Ramble of rambles

I’m tired of all the conflict. I’m tired of negativity. I’m even tired of all questions, except one: What is the universe? That question, of course, could be phrased as several questions. One of the most irksome to me is: Is there such a thing as nothing? Is there no space between somethings? This surely seems possible to me if we allow that everything is built of one base element which we’d have to accept was irreducible. But then, what if there really is just one element – one particle that gives the appearance of differentiating itself into many different things and energies, simply by contorting here and there? Might it not shape-shift – infinitesimal near-nothing to expanding universe (maybe with no “big bang” explosion)?

We are faced with many paradoxes: Human concept of existence must disintegrate at every turn. Large can never be largest. Small can never be smallest. Time can never be quickest or slowest, or ever begin or ever end. Another paradox is that human genius can know a lot yet know nothing. We only react by determinism (that seems like freedom), and we only react to perception – to one’s self. That’s not knowledge, though it seems so (another paradox).

I think these are natural sights and intuitions that everyone should have if they tried. But that would mean the human best understanding, alpha to omega, must totally miss the boat on the nature of the universe. We can’t grasp it, will never understand it. Fortunately, as Woody Allen said, we can still get a good steak there.

I dislike walking around so ignorant. Adding insult to injury, there are brief moments when I feel trapped in the universe: nowhere else to go! We are stuck in this box! That is obviously a psychological aberration, but a valid one. A valid aberration – a paradox. There is also the paradox of child and adult. A healthy, untraumatized child has a great sense of meaning – strong feeling, love, wonder, fascination. But he hasn’t been smacked by the stupid news of mortality, and is too limited to be resigned or deadened to routine: He is ignorant. The adult has this “wisdom,” but has mostly lost the child’s blind enthusiasm and meaning-as-feeling: He is meaningless.

I have felt sorry for trees and animals. They are so alive, yet so jailed: by being planted still, by their instinct and a non- or minimally conceptual mind. I think we people are luckier to be able to suffer meaninglessness and ask unanswerable questions.

Do I want to live forever? Probably, but in a tolerable way. That would be to have a long lifetime then sleep a long, long sleep, a few hundred millennia. Then awaken. But . . . would that actually be a refreshing absence? Or would the monotony of living pick up right where it left off, with all that hiatus unnoticed? We may get to find out, if after our death and countless eons, all our atoms chance together again. We are back! How would that be?

A good day for me is when life seems as meaningful as a piece of fine classical music – a certain Percy Grainger or Chopin or Rachmaninoff, or Arcangelo Corelli or some others. All: the ultimate meaning, all illusion.

Oedipus Mother

Here are two short and blunt case histories that illustrate psychological irony. Their theme is: “I vowed I would never become the kind of parent my mother was.”

Neglect

A sixty-year-old client lives with her husband, adult daughter and son-in-law and two grandchildren. She does everything for her husband. He is somewhat disabled and quite willing to be helpless. The woman manages all the household chores: shopping, cooking, cleaning, laundry, errands, dog duty, minor home repairs. Adult daughter and her husband, home from their jobs, go upstairs to play video games. My client is essentially the parent to the two grandchildren. We don’t really know if the boys think of their parents as their parents. The daughter is lazy (depressed) and contemptuous and cold to her mother. Her husband is a non-entity.

When my client was young, with three siblings, she fell into a role. Her mother was a member of several bowling leagues and social clubs and rarely stayed home. Her father, consumed with the small business he was building from the ground up, was literally an “absentee landlord.” The little girl became her younger and older siblings’ caretaker. Psychology kicked in and ate away at her at the speed of desperation. Self-esteem, collapsed in her parents’ purposive absence, became her servant-doer persona. This is who she was: uncared for and caring. There was no time for insight there, but for one kind: She knew that when the time came, she would never be the neglectful mother that her mother was. She would always be present for her child.

As a parent, she remained what she had become: the selfless, helpful controller of all things. This need-identity dovetailed perfectly with her earlier promise to herself. She did everything for her baby – infant – child – teen daughter, supplanting her as central actor in her own life. Pampering became the kiss of death; the child’s initiative was unborn. Any sense, a subterranean din, that her daughter was an autonomous self, independent of her, brought a terrible panicky death feeling: I am nothing. Neglected. Abandoned.

So the woman who knew she would not be the absent parent became fully absent in an unforeseen way: She was blind to her daughter’s personhood, her need to think, act on her feelings, be her own initiator. She left her child unparented.

