I heard a tune emanating through one rooms soundproofing. I found myself frozen. I had never experienced such a moment or feeling before, ever, in my “within normal limits” life. The piece struck me as my meaning, the nature of me, never known yet exactly familiar, like the “back of my hand.” I knew that I had never heard it before. From age five, I was familiar with classical music, listening to radio and records and playing piano, and at five I would have remembered what I’d heard at three. Now I can only guess that my mother had been in the presence of the Brahms, and it reached me in the womb in my first nine months. Or possibly year one or two. Transfixed, I waited for it to end and the pianist to leave the room. It was the school’s dean, Charles Moore, a slightly cantankerous man. He didn’t notice my stunned demeanor, and just told me the composer and form – Intermezzo – and walked on. Fact is, the cellular or pre-conscious world is different and sometimes better than the real one. It was only the first theme of the piece that I knew. The middle section I don’t care for, especially as it has some harsh harmonies that make no sense to me. The work ends with the return of the first theme, beautifully, drastically, with my name in it. 


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hR051uCNrAw – Paul Stookey’s (Peter, Paul & Mary) Wedding Song. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExwdUghY3wA – Grieg, Norwegian Folk Tunes, Op. 66, No. 14 – In Ola Valley, in Ola Lake. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0VhKERbhkE – Lipatti / Chopin perfection. 
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NjssV8UuVA Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trUaSv1-jIk – Susana Allen singing Shalom Aleichem (Peace be upon you). English translation of the Hebrew. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21z-K5ChWbE – Rachmaninoff, Piano Concerto #2, Second Movement (beginning of the movement was featured in the tv series Snowpiercer). 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vA8qX_p11w – The best rendition of Chopin’s Étude op. 25 no. 12 (“The Ocean”) that I know. The speed is possibly excessive, but Sokolov is the only pianist I’ve heard who turns the technique study into a story, like one of Chopin’s Ballades.

 
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See other therapeutic favorites at -- https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2014/05/trifle-1-dont-mess-with-me-or.html.


Tuesday, January 28, 2014

A challenge


Here’s an unpleasant consideration for therapists who work with older teenagers: What do you do when their home life is toxic and their parents uneducable? Don’t tell me it is rare that parents can’t be changed to understanding, respect and humility regarding their children. It is rarer that they can. You are there to help the child. But what do you think “help” means?

We all know how things can turn south when we protect our client by calling Children Services. The undermined parent may yank him or her from our sight. But what about all those times that are too subtle or normative for Children Services, where the teen is oppressed by absurd restrictions, standards of behavior or production that are the parent’s revenge needs or his projections of himself, father’s tyrant rages, mother’s self-centeredness, both parents’ neglect or immaturity?

An older minor (fifteen, sixteen, seventeen) is typically insecurely attached to his present and looking askance at his future, and is simultaneously averse – anathema-level averse – to leaning back into the arms of parents who have been painful. This is not the situation where you can effect family reconciliation at anything deeper than some brittle dĂ©tente. It could be intolerable: Even if parents were to become angels, it is too late for their son or daughter to regressively melt or to shrink into their newfound care.

So what do you do? What do you do after the gifts of empathy and support, and possibly some low-level catharsis that isn’t so white hot to rend the child’s psyche or family bonds? Can you encourage the young man’s autonomy need, when it’s that potential which has been erased in such a home? (Encourage him to run, when he doesn’t know what walking is?) Do you believe, as your psychological philosophy, that parents-right-or-wrong is the ultimate definer of harmony?

There is a therapist I know who works with troubled adolescent girls – the kind of youngsters I’m talking about – by doing collages. I’m sure everyone is happy with the results.

Friday, January 24, 2014

Passion of the gums


I thought I would write about some areas of my psychological ignorance and impotence.  That is not a statement of “humble grandiosity,” but of real humility sans secondary gain.  Though there may be post-secondary gain if sitting in a mountain cave of no-mind opens me up to greater wisdom someday.

The main ignorance could be named Passion of the Gums.  My happy, healthy and successful older cousin R— has been a periodontist and world traveler for decades.  I assume (though I have never asked him) that he chose the dental profession in his late adolescence, and the gum disease specialty soon afterwards.  Family legend – at least what I believe I remember hearing in my childhood – is that R knew from his single-digit years that he wanted to visit all the exotic places shown in that simultaneously compelling yet excruciatingly boring magazine, National Geographic.  In my own teens, my hyper-neurotic antenna wobbled in consternation, in angry alarm, at the idea that someone would choose to dedicate his life to gums.  And still, over forty years later, I remain completely baffled by what I assume, from my cousin’s example, is a quality of mentally healthy people – the ability to choose a necessarily arbitrary aim and displace most of one’s natural energies into it.  Gum disease.  I cannot understand it.  I can equally not understand having a more credible passion – travel (though for many that desire could easily be entirely neurosis-driven) – then making a “practical” decision to finance it by giving oneself to a life of bad breath and medicine’s red-headed stepchild.  While I can see that genetic and environmental factors might, in the rare case, plant a positive or negative oral fixation in the baby or infant’s psycho-template, I doubt that this is what happened in R’s case.

