Borderland*

What do we make of a 26-year-old good-looking, hale and hearty guy whose presenting problem is relationship flops: Gently cut loose by three women; repeated on-line dating rejections and fading-outs?  The flesh-and-blood women found him “too affectionate,” clingy.  His perspective was: He put “everything I have” into the relationships.  From this, the categories that come to mind are Borderline Personality first, Dependent Personality second.  The adult boyish immaturity seen in many ADHD men doesn’t apply.  We ask and learn more.

He “understands,” accepts the explanation given by the woman he’d dated for six months, though later it seemed to him implausible.  That is, he had no abandonment crisis or fury.  Or maybe this is just how he can present himself in therapy.  For he’d also named “anger” at slight things: a woman's "saying something the wrong way.”

More signs came up in the conversation: It would be nice to just sit around and play fantasy board games all day, and ride four-wheelers.  He works in the family business but is given a make-work position.  He lives with his grandmother.  He needs the comfort ritual of midnight snacks, the old childhood goodies.

Is this Borderline?  Yes.  Without cutting and the masochistic lifestyle, without the zombie-disembowelment-sexual fetishes, without the hospitalizations.  His theme, his root, is youth, and infancy-gone-wrong – though I didn’t learn anything about his parents or his childhood.

There is also the requisite dissociation from all real feelings, and of course from the deepest furnace of mother-child failure (as Masterson describes with his picturesque WORU and RORU concepts).  This is evident in his smiling responses to everything immoderate that I hypothesized: identity absence; self-canceling nature; still the child; a cloud not a man to a woman.

What will help him?  This is the part that separates the men therapists from the boy, and the former will say: Not a whole damn lot.  When you are this much a needy child, too late, how do you grow up?  When your being has been a smile and Boy Scout air your whole life, can you discard them?

My goal, for the moment (and “his” “client-centered” goal means that I offer to take his blindfold off) is to show him the ocean beneath his flip-flops and at the same time describe what so many of us, with an adult in tow, do to live well in the world.

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* Christine Ann Lawson’s term, in Understanding the Borderline Mother.

The worm turns

I have heard many times throughout my life, as I’m sure we all have, the bromide that surviving a major illness or an intractable disease has made the person appreciate his or her life for the first time, or with greater clarity.  I have never denied that, but have never understood it at the feeling level.  They really feel different in a psycho-spiritual way, awakening into a new world?  But I have now suddenly, in a moment, developed an infirmity that is never terminal but feels life-changing, and something has indeed happened inside.  And it is complicated.

Physically, there is a mild, omnipresent ache or pain and the knowledge of an ugly imperfection, and these bring me a sense of mild, omnipresent anguish.  The anguish is delicate – ultra-sheer – yet terrible, almost end-of-life suicidal terrible.  At the same time it seems to contain – not accompany but contain – its opposite: a vitality that may be escapist yet is real.  It helps this problem to walk, and I am walking a lot, and briskly.  This gives me a sense of strength and, from the slight euphoric momentum a bit of magical thinking that the problem may just disappear.  That thinking contains its opposite: the knowledge that it will never leave me.

I am bowed, disturbed, moribund, energized, vital, quickened: I have written two of my most pungent and effective client advocacy letters ever, and done some of my best therapy, since the problem occurred.

I cannot tell if there exists some underlying psychophysical theme – transcendence and renewal? dread? gratitude? anger? pro-agitation? strength and resilience? – or only the complexity itself.  But clearly in some way I have fulfilled the bromide.

Questions arise: Wouldn’t it be interesting if – to universalize my experience – we got better when we got worse?  If there were something about extreme reality’s contact with the body’s brain that dislodges depression at some level, wakes us up?  And . . . Aren’t many of the “awakened” normal folk, not depressed?  What if anyone can be so changed?  Would that mean there is a film that covers all of us, that crisis punches holes in, letting in the sun or a new dimension?

If so, what does this say about human life in even the best circumstances?  Of course, I shouldn’t generalize.  I only know that this disease has screwed me up for the good.

Unpleasant questions #1: Maestro masturbator

Is a predominately sensual life regressive and neurotic?  If a scholar were to give a Ted Talk on his lifelong passion for masturbation and the varieties of subtle sensation possible to it, would we consider him a sophisticated aesthete or artist, a highly self-actualized person?  I think we would not.  Yet how could he be distinguished from the epicurean, the lover of books or the connoisseur of serious music?  All of them are basking in chemical and neurological sensation while enhancing that feeling with intellect, discriminatory powers and breadth of knowledge.  How could one be higher or better than the others?

This appears to be a question of psychobiological development.  Once an individual reaches then transcends one developmental plateau – baby’s sensation-feeling-based life; latency child’s emotional and concrete thinking status – on the way to the pinnacle of adolescent’s and adult’s “formal operations” conceptual thinking, it would have to be regressive pathology that causes him to be weighted down to a penultimate level.

Individuals, in other words, who are dedicated to sensual delight are masturbators, whether the passion is Bach, crème brûlée or Jane Eyre.

What could be the value in dethroning these spuriously higher enterprises?  Doing so helps us see more clearly – or see at all – the self-medicative nature of so much human life: We are seeking solace, cushions, distraction more than we are jazzed by challenge, mystery, the future.  Of course it is true that intellect itself can be masturbatory.  Just today a client, who knows she grew a fake-happy persona in childhood and has never lived a real self, said that “thinking” is her peace and pleasure.  Any thinking, all thinking, is her distraction from her missing life.

