How to reduce the chance of having another unsatisfactory relationship

My first tasks in addressing the matter of marital satisfaction are to reduce a treatise to a few paragraphs and to avoid the glib wisdom – “all is lost.”  Deep emotional attraction, at least in the client population, is like the runner with a knife in his back: He will not be able to run in a straight line or achieve victory.  His vision is blurred by pain.  He will flail in distress and need, stumble, and fall head-first upon the first caregiver who offers a painkiller and a bandage.

Most of us, injured souls from the tip of our childhood roots to the tip of our adult defenses, are attracted to soothers: people who make us feel better and feel different from our deeper selves.  What would, in a healthy person, be the magnetism of admiration in a medium of mutual autonomy, becomes the draw of need.  This can have many forms.  A need for distraction from emptiness: marrying a partying or funny or chaotic person.  A need for hope: marrying someone like our parent, whom we try to please love out of.  A need for semi-closeness but that does not challenge our defenses against loss: If we have buried our heart from loss of love, we find someone we can reach out to but who cannot reach in to our inward self.  A need to not grow up and wake up: We marry someone who will take charge.  A need for revenge: We marry someone who piques our deepest frustrations, our rage, our imprisoned power.  And in all or most, a need for the symbiotic embrace that is always attributed the vague concept “love.”

Does this seem unlikely, that we are attracted to others more by our “negatives” than our positives (eHarmony and the rest of them notwithstanding)?  Look again at the runner.  Where the analogy doesn’t work, it is yet worse for our psychology.  A physically injured person may have a healthy and loving spirit.  But an injured psyche, a malformed seed, must grow into a weakened tree.

The problem for relationships is that human beings are organic paradoxes of determinism and hope, where determinism makes us the hollow tree and hope makes us believe the loved person can heal us.  Soon, we become disappointed.

What can help is that our pain needs to be seen by the other person.  I once helped a fifty-year-old woman, suicidal throughout her life, by acknowledging her need to rest in the most radical way: to take leave of her job, stay in bed or sit at home, timelessly, to simply feel who she is apart from the life conveyor belt that had carried her from cradle to now.  To no longer be a “human doing” living others’ expectations but to simply feel and think and know her own body and nature.  To stop being “other.”  In that place of living, finally, she knew that to live she had to throw her anger in her mother’s face.  Her husband would also know that she had found herself, and who she was, when the clocks had been burned, and there was all the time in the world to be a person.

Also helpful is to find your inner child and its adult personas, in therapy, before you join a relationship.  If you come to know this self – with its starved needs and stillborn feelings – and the personality you’ve grown to bury it, you will see how a prospective mate may entice hope, frustrate these deepest needs, challenge or fail to challenge the defensive personality that keeps you safe but entirely alone.

Fantasy impromptu #3

In my last few weeks at this job, before moving out of state, I have been looking at some old and recent clients in a different way.  Strangely, each has become a person with a problem that can be understood and solved in a session or two.  When I had no end time in sight, and it was expected that most would be attending for a while, there was the typical understanding that clients could be helped only through a relationship in time.  I suspect that each counselor sees – unthinkingly or thoughtfully – the therapy process in his or her own way.  My own view has been that the client has to be worn down (in a manner of speaking) over months to a place of trust and truth, to a certain amount of regression, leaning on me or on the room.  I find the notion that we help change a person by having him Endust® his surface – improve his adult thinking – idiotic: botch therapy.

But right now, I am picturing the ailing individual as someone who can be helped by showing him his pain and getting him out of his lies to himself.  This is where our patients are: They have survived by lying to themselves, in the form of defenses.  These could also be called self-medications, or misdirected energies.  A new client (one of the last, before I converted to doing triage and transfers) has the tough-gal character.  It is a character of defense, after a girlhood where her stepfather raped her and her mother put up with him.  When you sit in my room, you are in a place where your pain is not merely nodded to, saluted, but where it, and compassion, replace everything else in the room and in the world but for air.  As complex as any person is, she is simple: She is hurt, has run away, and now must come home.