So to summarize, my number one ignorance is: How does a healthy individual choose a happy self-sacrifice, a giving up to an extrinsic purpose?  I look at human nature and cannot see any continuum, only beast and beauty.  Sick, or empty, or average individuals fall arbitrarily into the world’s slots and categories of work, or are neurotically drawn to a harmonious self-medication or defense (social worker, psychologist, hedge fund manager).  Passionate souls, some geniuses, are one with the world: young Einstein magnetized by a compass, later by a beam of light.  But . . . What is in the middle?

Two areas of my felt-incompetence are the treatment of dependency and anxiety.  “Felt,” because I know I have helped people by means of the complex overt and subliminal armamentarium of psychotherapy.  But in the main, I’ve assumed defeat to change an adult’s dependency on his abusive and guilt-injecting parents, and to smooth her lifelong anxious nervous system and thoughts, and remove her frightened taboos.  These adults will not leave a parent as they call their umbilical chain guilt or love or money.  They will not leave because it is healthy to need.  Can I really ask them to need me instead?  The child raised to fear will eventually become, through anxiety, a monument to her fears.  This monument, too, commemorates her true dependency on parents who could not quell the fears.  What will she depend on now, if not these links to her childhood?


Sunday, January 19, 2014

Easy crazy


Imagine – in a world somewhat stranger than our own – that you receive an official document from the National Science Authority.  Beneath a colossal stories-high cataract of scientific, social-scientific and statistical data you read this statement: “All evidential information, factual and extrapolative, free of significant confound or contradiction, compiled and crunched longitudinally, leads this body to determine that your wife is not very good-looking.  She is, in fact, at the 71st percentile on the International Scale of Comeliness.”  If you are like many men – but not all – you will find this statement untrue, unacceptable, nonsense.  You will know what you know, that your wife is attractive in all ways that count, more so than many or most others and less so than none but for a few geometrically perfect freaks.

And you will be crazy.

Imagine that your political ideology – for example, anarcho-libertarianism – has been proved by countless projective models to be impracticable and destructive to society.  All taxation is theft.  Law enforcement and courts privately funded, streets privately owned.  Free-market opium dens, brothels and munitions makers on every corner.  Broadly intelligent and experienced, you will know that – as Einstein said – “the theory is correct”: Ultimate freedom is the ultimate good, and therefore the practice of it must be right.  You will have no reason – or (my theory goes) ability – to consider any dissenting viewpoint other than as a target of derision.

And again, you will be crazy.

A delusion is nothing other than a fixed belief that is “resistant to reason or confrontation with actual fact” (dictionary.com).  It is a belief that is “firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary.”  (Psychiatric glossary at http://www.abess.com/glossary.html.)  Delusions are an integral part of the symptomatology of schizophrenia; are the defining feature of delusional disorder, another psychotic diagnosis; are featured in personality disorders such as paranoid personality and narcissism (the narcissist, contrary to his conviction, is not perfect or uniquely desirable).  And yet, as the above examples show, it is quite easy to have a delusional belief.  An anorexic believes her hanging skin, loosened by starvation, is actually fat.  A Jew believes the Messiah hasn’t come yet.  A Christian believes He has.  A humanitarian liberal believes the rich should be forced, at the point of a legislative (and real) gun, to pay the poor.  A conservative knows that the right to property is the right to life.  A “cold warrior” believes we must be aggressive; a pacifist, that we should refuse to engage.   A “depressive personality” cannot consider that the future will not be as bleak as the present; a PhD psychologist is sure he is smarter than a Master’s-level counselor.

Do you think you are smarter than you actually are?  Insane!  Do I think I’m a superb therapist?  I may be nuts.  I remember a nice young couple who came for marital help.  The wife complained that her husband could never accept her view of any situation: He qualified or disagreed all the time, feeling convinced only in his difference.  The perversity was so deep that he could not accept the sky was blue when she claimed it.  It was “blue-green.”  He could subclinically qualify for two diagnoses: delusional and “oppositional-defiant.”  This raises the question: Is there something in characterological oppositional-defiance – a diagnosis that many children have (DSM code 313.81) – that is delusional?  If so, what is the commonality?  Is there a connection between a child’s need to “take a stand” against authority or reason, and the adult’s intransigent craziness?  What makes holding to wrong beliefs desirable and necessary, as necessary as our sense of Self?

