Saturday, September 26, 2015

We can fall out of this world


I have come to believe that many people are living in an alternate world, where their show is above-ground but they are actually hidden.  They live in a shadow dimension of one.  This is not a metaphor, or science fiction or yet a scientific concept.  A schizophrenic, with his gibberish, thought broadcasting and hallucinations, may be said to live in an alter dimension, where he sees a different world with different definitions.  The same with a psychopath, or the delusional person who smiles cannily because he knows you are The Enemy.  Beyond the obvious, there are countless others who have always seemed perfectly here to partner, friend and stranger, but who are actually imposters, in a way.

This occurred to me when two clients, two years apart in their therapy, became mirror reflections of cause and effect.  And I’d always known it in my own living, for so many years, in that autistic dimension.  With a great deal of struggle over time, I have but one or two toes, maybe a whole foot, left in it.

To be out of this world is still to act in it.  I speak of a core feeling disconnect that bleaches the self, and therefore everything else, of color, of meaning.  Many people don’t feel and because of that are just going through the motions.  The covert drama is born of several factors:

Inner need.  The dissociated person is driven to secret action because childhood-origin needs and feelings, unanswered and unheard, seek targets later in life.  A stay-at-home mom may shoplift without a ripple in mood, will think of being a loose teenager, may “perceive one child as all-good and another as no-good.”*  A heterosexual man masturbates homosexually – an underground dreamplace that doesn’t touch the real world.

Amorality.  Felt morality – I will bet anyone – comes from receiving love.  The child who dissociated from feeling dissociated from the pain of not being loved.  He will live in an amoral land.

Thought.  When a very young child suffers shock and emotional trauma, the result can be catatonia or a vegetative state (think anaclitic depression – those neglected, listless “failure-to-thrive” babies and infants in the old studies).  But an adult in emotional shutdown has thought as a life prosthesis and home ground – an entire cosmos inside and cut off from the world.

The imperative of living.  This is just one’s need to carry a life in reality.  A lawyer, doing his job diligently, feels like a child in grown-up’s clothing.  A psychotherapist, saying all the right things and posing empathically, is frightened of people, like the child he was.  The depressed mother can’t curl up, eyes closed at her own mother’s breast.  She must act the many roles.

The one client was abused sexually by a neighborhood teenager – this through his entire childhood and adolescence.  He was silent always: His father, a redneck lout, would have shamed or killed him.  He came to have two lives, starting around college: the conventional good father and husband, and the libertine underground.  There was no clash, or question, of morals in his head.

The woman was abused sexually by a neighborhood man, from age six to fourteen.  She would walk to it, several days a week.  Silent always, even in her psychiatric hospitalizations.  Her children are grown and on their own, and her husband learned about her history yesterday.  She spends crazy money, steals from friends, is withdrawn, depressed, harbors a rage that no one sees.  There is only complacence within her to be who she is.

My covert life saw both itself and everything outside in wrong ways.  I identified myself as an elite little league fastball pitcher, when I pitched none too fast and wild.  I was the family “pianist” until a teacher, seven years on, uncovered my inability to read tempo notation.  And still I believed I was a pianist.  I stole my uncle’s Wilkinson Sword Blade razors; handfuls of quarters from my father’s closet; sundries (mini playing cards, letter openers) from Woolworths and the Hecht Company – all from a place beneath the moral world.  When my uncle gently apprehended me, I remained buried in that other place and could not say a word.  I expected him and his horrible truth to fade away in a gray-pink cloud.  All, I felt throughout my childhood and later, should succumb to the same oblivion as I.

We – many children like this, I’m sure – live in an inner, cushioned place that doesn’t hear other people’s feelings: They are an alien noise.  This is a true existential mental state that doesn’t know, at all, why the gray fog of “other people” want us to join their rules, their facts, their ideas, their determination of the right way to be.  We are insular, and no one sees it: a formula for perpetual underworldliness.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud, talking about his spiritual friend Romain Rolland, quotes Grabbe, a German playwright: “We cannot fall out of this world.”  The context is his discussion of the so-called “oceanic” religious feeling.  Here are two excerpts:

This, he says, consists in a peculiar feeling, which he himself is never without, which he finds confirmed by many others, and which he may suppose is present in millions of people.  It is a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded – as it were, ‘oceanic.’  . . . .
. . . That is to say, it is a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole.**
My belief, or certainty, is that many – maybe not Rolland’s “millions” but other millions – have indeed fallen out of the world.  The severing of ties to love leads to an internal life, always parallel, always below the place of equality that would be the real human utopia: omnipresent care as feeling glides across the world, connecting all.

