A ramble on love

We all deserved parents who loved us. But do we deserve a spouse who loves us?

I think this is an interesting question that contains feelings from childhood and adulthood, and bitter and sweet feelings of the child in the adult. It makes us look at “What is ‘deserve’?” Of course a baby who is here deserves to live as a whole person, and that requires love. But how can an adult deserve something that’s a matter of chance, bent antennae, and the unconscious? Yet how can it be right for him or her to be unloved?

There are those decent people who, growing up, had to lose their sensitivity to love because to need something that was not there would be to starve to death. The “irony” is that you can love these people and they cannot feel it, they cannot really know you love them. Where is the “deserve” in that scene?

Freud seemed to think that everything in human life reduced to sex. What if, instead, everything reduces to love? What if nothing is right without it; nothing, even the good things, is complete? If you’ve been without love for years, or forever, will you look at the most placid mountain lake or hear a Chopin Nocturne in the same way? Friendship without it is – less. A career without it is – money or ego, lesser things. Curiosity without it must have a short shelf life. Religion without it is neurotic, often murderous.

Then see how much love is missing in the world. Or maybe it’s always been very thinned out in the wide atmosphere of the world, throughout history. Whose fault is that? In therapy sessions, I’ll sometimes say “Blame God or nature” that childhood emotional injuries do not heal without help, they remain, despite our growing up. Blame God or nature for the great craters of lovelessness in the human drama.

Here I’ll propose a test. If you think you’ve had good enough* love in your life, particularly in your growing years, check your moods and attitudes in a number of situations. Are you angered by small things, like a slowly reloading computer screen or the woman in the car ahead who pauses three seconds after the light turns green? Despite a good day at work or at home with your wife or husband, may you feel some deflation? Is there the eternal missing in your life, a question mark, though you don’t know its identity? Do you generalize people – “Even the best Muslims are probably terrorist sympathizers”? Can you be hateful toward people sometimes, even though you have a dedicated and good marriage? Can you have a spasm of deep rage within a calm or happy moment? Are your moods a bit too oceanic, undulating dark and light without a clear factor, frothy then thick? These are all signs of a deep wound, long before the present. It’s a wound of the failure of love, and it will always deplete everything because love is the sole blueprint, the one “on switch,” of our life.

Good news is that there are things that can be done to improve love.

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* Referring to D. W. Winnicott's seminal concept of the "good enough mother."

How to end terrorism

Consider these examples of a delusion,* on a scale from insane to less so:

A man believes that 1 + 1 = color blue.

A man believes the earth is flat, the Holocaust didn’t happen, 9/11 was an inside job.

A woman believes that an infinitely powerful and timeless unnatural being created all of existence.

A woman believes scientists’ assertion that molecules are made of atoms which are made of quarks and strings; that the universe began in a Big Bang – though she has never seen any of the proofs with her own eyes.

A man believes he is alive, and that he loves his wife.

While some of these beliefs may not seem psychotic, they are all examples of experience embedded in the continuum of human evidence – that is, perception and reason. And since human perception and reason are known to be fallible, are adumbrated by the eternal disconnect between appearance and essence, and are deflated by signs that free will is but a species of determinism, all knowledge is at its root belief, and all belief is variably delusional.

It seems likely to me, a psychotherapist, that emotion is the main factor that will lean someone toward the poorly evidenced (psychotic) reaches of belief, and in some cases toward an outright aversion to human knowing. Possibly any strong emotion can transiently do this: A blissful person may believe that for the most part the world is a very wonderful place; a suicidal person, that the world is uncaring. The feeling, though, that leads to the most intractable, destructive and necessary beliefs is the pain that we banish and wall off, the early injuries to our identity that amount to loss of love in our childhood. The walls of repression we build are often made of self-soothing beliefs.

Here is one example: I grew up in a loveless, emotionally buried home. It was impossible for me to share feelings with inert people, so my need for love and touch were put in the crypt. Later, during high school and college years, I would have declared to anyone that emotionally present, happy, spontaneous and affectionate young women were superficial, fake and frivolous. The belief would have had the certainty of viscerally deep wisdom.

To believe, or realize, otherwise – that these were real people, living right – would have sent the walls of defense crashing, layers of walls collapsing down through my childhood when love and real feeling, critical needs, were starved. The pain would be a child’s pain but now made fatal by the sense of permanence, of absolute too-lateness. Many of us sense we are not whole, or wholly here, that something is missing. What is missing is our organic identity that comes from the parent’s love. Without that, we must find prosthetic identity, mostly in our head.