Today’s casual theory says that delusional craziness comes when thinking identity replaces feeling identity:  We lose touch, through childhood, with the feeling self which is intrinsic value and meaning.  When a young person is accepted, loved for himself and continues to feel, he is open to stimuli and fundamentally values the world.  A poetic formulation would be: Love makes a heart of gold which shines in the world even when the world is dark.  The child doesn’t grow to have to be right – have right ideas because he already is right.  He doesn’t have to be something or cleave to a fantasy because he already is something.  The heart beats from its steady light, and all feelings are simply variations of that underlying identity.

Defenses cover not only pain, but a repressed heart’s emptiness.  One defense that often covers emptiness is knowing, or rather “thinking-knowing”: I don’t feel my parents’ love, but I “know” they love me.  I please no one in my life, but I “know” I am the good girl or the bad boy or the smart one.  Thinking-knowing is an extrinsic identity, like an obsessive-compulsive’s perfectly aligned books or clothes, that gives a hollow feeling-self substance.  Or rather, structure that feels like substance.

There is something about identity emptiness that requires the antidote of perfection: the absolute rightness of a belief or conceit.  Liberals are socialists; conservatives hate people. Without it, the person will instantly sense disintegration: the dissolving of the thinking-knowing self into pain and mute emptiness.  Thought and feeling have become binary: one and zero, existing or not-existing.  If I do not know, I am forced to feel.  As a youngster I had no narcissism yet, but could not tolerate even minutely misaligned corners of a folded sheet of paper.  Many children must color every centimeter of a page, leaving no empty place, or must color rigidly between the lines: A stray crayon stroke is chaos, wrongness.  Later, as a teenager, I needed to believe Ayn Rand’s philosophy.  It created perfectionism, with the added benefit of guaranteed happiness (a sense of superiority).  Any thinking-knowing state that the extrinsic identity comes to invest in must not have a chink in it, or spring a leak.  Otherwise, painful emptiness would be released.

The link, as I see it, between thought-identity and “oppositional-defiance” such as the husband possessed, is that agreement is passivity of the thinking-knowing mind which means to be “done to” and therefore to have to feel.  The defense mechanism of thought must be an iconoclast, always a re-inventor.  I had a boss once who could never agree with anything I proposed without adding his own angle -- "That's true, too," he'd always say; an associate who unconsciously knee-jerk denied most everything I said; a client who paraphrased every question I asked him before responding: Rephrasing was his “catcher’s mitt” of thought that intercepted each stimulus before it could hit him in the chest – the no-man’s land of his heart.

Janov, in The Primal Scream, wrote about a shut down child’s becoming, “one day,” more unreal than real: The Rubicon of repression of self has been crossed and a neurotic is born.  This is basically what I’m talking about here: where we become thought- or knowledge-based in the absence of the feeling self.

I believe there’s essentially no difference between the casual delusion of someone who believes his child is handsome, and a forty-year-old man’s certainty that the CIA has snuck into his apartment and moved his hot water heater – again – three inches to the left.*  Pain and emptiness, the earlier and more balefully they infest the forming self, can be beyond formidable, as Modrow chillingly describes in How To Become a Schizophrenic.  As this reality grows, the person must become something other than real to save himself.


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* From my crisis triage days.


Friday, January 17, 2014

Strength


A lot of my therapy happens to feature helping people become stronger.  “Stronger” to me means certain mental-emotional and character qualities, and the behaviors directed by or at least infused with those qualities.  This goal cannot, “technically speaking,” be considered client-centered, as it often originates with me (though it would not be pursued without the client’s interest, and is arguably locked into the nature of depression, anxiety, etc.).  It is not a multi-culturally polite approach.  The indigenous folk of Lower Slobbovia may define strength as submission to the will of their demented nonagenarian great-grandfathers, and the foresight to sharpen the penis of their bedded sons. . . .

“Childhood in contemporary Japan, although somewhat more Western than that of other Eastern nations, still includes masturbation by mothers ‘to put them to sleep.’  Parents often have intercourse with their children in bed with them, and ‘co-sleeping,’ with parents physically embracing the child, often continues until the child is 10 or 15.  One recent Japanese study found daughters sleeping with their fathers over 20 percent of the time after age 16.  Recent sex surveys report memories of sexual abuse even higher than comparable American studies, and ‘hot lines’ of sexual abuse report mother-son incest in almost a third of the calls, the mother saying to her teenage son, ‘It’s not good to do it alone.  Your IQ becomes lower.  I will help you,’ or ‘You cannot study if you cannot have sex.  You may use my body,’ or ‘I don’t want you to get into trouble with a girl.  Have sex with me instead’” (Lloyd de Mause, 1997 speech, “The History of Child Abuse” at http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/05_history.html).
. . . definitions that I could never agree or work with despite the sacrosanctity of cultural differences.*

When you look at the idea of strength, doesn’t it seem estimable?  A person who cares about herself wouldn’t allow someone to abuse her body or boundaries or screw with her mind.  She would feel in her heart worthy of living, and her heart would move her to live and enjoy her birthright, not merely hide and hope.

