My last client of 2016

This was an early-20’s young woman who looked and sounded like a vulnerable teenager. I had asked her to remind me of the issues she’d described at the Intake-Assessment session three weeks earlier (the chart was unavailable). She reeled off an absolutely believable, egregious and heartbreaking series of abuses by “Bill” and “Susan” – what she called her father and mother – then a pool of abuses by Susan and “Jeff,” the meth addict mother latched onto after being enabled, if not coerced, to ditch Bill by Child Protective Services. The child and her sister would be “beaten so badly we couldn’t walk.” She saw Bill shove her mother down two flights of stairs then kick her repeatedly, because he had screwed up some woodworking project. The siblings had to beg both parents for food, if there was any in the house. She had to ask permission to get a drink of water, or to go to the bathroom. If father, picking her up from school, saw her socializing with another student – that is, talking – she would be beaten. She was allowed no friends from the neighborhood or at home. Later, mother found the alcoholic and meth user. Bill died by suicide. As my client, now seventeen, was forbidden from having a lock on her bedroom door, Jeff would barge in, slimily begging for a hug from this young woman he had only recently met and whose home he now commandeered in his unemployed and entitled glory.

One day the young woman, now with a baby by a transient boyfriend, became enraged and got into a punching and biting fight with her younger sister – whom she had protected as much as possible but who in deepest neurosis became a loyal symbiont of their personality-disordered mother. The months-old child was in the fray, and CPS took charge of it. Grandmother – borderline, hateful, vengeful, immature – was given custody of the infant. My client, twisted into knots mind and body from her first years on, never safe and never free, moved out.

If you see this twenty-something wandering The Strip at night, to stay away from her parents’ home and from her latest refuge; if she asserts that her mother is damaging her little child, and is mysteriously causing stains and holes in her laundry; if she claims to have no power with CPS, despite being a “very good mother” who loves her child – If you see her, will you think she is a mentally ill person, a being on a different level from you, with mood swings and failure? In fact, she is one of the best people I know. She asked for help, and said “thank you” when it was offered. She wasn’t a botch or a criminal. She was a soldier left behind on the battlefield, ignored and forgotten in a ceaseless war.

Dry humor, or wet seriousness, for the end of the old year -- #2

I picked up, at my wife’s request, some breakfast hot bar items for Gramps (her mother) at Whole Foods Market this morning. The cashier asked – because they’re young hippies who have to – how my day is going. My humor is usually gauchely subdued, dry and disconcerting. I replied, “Stern. I woke up stern.” And I felt it and looked it, and also suspected this was not a felicitous, familiar term in the young flower-power lexicon.

The world, and the universe, are here, are stable even eternal, yet here we human beings are splashing and screaming and creating dramas like emperors in a sandbox, twits in a tornado. Our lives are so complicated, with so many problems and subtleties and footnotes and deep meanings, on a cosmic plane that is blind to all. Adding piss to poop, we send out a Collective Conscious, join hands and become a vast club that has “traditions,” shared beliefs and causes. We intently watch the rest of the world as if we are all One. Let’s teach line dancing to the Syrian refugees and tie a purple ribbon ’round an ol’ oak tree.

I’ve wondered – Is there any more dignified and appropriate way for human beings to live? Conformance with the Music of the Spheres, for example? An inner sense of movement that says “explore the mysteries” that would make us all go outward through the galaxies, downward into the earth and physics, inward to the psyche? Rather than, say, having four-thousand religions, voting for the cartoon Narcissist, having six trillion singing competitions, caring what Anthony Bourdain eats?

Here is my solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: All of you become agnostics then support your goddamned families. That would do it. Grow up, you fucking bunnies. “Stop it!” as Bob Newhart would say.*

I recently wondered what it would be like to have Absolute Zero defense mechanisms, self-medications, tension-piss-awayers. That is, no masturbatory forces like drinking, prestige seeking, fantasizing, writing poetry, blogging, chewing fingernails, wanting riches, etc. Almost all of us would be just pain and emptiness, looking blankly outward, with no goals, no personal North. This is what happens to children. Maybe, though, it would be our best medicine: that cold, finally still place, to see who we are.

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* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow0lr63y4Mw

Son of Pessimistic therapy laws*: Some observations since

* In a therapy group, drug-addicted and homeless clients express bravado, wisdom about life and self, and workbook-taught hope. They may break down or break through in individual therapy, but in group they become children influenced by peer pressure and peer support, both detrimental to healing.

* Borrowing the spirit of Woody Allen’s quip – “I hate reality, but it’s still the best place to get a good steak”: The here-and-now is our most desirable place, but is our prison. We are separated in time and mind from mother and father (mommy and daddy) and their help. (See next-to-last observation.)

* Many clients who could keep a job want Social Security Disability Income. I wonder if they are not lazy, but instead are children seeking justice and the free gifts they should have had in childhood.**

* Hurt and anger are so often inextricably fused – like love and need – that we might choose the hurt: That’s the only place we can heal (and touch our most real self).

* On my death bed, I will still need and wish for my self-medicative acts and substances (writing, coffee-and-contemplation, food). Because despite my knowledge and my therapy and some serenity, I will never not be my core self which is loss, pain and un-self.

* The therapists at one mental health center are complacent braggarts or have skin-melting bad breath, and the case managers give daily classes on “growing happiness” and “building self-esteem,” neither of which could happen with ten thousand worksheets and checklists. Our profession is mostly stupid and amateurish, not a half-an-inch different from the rest of the world.

* We cannot grow from a neglected or abused dependent child to an independent adult. This disturbing insight is my own and I am sticking to it. Notwithstanding my frequent if not daily efforts to help a client grow strength and autonomy, I know that lack of a loving dependency in our childhood leaves us a baby needing to be held forever (though that lack often grows a defensive character of pseudo-strength and independence). Unfulfilling parents keep us incomplete and stuck in time. To our dying day we need, almost to the point of engulfment.

* Best therapy would be a couple years away on an island refuge or in a sanitarium on a secluded estate, beyond the quiet or loud imperatives of life, with the therapist often there. This is because every moment in the consciousness-demanding present – in here-and-now life – is a strain, a wrongness to someone whose vital but bleeding core is ensconced in the past. And that is where the hurt adolescent and adult are, despite everything we want to believe. The present is being trapped in a strange dimension for most people. In this wrongness, they grow rage and delusion, starve or run blindly. They believe fake news, make their hurt and fear decay to anger.

* Peer support, love, and helping a person can push the storm and the emptiness away, to different degrees.

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* See earlier post -- https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2014/04/pessimistic-therapy-laws.html.

** See earlier post -- https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2014/02/parallel-universes-therapistsknow-that.html.