Terrorists are people who were born and raised without love. Say what you will about that, but understand that the child has to be loved for who he or she is, not approved or appreciated or solipsistically “loved” for being like the parent or what the parent needs. Terrorists are embodied pain from the first days and years of their life. Pain has sent their mind into rage-colored insanity, into escapist ideas. The more powerful the original torture and loss, the farther their need to escape.

What we can do to end terrorism is question parents, try to change them. I recently wrote to the parents of a 17-year-old client:

I would recommend that for the sake of ‘Jan’s’ psychological improvement (which includes his happiness and cooperativeness at home), you either find your way to perceive him as an adequately trustworthy young person, or provide him some tangible standard or timeframe he may reach to ‘qualify’ for your trust. From my perspective, I am a bit troubled by the idea that a child’s self-injury – or manipulation or anger or depression – should cause your disrespect or inability to trust him. All of those problems are generally better approached by empathy and a real investigation into his feelings and motivations. Of course, that is a big part of my job as counselor. But it’s also true that the greatest ‘therapy’ for a child must come from the home environment.

This way we’ll change the emotional color of the home, from time to time. Children won’t have to leave the earth and go into their heads. They won’t believe untrue things to protect their hearts. They won’t discharge pain in the present and future that came from the past.

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* A delusion is defined at MedicineNet as “a false personal belief that is not subject to reason or contradictory evidence” and at “Oxford Dictionaries” as “an idiosyncratic belief or impression that is firmly maintained despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality or rational argument.”

Splinters of a deep mirror (for M.G.)

Who knows why they “believe” in something, such as a conservative or liberal political philosophy? The shallowest reasons given will be thought reasons: “I believe we are our brothers’ keepers.” “I believe that individual freedom is the foundation of a humane society.” These explanations will be thin shellac because they point to deeper “why’s”: “Why do you place the right to own property over people’s suffering?” “Why do you think I should be forced, at gun point, to help someone whom you could help or who might help himself?”

Beneath the idea cloud will be a gut or feeling answer: “I care about people. But I can’t stand the super wealthy.” “I hate parasitical moochers, lazy people who want a handout.” “To me, humanity is One.” “To me, stay the hell out of my pocketbook.”

But we see that feeling answers must themselves be echoes of something else, some deeper place in the person. Along the way to searching for this something, we might find a world of phantasmagorical parts, splinters of a dark mirror.

The journey – blindfolded but touching things in that dark – might include:

“Personal freedom” brings up angry and frightened feelings in me. In my childhood, freedom was terrifying. I had extreme separation panic that was one with a core umbilical dependency. The image of being separate from my mother brought a calamitous surge of implosion horror. But there was never an emotional bond. Caesarian birth, weeks in an incubator, a stolidly depressed and probably unloving mother. I eventually set myself adrift, alone in feeling and thinking, always distant yet always dependent.

Dependency failed for a child who couldn’t reach out and whose incompetent world couldn’t reach in. My loss of my parents, and some unrecognized contempt for them, meant I wrapped myself in the bandage of “freedom” and “independence.” I remember conceiving “Insular!” as my self-enclosed rallying cry. The bandage became a banner.

But later, marital dependency, and looking back to childhood, made things better. I could lean on her and be a boy, sometimes. And because this is right – to be attached to a friend or partner or mother – the sense of human giving and sharing returned to me (there had been some seeds of it in my earlier childhood).

Yet (again), the connection has had grave limitations and I’ve remained mostly the insular island. And let’s not forget the contempt for powerful and clueless people, my parents; and the freedom, and the empty internal place where no nurturing had been given so no sustenance could later be given to others. Cold independence. Warm joining. Noble-desperate freedom. Needy love. All fused together. Were I less soft, less able to feel the mush underneath, I might label these feelings Libertarianism with a dash of ambivalence. That ideology has freedom, the aura of untouchable; it has contempt; it has the badge of honor; it has some heart. But I label myself nothing, no doctrine or political club, or identity. Nothing but the everything.