But of course, “strength” doesn’t mean the same things to everyone.  To philosopher, logician and atheist Bertrand Russell, “people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners” would be “contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings” (“Why I Am Not a Christian,” lecture, 1927 at http://www.users.drew.edu/~jlenz/whynot.html) – certainly not a strength.  Yet millions of people would consider such acts of faith a beautiful reflection of their strength.

Again, I can only go by my own lights, which are admittedly filtered through my history.  Strength, then, is often seen in relation to malevolent or sick others who control, and who have sapped my clients’ self-generation and spirit and backbone.

Out of this perspective, though, comes a question: Why do many clients recoil at the thought of exercising this “relationship strength”?  Why do many pay weak service, or lip service, or no service to the notion?  Why is it not a value?  Men and women stay injured children before parents whom they continue to depend on for lifeblood: money and residence and child care.  They have “heart plugs”** which family pulls at its neurotic discretion.  They may know their life is constricted by weakness and the gravitational force of their parents’ needs or will, and they accept.  While there must be many answers to this question, I believe that often the people are in a very real way accepting unhappiness.  One corroborative explanation for this is Scottish psychoanalyst W.R.D. Fairbairn’s “return to the bad object” dynamic.  Fairbairn, working in an orphanage pre-World War II, “noticed that children who were forcibly removed from their abusive homes remained extraordinarily attached, both in fantasy and in reality, to their parents.”***  His explanation defined bad object as a parent “who holds out the promise of gratification, yet fails time after time to satisfy the needs of the dependent individual.  Thus the bad object has two facets, an exciting facet that promises gratification and a larger rejecting facet that frustrates the needs of the dependent other.  A parent who is a 100 percent rejecting object is not defined as a bad object, since this type of parent promises nothing to the infant, who soon gives up all efforts to get her needs met.”*** 

The “bad object” caregiver cannot be rejected by the child: Meager satisfaction is the parent’s hook embedded in her soul.  Like someone trudging miles through the desert who is, at the moment of greatest weakness and need, offered a single spoonful of water, the child must accept, “love” and conform to what will be insufficient and even emotionally torturous.  And further: Frustrated in his critical needs, he becomes "more rather than less attached to his mother than is the loved and accepted child.  . . . Young children, including abused and neglected ones, are absolutely fixated . . . on their mothers.  The more they are deprived, the more they are fixated."***  Collateral dynamics are involved.  The attribution of false guilt to the child.  His internalization of badness which saves the parent’s goodness.  And the mutable meaning of happiness.

For doesn’t happiness redefine to the size of the child’s world?  The small planet whose dimensions are the umbilical cord of fixation tethering him to his mother?

I would like my clients to grow strong enough not to bleed at the sight of a parent or boss; to burn off their false guilt (you are not bad for getting a C); to feel mature enough to laugh not quake at father’s raised eyebrows or mother’s raised voice.  These are strengths, want them or not.

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* In that spirit, here is architect Roark at Kiki Holcombe’s cocktail party, from The Fountainhead (pdf complete novel):

“’Oh, Mr. Roark, I’ve been so eager to meet you!  We’ve all heard so much about you!  Now I must warn you that my husband doesn’t approve of you – oh, purely on artistic grounds, you understand – but don’t let that worry you, you have an ally in this household, an enthusiastic ally!’

“’It’s very kind, Mrs. Holcombe,’ said Roark.  ‘And perhaps unnecessary.’
“’Oh, I adore your Enright House!  Of course, I can’t say that it represents my own esthetic convictions, but people of culture must keep their minds open to anything, I mean, to include any viewpoint in creative art, we must be broad-minded above all, don’t you think so?’
“’I don’t know,’ said Roark.  ‘I’ve never been broad-minded.’
“She was certain that he intended no insolence; it was not in his voice nor his manner; but insolence had been her first impression of him.  He wore evening clothes and they looked well on his tall, thin figure, but somehow it seemed that he did not belong in them; the orange hair looked preposterous with formal dress; besides, she did not like his face; that face suited a work gang or an army, it had no place in her drawing room.”
** Movie version of Dune.

*** David P. Celani, The Illusion of Love, Why the Battered Woman Returns to Her Abuser, p. 7; p. 137; pp. 25-26.