Uneasy into that good night

Here in Gambling & Sin Central, Nevada, I have treated more septua- and octogenarians in the last three months than I had over the preceding fifteen years. I am 64 and see, for the sake of some therapies, myself and them on the same voyage toward sunset. One theme prevalent in this group – addiction – has brought to mind the voyage, and along with it a question.

These older clients, for reasons that may have to do with Las Vegas and its pull to special self-medicative souls, are as lively in their thoughts and needs and bleeding hearts as twenty-somethings.  Their thinking runs and twists with exclamation points, acrid attitudes and tears. Their dependencies – shopping, food, May-December infatuation, gambling, morbid grief – have the aura of problems that should have burned out a while ago. And I find in them a disturbance that effectively Teflon-coats their resistance: an unappeasable need to live in their intellect, ripened over decades, that is nevertheless linked to their unhealed childhood injuries. This presents, in the therapy hour, a vexatious front of “I already know everything” wisdom and immaturity.

The question I’ve asked is: “As you travel further into old age – maybe you even think of it as the final straightaway – and may want to see your life in a certain way . . . Still burdened with this addiction, do you want to be your best, or do you want to be your truth?” I mean the following:

We can all picture a better self: working out, eating healthier; going back to school, showing more kindness toward others; ditching bad habits, stopping to smell the roses, going to marital therapy. But viscerally we may sense that this “improved” version of ourselves is a falsehood: It’s not who we are. A deeper understanding will show that there is a real self, injured, who has never been seen or heard by anyone – a self beneath the adult charade most of us have grown; and that there is a cosmically powerful pull to be that truth.

With less time for wishful thinking, my older addicted clients embody this choice, though it may never have occurred to them: to be their best face – their “better angel” (or one they have adopted); to will dignity and family reconciliation and peace, to transcend. Or, to live the truth by naming and crying their long-forgotten child, their structural failure; to respect the deeper Self by boozing or bingeing or gambling to nurture this undeserved pain; to bleed; to denounce the neglectfulness of others across a lifetime. Of course, this isn't a simple choice, as it's the result of all the wheels of one's life turning, then slowing down, and stopping in place or in confusion, as a kind of verdict.

But if I ask the question, it might make them pause prematurely, and look. To say – Face your identity now. Choose between forgiveness and bloody truth, hope and primal truth – is to ask: Can I still grow up? Should I? What does that even mean?

And what about the third choice – to simply be, as time marches on?

A short lesson

All in one week, three clients appeared for whom nothing had any meaning.  They were ages 15, 18 and 24, two young men and a woman.  One could say they had reached a point in their lives where everything had dried up, evaporated.  How absurd that seems, at their age.  But I know it’s exactly true, because looking back, I could say the same was true of me at 15.  I had pretend values, yes, but they were only narcissistic supplies: philosophy, political ideology, creative writing.  In reality, nothing existed as the world quickly transformed – the receding of childhood now inevitable – from an external place bathed in my dissociating anxiety, to bleak solipsism.

I am certain that any victim of this meaninglessness can feel the cause of it and the antidote to it at once, within the constipation of the emptiness.   What they will sense is unexpressed and frozen pain waiting to burst, but held still forever, up to this point.  This is really a feeling, of deep historical grief waiting to happen: This is what has balled up and suffocated the nerves of life, lightning, love.  In each of us who knows this state, there will be the sense of real life immanent in its absence.

This is my lesson today: Absence of meaning is stillborn pain.  Add time passing, and the body is benumbed, feeling vitiates, and the thinking brain tries to run away but is tied to the anesthetized body.  Thoughts float, empty.

There will be no help from the here-and-now.  The here-and-now, when promoted by the therapist, is Kafka’s The Trial: a sentence or a funeral where the victim doesn’t know what has died.  You have to go into the past.  That’s the kind of grieving and healing the world has rarely known about, where we stop time and stay holding the hurt heart until it has bled out its pain.  This doesn’t take “forever,” because there is no time.  We will not let time resume until it has happened.

Intervention tidbit #9: The sofa

I don’t have a Freudian couch in my office, but I do have a sofa, with fake leather skin, fluffy comforter draped across the back, a couple throw pillows.  Not long ago a 24-year-old client had a deeply healing session – one of my best in a year or two – because she lay on the sofa and thereby became the child under the adult persona.

We can talk to our adults week in and week out, and they can experience important feelings, or one feeling that must be focused on, and you never see a real breakthrough where he or she is changed for good, from this moment on.  This is what happened, that morning.  During the process, of tearfully calling to her father – Why couldn’t you love me?  I needed you to love me – there was no change or epiphany, because that was the stage of becoming – becoming real, of allowing the real person to emerge for the first time since its childhood burial.  That was the stage of hurting.  But actually, it was someplace during that grief bleeding and calling – at some split-second in the midst of the process – that dread of being real, fear of pain of facing an uncaring father, turned into pain release and absolute truth, which is nothing but redemptive.  It was a real birth. 

How does it work that shame, guilt and pain disappear when the child in the adult feels and expresses them through?  You re-own yourself, which is intrinsically good and not guilty or shameful: Guilt and shame come from the parents, are layers of destruction over feeling.  Tears melt the embodied assumption, inherited from those parents, of one’s wrongness.  And crying as a child is to give the pain to someone in the room, the therapist.  Adults who cry are still trapped in their adult mental space which consists in part of isolation from help.  They have long been lost above the scar tissue over their heart, cannot feel their real need, cannot need you.

This young woman also discovered, uncovered in the talking – like a new world – identity-feelings she had never been aware of, and therefore became her richer self, her identity.  That kind of discovery makes you a different person, and this was “on top of” the different person who no longer felt the weight of all the pain (had, in a way, given it to me), and who no longer wore the mantle of her parents’ shame and guilt.  Despite my self-label as a “primal-related therapist,” I had too infrequently gone here with clients, to where I couldn’t remember and quickly had to re-find the right instructions for her, on the sofa.  Was she to regress to her little girl and cry for her daddy?  Or was she to be the adult who felt her childhood’s feelings within her?  This latter was the right modus, because it kept her in the felt safety of her adult life, the power of now, despite its self-medicative nature.

This was her fifth or sixth session, very new in therapy and probably the best way to do it, as now there would have to be more discoveries through abreactive reliving, and we wouldn’t have been going on so long and become tired out.  What will she change into?  Already she knew the certainty that this all would have to be shared with her husband; that she could and must tell him her love for him, no longer shamefully afraid that he, too, would leave her.  These waves would push others toward a new shore – standing real and strong and grave before her family?  Returning to school?  She would become a better mother – another certainty.  And, maybe sooner than usual, she would leave therapy.

I can love losses like that.