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* Christine Ann Lawson, Understanding the Borderline Mother, p. 4.

** S. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, copyright 1961, pp. 36-37.

Monday, September 21, 2015

My end-of-life search for the meaning of the universe


“Meaning in life” is a matter of psychology, in health and in sickness.  In health, it is a feeling.  In sickness, it is a need.  A normal child, before trauma or the vitiating effects of parents, feels life and it therefore means everything to him.  An adult, shut down, has no meaning but feels its absence and needs it.

There would be many fewer books – contrived ideas and meanings – were the human species robust.  Instead, ascendant would be the urge to discover the world with our eyes and our hands, the mysteries below us and above us.  We wouldn’t be “social metaphysicians,”* so hooked into strangers’ and fictive lives.  Writers wouldn’t scribble innumerable fantasies of heroes, antiheroes and horror, crime and romantic struggle.  They wouldn’t be creating all the philosophical systems or spinning endless webs of exegesis.  They wouldn’t desire nameless audiences for their thoughts.  We wouldn’t need so much entertainment.  They, we, would be living.

Don’t we know that feeling is meaning?  That is really why so many of us keep certain childhood memories or the memory of childhood on a unique pinnacle.  Not because they had more colorful emotion, but because they were actual meaning.  Why don’t we have that now?

It is lost to many adults (and even adolescents).  I believe a good chore for psychotherapy is: How do we get it back, or something like it back?  One answer, the lesser, is that our shutdown, our submerged self, requires a thunderclap of the brightest colors to reach it.  Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto, true love, the messiah’s return – or the expectation of it.  The greater answer is that we have to have the will to be our child again: the strength to be weak, the courage to be afraid.  In Him or Her rests our meaning.

It is regrettable to me that so few people have that will.

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* “Social metaphysics” was an idea created by psychologist Nathaniel Branden.  Immersed in the Randian Objectivist philosophy that equated individualism, egoism, atheism, capitalism, rationality and morality, he formed a psychology that condemned people’s “obsessive concern with gaining the approval, and avoiding the disapproval, of their fellow men.”  In my work, I have retooled the concept to mean individuals whose ego is based not in themselves and in nature, but in a ground of people – often young Borderlines.  Listen to Branden’s odd Big Brother voice at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmQAnVh6K-4.

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Variation on "Being 18"*


Over the years I have worked with many later-adolescents, those from 17 to 21 or so.  My memory, though generalized, is strong, and would be reinforced with concrete were I to scan old and new client lists.  I know that crouched quietly or disquietly off to the side of at least ninety-five percent of these youngsters’ presenting problems was this shadow: They had no idea what they wanted to do with their lives, as job or career.  One could also say they did not know who they were.

“Identity diffusion” or crisis is thought of – by our culture’s “collective unconscious” – as a rite of passage for teens.  I suspect this is a tremendous and fallacious cop-out.  At the very least, there is a qualitative difference between the transitional growing and crystallizing of “normal” teenagers and the identity vacuum of the young men and women, or old children, who present to counseling with psychological problems.

I am saying that this is the doing of parents.  Identity begins in self-esteem, and self-esteem forms in a Self that is created by parents’ radiating upon the hopeful form of their child respectful love, mirroring, appreciative joy – these good energies.  I know my teenagers’ parents.  And though I don’t know them as they were seventeen to twenty-one years earlier, I can see the same faces that I see in all my adult clients – troubled, incomplete people – as they sit in the lobby or return to pick up the teen ten minutes after the session.  These faces, and postures, contain a relationship of burden and detachment, lostness modeled, anger that deliquesces in the boy or girl as anguish, giving up.

In these relationships, the youngster is carried, in effect, in a half-empty cargo vessel to a strange port where he disembarks and walks on, holding only his greater age and some attitudes that may help him survive.  The long journey should have been made on solid land, with lots of supplies and stopping points, not at sea with no destination in sight until the end of it.  His legs are uncertain; his eyes are used to the past.

I haven’t read such a case history, but it regularly happens that in one segment of a session I help a bleeding and wounded person express his grief and drain his pain, and in the other I encourage him, by empathy and the force of necessity, to be the strong, wise and patient parent to his child.  This is the psychological definition of absurdity, probably a combustible paradox, probably in part injurious to him.  But it is good injury: None of us wants to die never having been an adult.

Parents may feel they are already living deep, just carrying their populated life and their buried pain in the present, and into the future.  Is it too much to ask them to carry the extra depth of their child’s thoughts and worries, and to give her a comfortable, confident ride for a while?  She’ll grow in security and will be world-focused not inner-dwelling, will collect things in her heart and will want to enjoy and develop them later in life.