Failure

The fifty-three-year-old woman has felt, from her earliest childhood to now, that she is a failure. She was sexually abused “on the living room floor” at two and three years old. She was “thrown away from a young age,” and so abused and shredded that “now I can’t recognize abuse.” Her mother left; she went to foster homes. “I could never please her.” Her name was “bitch” at age nine. Father called her “whore” for getting raped in junior high school. She and a sister, transplanted into father’s new family, were the identified slaves: fed last, if there was any food left; asking permission to go to the bathroom. She “never felt I was good enough,” was told no one would ever want to be with her. One day in middle age her body began to speak its peace – as so many women’s bodies fail – psychosomatically from an opportunistic injury. All the heart-murder converted to “regional pain syndrome,” “fibroid tumors,” “neuropathy, neuritis, neuralgia,” “polycythemia vera, diabetes, R.A., chronic diarrhea,” “they’re checking for pre-leukemia.”

What she wanted for her daughter was that she not feel like a failure. So my client never let the girl quit anything – any sport mid-season, musical instrument no matter how undesired, hobby, class, youth group. The child was forced to finish, to succeed. But you can see this wasn’t guided by the mother’s bright inspiration, happy and loving encouragement. It was guided by fear and sublimated anger. It was the mother’s running away from her immanent sense of worthlessness. The girl also saw her mother – daily – beaten red by her father. You can look a little deeper and see that each success forced would conceal a fear of failure: That was the spirit behind it.

My client realized, in therapy, that she probably “confused” her daughter by her own poisons and contradictions. The young woman, almost thirty, is both a deep alcoholic and a highly valued worker. She is angry and controlling of her mother – threatening to have her ejected from the house – and weepy and clingy like a little girl when the panic floods her. Can she not feel like a failure, getting drunk nightly, pushing herself to succeed every morning?

These two histories aren’t meant to suggest there is some special, ineluctable force that makes us liars or traitors to our own purposes. Rather, that the widest principle – the past inhabits the present – is so valid it can be found in even the most painful, unfair scene: betrayal of oneself and another. A woman may not swear: “I won’t be like my mother.” But she will carry her unnurtured, ungrown self into her adult life, making her too empty, needy, blind and angry to nurture her child right. Her dependent will become, as deMause describes, a “poison container.”* The principle says: We are made healthy in early relationships, we are made sick in early relationships, we are made in early relationships.

I suppose there is something special about a mother who declares she will not fall into her own parent’s mistakes. She has a good goal, already an improvement on the previous generation. But I find it especially frustrating that she (and most people) will continue to live on their surface, a surface of hope and intentions, justice-making thoughts, resolutions. That is not where we live. Our engine is underground. Our blueprint is hidden in our history. We may say what we want – I’ll be a good parent, I’ll be a writer, next job I get I’ll stay with it and not quit. But we’ll be speaking a dream, a cloud blown away in the wind, until we awaken into our unconscious.

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* Lloyd deMause’s psychohistory website’s article – “The History of Child Abuse” at – http://psychohistory.com/articles/the-history-of-child-abuse/.

Ramble #3: Some frustrations and related issues

There have been many times when the best thing for a client to do would be to break down or explode emotionally in my office, to let the “primal” truth replace their entire lived persona. Yes, this is what official Primal Therapy does, or seems to do. And I admit I do not know its targets other than what Janov describes in his books. But I do not think that Primal’s surgical dive into the need for loving parents is really what I’m talking about. I believe I mean a more universal grief or pain or despair, even if its roots of course have to be in the earliest disconnections. That grief or pain or despair doesn’t happen, and it should. What are we crying for if we never had parents, never had any original connection? That was my case, and probably that of a fair number of my clients.

The clients don’t release this way. Despite my words, the pointing to childhood, the pointing to parents, the pointing to identity loss, the quiet, the time in the room, they slide all over the place elsewhere. Adding insult to injury, a small but poignantly aggravating number of them will say, when we’re getting into the thick of it, that they have “no one” to open up to.

Yes, folks: I have to remind them that “I am your therapist.”

Is there some existential collusion to make me feel impotent?

Another concern is my loss of conscientiousness in diagnosing. I am bored with and almost completely oblivious to the diagnostic labels. This has happened over the past few years, and has been abetted by the new DSM 5 psychiatric roster. Did you know that everyone, pretty much, is Unspecified Something? Unspecified Depressive Disorder. Unspecified Anxiety Disorder. Unspecified Psychosis. Unspecified ADHD. Unspecified Adjustment Disorder. I might as well write down: “They got stuff.”

But . . . what makes this interesting and right is the fact that specific diagnosis is meaningless and vague diagnosis is accurate. My clients don’t have a discrete disorder; they have a hurt, bent life. They don’t have “depression.” They have what depression is. It’s their lost childhood and the peculiar pain of it. It’s all the precious time gone by, heading toward old age, when they never even reached the starting gate. Every day or year that adds on is heavy emptiness. Heavy depression. Or – they don’t have “anxiety.” They have a body electro-chemically charged with fear, from birth or childhood. Let’s go to that fear rather than to anxiety in the here-and-now via Xanax or meditation.

I believe that’s all my frustrations.