We can see that all of our convictions, not just political ones, are like this: thought made of feeling made of experience, sight made of blindness. A question: Is there some way to use this fact, that we think we are wise when we are atoms? I use it when I help clients see the source of their problems. But on a wide scale, for a society that does so many awful things, is there a way to show people their unknown mirror with its many pieces? Imagine if we all knew we came directly from childhood facts, birth errors, congealed bleeding, attitude-calluses formed. Wouldn’t there have to be some evolution of humility? Wouldn’t we step less cocksure, into that flammable fog?

Treatment points for "delinquent" boys

In 2006, I was the first and sole therapist for a start-up Residential Treatment Center – a therapeutic home for delinquent adolescent boys – in rural Ohio. I wrote the following guide* for the support staff whose job featured relating in a personable way to the boys and preventing and stopping their violent behaviors. (I forget what this staff’s title was at this center; in other places they’ve been called “crisis techs” or MHA’s – mental health associates. It wouldn’t be unfair to call them kindly bouncers.) Though the guide was quite psych- and theory-heavy, I wanted these workers to understand something of the inner natures of these boys, beneath the stigma and tendency to see them as corrupt or simply immature. With some built-in embarrassment, the material was titled –

The Deepy-Weepy, Huggy-Wuggy

Side of Treatment

Brief introduction to psychological and counseling concepts

that will apply to residential adolescents

☼

Main psychological concepts (applying to both adults and children)

“Everything is psychological.”  Some clinical professionals differentiate between children’s actions that are “mental health”-related and those that are merely “behav­ioral.”  This differentiation is sometimes used to determine if a child should go to counseling or the crisis center, or to court or jail.  But . . . everything is psychological.  Behavior always has deeper meaning, and it is valid to say it always has a darned good reason.  This includes negative behavior, positive, language use, how you walk, talk, eat, groom, breathe.

*****

“People are dysfunctional not because they think wrong or behave wrong, or (in general) have unbalanced chemicals or flawed genes.  People – including children – are psycholog­ically dysfunc­tional because they’ve been hurt and haven’t been given the chance or means to heal.”  The primary source of psychological pain in childhood (and derivatively, in adulthood) is the pain of unmet needs for love, bonding, visibility (“mirror­ing”), touch, attention, communication.  Otherwise put, we may love our children, but not necessarily in a way that reaches them.

*****

“Everything is behavior.”  That means: emotional/mental/tension states of the person manifest in the body and its actions.  This could be over-sleeping from depression, trembling from anxiety, restricting respiration in response to abuse or anger; over-working or over-exercising to channel away tension or feelings of emptiness; passively accepting abuse; it could be whatever brain processes are involved in dissociation (numbing out, daydreaming, “leaving one’s body”); it could be irritable bowel syndrome or ovarian cysts in response to sex abuse, and a constricted blood vessel and high blood pressure in response to stress.  Therefore, a child who appears healthy and mentally positive may still exper­ience symptoms of mental/emo­tional problems that are not apparent to him or to us.  Lessons: (a) The overt behaviors of our clients are the tip of the tip of the iceberg; (b) Don’t assume that things are fine just because they appear that way; (c) Don’t assume that positive behaviors are actually positive – they may be repressively self-medicative (self-soothing) behaviors.

*****

“The brain hates pain.”  For psychologically wounded people (most of us), the self is in conflict.  Pain “wants” to be expressed (i.e., the body wants to heal): outletted to the light and air of healing.  But the brain, averse to pain, wants to bury (repress, minimize, distract) it through the various defense mechanisms.  In many adults, everything you see may be a defense against psychic pain: TV watching, sleeping, workahol­ism, belief systems/atti­tudes, raging, destructive­ness, niceness, narcissism, silliness/immaturity, pseudo-matur­ity/indepen­dence, etc.  Therefore, promoting “positive” behavior and attitude, while good and essential in many ways, may hide the underlying “splinter in the soul.”  Note that in the Ron Clark story, when Mr. Clark found Taeshon injured and traumatized, he first consoled, nurtured, bonded, empathized with him before accentuating the positive (his artistic talent).

*****

“We must feel to heal.”  And, “We can only heal where we’ve been wounded.”  If you break your arm, you don’t bandage your leg.  If your heart is broken, you don’t “think” the pain away.  Psychological pain is imbedded in the holistic system – it’s not just “feelings” but nerves, chem­istry, muscles – body and soul.  We must acknowledge and express it – let it out.  We can’t think, act, talk or “positive attitude” it away – though these things may temporarily cover it up.