The key*

Some teenage boys in our therapy have learned that their anger is burned hurt, and that their antisocial appraisal of people, of the world, is a defense.  The appraisal comes when their need for bonding, for love that sees them, has finally been frustrated in all quarters.  They must bury hope, they must bury reaching out.  The philosophy that forms is cold heat: a cold attitude that covers the fire of failed love.  This is not something they can learn in isolation, with no one at all there for them: That would be the last straw of complete hopelessness.  They learn it in a warm relationship with the therapist.  This allows the hurt to be respected, to be held by a caring person.  Painful hope stirs.

These are the young men who do not become school and college shooters.

Some other young men can’t learn this.  They have been too scalded too early in life, are now a seventeen-year-old shell containing a six-year-old helpless psyche.  The same lessons that work for the other boys bounce off a chaotic brain, a person holding himself together only by being against everything.  He is against because touch and warmth are too late, are only pain and engulfment.  He is an against soul.

We can “manage” guns, we can “manage” anger, to possibly lessen violence.  But what we really need is early caring.  In How To Become a Schizophrenic, Modrow writes:

“Since the sufferings and mental disorders of the schizophrenic patient can be seen as a protest against an intolerable living situation, some psychiatrists such as R. D. Laing and Martti Siirala view him or her as the sanest member of the family.  Their views find confirmation in the experimental findings of Elliot Mishler and Nancy Waxler, two Harvard University psychiatrists, who write:

“’It is a matter of great importance that differences between parents of schizophrenic children and parents of normal children are more striking than are differences between schizophrenic patients and normal children serving as research controls.’”**

The answer to these mass murders will be for society to dissolve the dissimulating label “parent” and see merely people influencing and hurting others: hitting, bullying, shaming, oppressing by their depression and anxiety, starving by their lack of empathy, starving by their absence, crazymaking by their own confusion, crazymaking by their sexual and emotional neediness.  Dissolve the aura of parent and simply have people open to the light of decency.  In a generation, there would be no boys gutted of love and failing to grow to be men, and the shootings would stop.

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* See earlier posts: Theory platform: Elliot Rodger, age 22; Why the world is so screwed up; The shootings.

** John Modrow, How To Become a Schizophrenic – The Case Against Biological Psychiatry, Writers Club Press, 1991, 1996, 2003, p. 14.  Author’s footnotes left out. 

Lisztian rhapsody*

Should therapists always help their clients feel better?  I believe the right answer is “yes in no.”  This expresses my conviction that some positive change or transcendence – to happy or content or accepting – is likely to happen, or the client deserves it to happen, through the course of a meaningful, difficult therapy.  This may take time or be a quick moment of epiphanic asphyxiation.  But it is the work of creating knowledge and release and the bonding one passes through.  It is not soothing, not bubble baths – until that is all that is left.

But this is only my carried-out attitude.  Though I want my clients to feel better, I cannot help but define “better” to include awareness, “awareness” meaning the person’s truth at the bone and soul level.  There is nothing in me that allows therapy to be bright-thought, false-hope delusional or numb-distracted.  Another clinician, though, may see the world in a happier way, through clear eyes or crooked lenses, and would consider it right to forge a positive feeling on its own merits.  That clinician is in a different world than mine, and I couldn’t really converse with him, though he may sit at the same table.

I’ve never really looked in this direction, but – I think I have good skills and caring intensity in the therapy hour, but may also bring a peculiar personality.  I think it says too much for some people, while other counselors are just benign and friendly.  It must be strange to hear my gentle yet arch humor along with a ruthless eye to parents and the deterministic liberty that says: We are what we were, so knowing it, we can see beyond it.  Plus, a sixty-something guy wearing a still-naïve inner child as a badge of honor could be off-putting.  Or endearing?  I don’t know.

Very soon it will be time to say goodbye to the people at my job.  I have never made myself known to them but for the now-tiresome quirks.  Humorously (to me), I view the administrative staff as more sane and down-to-earth than the clinical folk.  A strange bunch that gets into this field!  And the less strange, those who know they are most like their clients.

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* “In the Hungarian rhapsodies, the majority of which begin in a mosque, and end in a tavern . . .”  From James Huneker’s biography of Franz Liszt, 1911 (Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/39754/39754-h/39754-h.htm). Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody #2, played by Valentina Lisitsa – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdH1hSWGFGU.