Hope is regressive

I’m a bit angry at one client whom I know I didn’t help, though he had four years of sessions – my longest term of therapy yet. This was back in Ohio, I’m now in Nevada, so I can look from a distance with some disdain. Yes: I don’t blame myself. I imagine having done more, which would have required stretching my identity to much more social-worky, heart strings-pulling, “savior complex.” But the real therapy I do didn’t work.

This was a young teen, now in his early twenties. The personality disorder of callused-over grief and acrid cynicism was already deeply in place, probably long before he came to see me. I had plenty of empathy for his burned soul, and appreciation for him. We laughed, we walked, we had weekly snacks, my wife and I took him out. He liked some moving classical music, that may have reached a better, wanting part of a different person. But the inner core did not change.

I talked to him about his inner core, admittedly an odd therapy angle for a young teenager. But the purpose was to get him to feel it and to share it with me. Schools of psychotherapy always talk about “the relationship” as the most important factor in healing. I agree, mostly. But a relationship based in laughter and care for the “now” person is like those fantasy stories where someone dead, their spirit is reaching out and calling for contact, but everyone looks through him, can’t see him. The real person, the boy in the young man, was the hurting core that wanted to reach out but was afraid to.

I couldn’t get it to reach out to me in four years, though I could see in.

And now, from a distance, I advised him to get back into therapy. I explained – as I had in the waning days of our sessions and possibly even earlier – that as a child he would still need to be a child, would not be able to grieve the past because he was still in it, with “neurological hope” for a loving all-embracing parent. Now a nominal and necessary adult, he might be able to have some distance from his unhealed past, grieve it while giving up on it. In a critical way, that is what so much therapy requires: as Janov said, becoming hopeless for that which you could not and will never get.

The flaw is that he could not buy into being an adult, even at twenty or twenty-one. With alcohol as self-medication – the later mother’s breast; with the stubborn personality disorder; with depression, he remained the hoping little boy.

I sure hope he puts the goddamned bottle down soon.