*****

From the concept that psychological pain must be outletted to be healed (a grieving-related process), that to bury and ignore our hurt (to put on a smile and soldier on) is to disown and harm our self, we realize that:

Sometimes the most self-caring, justice-giving thing the child can do is fail, rage, decline, drop out, crash-and-burn.  The child who is in overwhelming distress because of incest or other abuse at home, should act up in school, fail to maintain his high GPA, mutter, growl, whimper, refuse to attend, get sick, get depressed, get scared.  These behaviors are his language of self-affirmation: “I hurt!  I can’t go on like this.”  Adults need to hear this language and respond with understanding, compassion and help.

*****

One of the greatest and most elemental needs is for the child to be seen for who he is.  This is related to his need to be accepted (by the mother) for the exact, specific child he is, rather than be forced to warp his natural inclinations to satisfy the needs and expectations of his parents (“You will be silent; you will be lady-like; you will be an athlete; you will get straight A’s; you will play the piano; you will be impressive to make me look good.”)  In therapy, this gift of acceptance and deep visibility is, essentially, life-giving and curative.

*****

By the way . . . mental health diagnoses are not actual entities or disorders – like medical diseases – but are symptoms or groups of symptoms or defenses against, some earlier injury in the person.  While there will assuredly be a biological, or brain, component to the problem, there is no proven reason to assume that the brain is the “culprit” in the problem – life is the culprit.  (Scenario: In a lonely mood, you’re walking along the railroad tracks at midnight, lost in thought.  Suddenly you are immersed in a blinding light, you feel a rumbling under your feet, you hear the shriek of the whistle.  You look behind you to see a locomotive barreling down upon you.  You can guarantee that every chemical in your body [and brain] is going to be very imbalanced.  You can also be sure that you should blame the train, not your brain, for your “chemical imbalance.”)

*****

Anger is a complex emotion, and can often be considered derivative (secondary) to earlier, truer feelings.  A child may think he feels only anger when his father hits him.  Primary to the anger, however, is a transient shock of hurt and betrayal.  He may want (need) to cry.  But the exper­ience of being so open to his pain and being responded to coldly, mockingly or abusively, is intolerable.  (It is like bleeding profusely in front of someone, who then just walks away.)  It is unsustainable and must be killed.  Anger may then rise up from the corpse of hope.

*****

The child acts out negatively because at some point earlier in his life, he com­municated his distress directly and accurately (such as by whining, crying, yelling), and no one grasped the meaning of, or accepted, these expressions.  Transitioning from crying or whining to breaking things and harming siblings is not essentially a matter of conscious choice.  The building blocks of this transition include unconscious processes of loss of hope (desperation and desolation), shutting-in pain, and alienation.  If the child’s true and articulate communication is unheard, he will have the terrible feeling of being isolated and alone even in the presence of other people – even in the presence of those who are supposed to care about him.  He will have, in effect, no rational outlet for his grievance.  Also, the passage of time will solidify his alienation from others, and possibly more significant, from himself.   Because, as we saw in the point above, painful feeling that is not helped and healed is intolerable to contain, and must be split off in oneself.  The child represses and thereby disowns parts of himself.  This self-distancing leads to “distant” communications to others – indirect, apparently incomprehensible yet eloquent messages of pain in the form of destruction and aggression.

*****

A history of being unheard and unhelped may cause the child to grow emotional scar tissue over his hurt, in order to survive.  In order not to be open to pain felt and pain caused, he may become unfeeling, tough, alienated from others.

*****

He will also tend to make his jail into his haven.  That is, he’ll take his negative responses to the world and consider them positive.  (This is a way to experience less pain.)  The anger and disconnect he’s had to cultivate in himself to numb his pain, will now be thought of as tough, manly, “cool.”  The quiet, shy and isolated person will see himself in more romantic terms, as a “loner.”  The incested girl (or boy), now oversensitized to sexuality, may see her/himself as sexy and seductive.  Therefore, you will see children wearing their injuries and self-harmful stances as badges of honor.

