Beyond the emotional, the existential

In the ocean of a woman’s malaise and weakness, she may cling to her mother who is nothing other than a cement lifesaver.  Sometimes she’ll say: “Mom always made me think that every decision I’d make would be a reflection on her.”  Today we need to think of what this means, because one doesn’t need any more trauma than this to become the floating lost: to exist secondary to life, and as the fodder for someone else’s ego.

The same spell lives in these words: “You’re not good enough.”  Set aside the obvious shaming here – making a child feel he will never possess goodness.  Look instead at the existential gift.  The parent is really saying, “It is meaningless that you are you.  You have to be me.”  That is precisely what this statement means: “You are not living according to my sight, which I require.”

The parent who requires her child to be a virtuous “reflection” is beyond ill.  She is the religious zealot who murders his daughter because she “shames” him by not living his life.  The root cause of this disease is the complete absence of a capacity for, and awareness of, individuality.  The person who does not have a self, cannot see one in others, especially in one's children.

I existed in this phantom zone for much of my life, starting at the beginning: the void of self and the consequent angry mystification that another child could exert the power of initiative, make a decision, go against anyone.  Later, when a married man, it simply galled me, in disbelief, that my adopted daughters could have opinions of their own.  This body-mutilated logic is a symptom of a never-made person, and I guarantee you that such an anti-human instinct resides, though unspoken, in the bowels of any parent who needs his child to be “right.”

The girl who grows up being a reflection of her mother; the boy forced to be a role model for his younger brother, may not gain the feeling of a self.  Nothing will be for him.  All body-feeling will be poisoned: He will have been taken over by what seems to him a real person – the irony, because the parent is emptiest of all.  We wonder at all the depression, anxiety, lack of meaning, empty jobs, dependencies on people and substances in the world.  Does a person with an individual self assimilate others, become assimilated, drift here and there and nowhere?

Raw #1*

What is so special about a psychotherapist that he or she can take someone with totally ruined self-esteem, self-blame for everything in his life, failure to grow an inch beyond his childhood feelings of humiliation and errancy – and make him into a person who feels the hurt done to him, clears himself, and can now see the world not through childhood pain and adult rage at others, but from injustice, justice, and peace?

I don’t know that I have that skill, because this client continues to see himself as a botched being from the start, a child awkward and ugly and ridiculous, and needing to try to be “cool” like his brother and father, always inferior.  He earns eighty-thousand a year, does humanitarian works beyond any norm, but is still this child.  He is a macho dude by job, but still the class clown, still the wannabe.  How can a counselor fix this?

These questions point to an ultimate problem with therapy.  Or actually, with people and with therapy’s pretensions.  We can’t make someone grow in the true way, as if we were the first twelve years of good parenting and a time machine.  We can’t make him grow.  Most people’s adultness, or even their more-or-less stable adolescence, is unreal, it is their necessary delusional place, their numbing of the truth, their scar-tissue ground of required maturity.  But that is what we think of as the adult.  Underneath most of our surfaces is the screeching child, lost beyond any known meaning of the word.  We grow a veneer of conduct and rationality and see things the way we are supposed to see them.

This client did not comport.  He remained the boy fully accepting he was the self-destructive garbage his terrible father made him see he was.  In third grade he already hated himself, tried to be some other.

Therapists learn about the quality of empathy, and hopefully really feel for the other person.  We should believe in the existence of the inner child.  But our natural instincts – codified in and blessed by all psychological teaching – say this inner child is a germ within the adult, a germ that we work on with the adult.  Oh, how placid!  How convenient.  What if he is our real soul, hidden or not – as with my client?

Picture being with, sitting next to, holding, the fully regressed man or woman, frozen in fire and unable, needing mommy, the apotheosis of pain.  That would be frightening, wouldn’t it?  But I need to ask all therapists: Why wouldn’t that be the best?

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* A single Bell’s Two Hearted Ale was enough to get me to write more from the heart, or the id.