Now, is there any use in trying to distinguish masturbatory pleasure either from the organic imperative of human good feeling – our birthright – or from more developmentally arrived, outer-focused pleasures?  An astrophysicist is more interested in uncovering the cosmos than in feeling good, let’s say.  Richard Dawkins tells of a famous scientist whose pet theory, fifteen years cherished, was disproven by a younger researcher, and who congratulated him with pleasure for discovering the truth.  I think we should know that being connected by awe not ego to the world is better than being self-enclosed.  It’s a fine goal for psychotherapy, though terribly difficult to win.

It happened one day

I have committed to memory a future date that I’ve determined will be the day of my demise.  It is not a suicide day, at all, but a goal to reach, a daring and lofty horizon beyond one-hundred, giving me forty more years.  If I make it to that day and am still ticking, I may have to sheepishly (if that emotion remains in my palette) ignore the majesty of my predictive reification and keep shuffling on.

I do not believe in magic or in the lasting effects of positive thinking (cognitive therapy with the emperor’s clothes off).  I don’t intend to change my lifestyle, exercise, eat better (I’m already a moderate health food nut) or act more cautiously – do anything specific toward my goal.  And, there is no quality of either hope or faith in the determination.  I don’t believe it is true; it just seems very likely now that it’s mine.

So what is going on?

Maybe it is magical thinking, of a sort.  How the idea happened, I don’t remember, but I know it came to me as a holistic creation rather than a cognition.  It featured a dual feeling of strength and happiness at the molecular level – deeper than gut level – a feeling that my life had changed from the inside.  When I remember it, there is an instant transformative sensation, as if some longevity power is happening now.  And yet it is so thin and transparent that it disappears most of the time, is forgotten and doesn’t undergird feeling or experience in a day.

This is not spiritual, but is it like religious feeling, without religious belief?

There is an inkling of holistic sense to this.  Psychosomatic (mindbody) psychology knows that pent-up, pressurized emotional pain makes us sick, damages the body.  Repression and denial are integral to this process, because feelings that are aired, at least to the mind, are not stored underground.  Years ago I ceased to be a represser and denier of at least accessible depths.  The resulting emotional news, over two decades, has sharpened my mind and what might be called my sensed philosophy.  From there, I’d say, came the unique declaration.

Once this came true, I felt both relief and challenge.  I’m no longer stumbling day to day, assuming the final pothole could open under my feet at any time.  On the other hand, I’ve never been ambitious, with far-reaching goals.  Now, I may have to think of the long run.

Another way to look at this is – What a chicken!  Shouldn’t there be enough value in each moment – life itself – without coloring it with a guaranteed long future (or afterlife)?  That’s the non-religious person’s belief.  But the non-religious dysthymic* person may like a bit of self-made magic – add some sugar to that tea.

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* See earlier blog post -- http://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2013/09/800x600-normal-0-false-false-false-en.html.

The invisible

This is just a fragment of an idea. It’s not a discovery of mine, but there may be a slant here that is useful for therapists and clients.

My belief is that almost every one of us was an invisible child, with secrets that were never told to our parents. I don’t mean the cool secrets or little behavior misdemeanors. I mean the suppressed feelings and needs that could never be said for whatever reason. Or if said, were not heard clearly, were harshly or blandly or warmly brushed off, were shut down. We became invisible, to ourselves and to others.

This invisibility is hard to see because children keep talking, doing things, joining with people and no one notices the lost parts, the lost person. And time seems to make all this lostness go away, or be moot: We’re grown up and are immersed in a big world.

But we remain invisible, and in fact lost. These are the married couples who “can’t communicate.” It’s everyone who comes to therapy and can't grasp what is wrong, what went wrong. It’s the lost stuff. It’s the feeling of difference and aloneness.

Try to picture what you lose when you can’t talk to your parents about your life, your sadness or fears, or are otherwise shut down inside. It’s an interesting phenomenon. Here’s an example. Around age eight or nine, a couple neighborhood friends and I had an insect collection, made in an amateur version of the scientific way: mounted with pins in a wooden display box. I forget if the insects were labeled: We may not have cared about the scientific names. I loved that collection, and the ongoing project, with drive and passion. We kept it in another boy’s garage. One day his mother noticed it, probably thought it was some nonsense, and threw it out. The boy told me about it, and I changed on the spot, a whole sea change. That was the end of my interest in insects, or science. I believe it was the end of my interest in building anything. It may have been the end of my interest in hoping. I’m not sure how far that wave carried. Had I been the kind of boy who could talk to his parents, give them his feelings, or they the kind of parent who could see a child and not pontificate like roles, I believe everything would have been different.

Invisibility and the lost are what therapists should be dealing with. It’s what all of our clients carry. They don’t primarily carry “depression,” but the lost fire whose smoke is depression. They don’t carry “abuse,” but the loss of love. Her anxiety is the smoke from real fear in childhood that was never assuaged. His anger is the zombie: It grows from hurt, parents’ ignoring it, and rises from the corpse of hope. Our client remains an invisible, lost, gone person in the room, no matter how present she seems. Maybe after so many years or decades she wouldn’t want to know about the lost. But we should do our job.