*****

Such a child will typically have – despite his show of bravado and big ego – a terribly impaired self-esteem.  It may be excruciating for him to be in environments of love and caring, and (more peer-related), in the presence of other kids’ success and healthy lifestyles.  The contrast with his own state of poor self-value will be too glaring and painful.  A yet more fundamental dynamic is that exposure to health and love – even when offered to him – will trigger feelings of his own long-term, entrenched deprivation and loss, which he will feel compelled to run away from, by running away from the love and kindness offered.  Therefore, while we may work to gradually “win him over” to accepting our care, it is just as likely that whatever success we have may be experienced by him as a crisis of healing – where he must, with tremendous courage, break down his wall of defense and “collapse” into his “un-tough,” younger and needier identity – figuratively to collapse into the arms of loving parent-figures.

*****

Children cannot “grow up too fast.”  Youngsters adopt a pseudo-mature and inde­pendent persona when they haven’t been allowed to be needy and securely dependent on nurtur­ant/authoritative (loving and strong) parents.  (This is sometimes called “reversal of dependency,” where the parents are immature and wanting, and the child may have to parent them.)  It doesn’t always mean these are bad parents.  They may be “depleted” – exhausted – or may have bought into an overly liberal or permissive parenting style.  The child buried beneath the pseudo-adult identity can’t grow beyond itself as its needs have never been met.  Therefore, the individual who “grew up too fast” has actually never grown up, and may be plagued by countless manifestations of immaturity throughout his life.  (An example would be the 15-year-old boy, in youth jail for murder, who was seen lying on the floor, in fetal position, sucking his thumb.)

*****

As a child cannot grow up too fast, so he cannot raise himself and have full psychological integrity.  He will be a young adult with “feet of clay”: adolescent and child fused; teenager and baby combined.  He may both seek parent-figures and defend against his critical need for parent-figures.  He is fighting with himself and consequently, with you.

*****

Final Points

Just as negative behaviors are more than they seem, so positive attitudes and behavior are more than, and sometimes very different from, what they seem.  They may be, of course, consciously manipulative tactics to “pull one over” on authority figures.  But they may also be unconscious “covers” to pain – ways to run away from what’s underlying.  I’m sure you’ve known many adults whose cheerfulness and energy can instantly deflate into depression; or someone who “looks and acts good” but feels bad or empty.  These phenomena indicate years of layers of growth and evolution – of behavior – resting on the quicksand of an unhealed past.  This is as true of children as it is of adults.

*****

To help the kids, we must care for and encourage them, but we must not be blind to where their behaviors come from.  We must see the damaged roots, not only the broken branches.  Nor should we merely manicure the leaves and think we’ve carried the whole child.  We must help them find truer, more curative expressions of their hurt.  For example, saying their grievance rather than breaking something – while we are preventing their destructive behaviors.  The child must be truly listened to, without the adult inserting her own thoughts, feelings and expectations into his mental life.  To do that is to deny his pain an exit.  An example of this would be where the child says dejectedly, “I’m just a stupid screw-up.”  While your tendency would be to reply, “No you’re not – you’re a good kid,” this response tells him You are not listening to me.  You are not caring about how I feel.  Or, My feelings must be wrong, or unimportant.  Or, My sense of reality is flawed and I can’t trust it.  So, while you wouldn’t want to agree with his toxic self-assessment, you would be well served to show him that you actually hear him: “Bobby – you’re feeling really down on yourself.  Tell me more.”  This gives him the gift of feeling clearly heard – something everybody needs and too few of us ever get.  After­wards, you may give him the encouragement of your positive feeling about him.  Here’s another example (from Vereshack):  A little girl comes home from school.  “Mommy,” she cries, “the teacher was unfair to me today!”  Mother looks at her child and says, lovingly, “Honey, I’m sure the teacher was just doing his job.”  This could – admittedly at a subtle level – be considered mental abuse.  Now, despite mother’s kindly manner, the child sees that her feelings amount to nothing; she feels unheard; she may now feel the door is closed: she can’t go to her mother with her real feelings and thoughts.  Or alternately, she may accept mother’s view­point and start to distrust her own grasp of reality.  We need to listen and acknowledge the child’s emotional frame of reference; otherwise, he will continue to hide his pain, his truth, beneath apparent change and growth.

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* I haven’t changed, corrected or improved the original material.

I’d like to add that this information won’t apply to the true psychopathic (“callous and unemotional”) child, except at the purely theoretical level, as my thinking goes. That is, these are children who have been psycho-biologically injured pre-birth and perinatally, are holistically damaged – on fire, essentially – as the blueprint of their lives, and therefore cannot be receptive to nurturant-authoritative or other healing approaches.