Child to adult

Benjamin Button – the man who grew younger and (presumably) more immature as the years went by – is often the reality in human psychology.  The feeling of a first-grader who falls in love with a girl on the school bus; a child’s real questions about the world; early teens, with their youth group self-explorations, middle teens and their starry night Kumbaya love and camaraderie on a confirmation class retreat; kids who see through their parents’ smiles and sophistic explanations – there is more gravity and reality in them than in many of the adults I see in therapy.  The complexity of adults’ malaise, confusion and rage is, in fact, a factor of their ascendant superficiality, their loss-of-touch with their true feelings and sights.  To reach emotional truth, depth, is to become simple again.

Not long ago I worked briefly with a troubled young-thirties couple married only two months, whose pinball-like emotional and commitment oscillations were more adolescent than adolescence.  Her caroming on and off grew out of loss and shutting down in a childhood of deep neglect, leaving her to live blind and on scar tissue.  She was so out of touch with her inner life that she laughed, sighed and smiled about her first marriage as a victim of Power and Control abuse,* and about the gossamer quality of her second marriage.  The man was prematurely powerful, head of a successful construction business.  This was his strength, like an iron lung detached from his hollow infirmity.

I wonder what the “systems” marital therapists would do with this couple.  He did not trust her, as she continued to talk with “old boyfriends.”  They each felt their relationship with their own children had been damaged by joining this marriage.  That one fact revealed in each a pathological child-state of emotional neediness, in the same way that some divorced fathers remarry, dedicate themselves abjectly to their new wife and her family and abandon their own children.  Marrying, did each spouse instantly lose the substance of his and her parental bond by succumbing to their greater need to be nurtured – like a child – by their partner?  If so, it is not a systems problem.  It is a core wound problem, a primal scream problem.

I remember using one of Dr. Hendrix’s slogany ideas: You have to be allies not enemies.  And a catalyst of my own: You may need to ask yourself if you actually like the character of the other person.  Some marriages are ruined from the beginning by this hidden, never-acknowledged dislike which turns an even deeper “compatibility” into an eternal tornado.  Underlying everything we did early on, including the discomfiting Couple’s Dialogue, was my sense that these are children who are grudgingly play-acting “being there” for the other, when each is too starved to be there for anyone but himself, herself.

Each partner would need to quit this dance for a while and plunge into regressive therapy that would show them, by touch, where they came from.  Returning to the child is to regain the depth, the self, and hopefully the love, they lost while growing up.

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* Referring to the Power and Control Wheel -- http://www.ncdsv.org/images/PowerControlwheelNOSHADING.pdf -- used in Domestic Violence classes.

A final sort of statement

There is just something very nice, even lovely, about people coming into the office to ask about their problems, seek help for them.  That idea may be strange to a happy or content person.  But therapists like me live at some remove from the natural world and its pleasures.  We live, in a way, on a question mark, on a crooked boat in the ocean.  So we’re more comfortable being watchful and uneasy.  As for me, I see enjoyment as sweet icing on a cake, and the cake is mystery and hardship.

When a person sits down, first thing I do for myself is push through – with enjoyable perverse optimism – the absurdity of helping someone who is basically a billion clocks and a billion clouds under a coat of paint.  The coat is his personality, his hiding.  You might as well twist a screwdriver in the deep blue sea.  And then, what we do is soothe and bruise him, at once.  This works in actual surgery: The patient is etherized on the table, heart exposed.  But in psychological surgery, to encourage while uncovering blood-red truth, give hope while proving the hopelessness of mother’s ever seeing you, loving you, is an operation that can be finessed only with heartbreak.

So some patients come back for more, others don’t return.  There might be a formula here: If too many of your clients keep returning week after week, month after month, you are not a helping agent.  You are a soothing agent.

Within a few months I will be relocating to a new state.  This feels a little odd – to be bringing my crooked boat to a place where Counseling – by all the group and private practice websites I see – seems so happy and hopey and helpy.  I’d like to make some professional friends out there, and have a strong practice, and not have to keep my mouth shut about being a pessimistic-optimistic shrink.  I’ll let you know how the operation goes.