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Sunday, September 13, 2015

Fantasy impromptu #2: Stages


I have always had a visceral revulsion to the pap concepts always – always – found in the nose bag of Intro Psych courses – operant conditioning, reinforcement, “learned helplessness,” Erikson’s “identity crisis,” Adler’s “inferiority complex,” Gestalt psychology’s figure-ground, Piaget and his cognitive stages and Kohlberg and his moral stages and oh horrors, Wolpe’s “systematic desensitization” and Maslow’s hypocritical hierarchy (look that faker up).  Even writing these terms now, I hear my gut yelling at the universe, “What unusable bilge!  Who in the name of the God of Trite Oleaginous Shit gives a damn?”

Nevertheless . . . I glance at Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development (that include “basic trust versus basic mistrust” and the famous “identity crisis”) and am reminded that there are indeed different psychological stair steps in life, and know that they require different therapeutic approaches.

This isn’t just that a thirteen- or seventy-five-year-old shouldn’t be led to primal scream, descending into her childhood unfulfillment and horror.  It’s that a 22-year-old adolescent-man will have a different quality of existential distress from a 28-eight-year-old.  The 26-year-old still living in his parents’ basement will feel different from the 29-year-old in the same place.  My client, 43, who is depressed that her medical records job is a dead end is encouraged to see her life as young and consider returning to college.  One with similar fears at 48, might see and be seen differently.  Their place on the timeline is not nuance, but number as dread, and I have to be there with them.

Age itself may not be a determiner of therapeutic moderation.  A 54-year-old man with a very toxic ADHD syndrome* has, through aggressive psychoeducation, slammed on his brakes and slid over the cliff, crashing into his childhood invisibility and expelling the rages of his injustice.  This great shock – My parents, it was all about them! – is the one thing likely to bring him peace, and quiet.

I see in my stage – sixty-four years – a future that can’t be described; where there’s a kind of “hope for hope,” but the material of it will still have to be discovered (I don’t believe in “inventing” oneself).  Aware, thankfully, of the fundamental flaws of my roots, upbringing and entire life, I have to be mired in them while searching above the waves for mountains.  Where I will soon be living, there are some small ones.

Were I to see a psychotherapist, I would want to treat her like a god, or the Mother, in this way: a person before whom everything can be revealed, who understands and accepts it.  The child always present; futility with no redemption; my sense of my goodness; the unusual marriage.  The self that no one has ever seen.  I’d make her my friend, knowing she’s not.  And leave the office feeling more substantial, no longer just a mind-dwelling person.  That seems to make for hope: leaving the nest of oneself.

What is there about one’s ages that makes psychology different?  While I will always believe that real therapy is a grieving of the timeless, there is the simple fact of death that shapes each age, curving, like space-time, the flat plane of our pained existence.  Death differently immanent in each age, clashing with life, forces us to be creative or desperate (maybe that's a kind of birth).  Psychotherapy rides the curves, looking for life and desperation, and offering friendship.

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* By this I mean the features of inattention and chronic tension in addition to related developmental aborts – lost-boy immaturities including naïveté about life and self-sabotage.


Monday, September 7, 2015

Pessimistic Shrink's second anniversary


Writing these little articles is, more than it is psychologizing, my way of doing poetry and joining human drama.  I’m following a similar neurotic symbolic dream of twenty-two-year-old Borderlines and my seventy-year-old father, who felt an internal something that told them they wanted to be writers.  I believe my father (who said he would like to write stories in his retirement but never did) felt that he had not touched earth, as closet Narcissist who could never speak like a man or just live the real emotions.  The Borderline never-aging girls seem to want to have a real ego – impossible to these early separation-individuation flaws – but that fuses with their adolescent-escapist intellect defense.

Probably everything I write comes from my ephemeral bursts of spirit, which then subside into a dysthymic inert land.  The bursts are wonderful – like a piece of music that just by sounds opens up Universal Harmony and Meaning to us.  That’s what all meaning to us is – a feeling.  It’s not at all some idea of “importance.”

I know that like all neurotics I embody the conflict between detachment and symbiotic need, which produces the absurd kaleidoscope of deadness, exuberance, fear, hate and love that runs our lives.  If I have the slightest advantage – which really could be the most moribund disadvantage – it’s that I know, have gotten used to, and have compassion for my losses and the death they’ve produced.  My fruit is therefore organic and knowing pessimism, along with organic and knowing optimism.  Many clients learn both from me.  I've come to believe this makes the best music.