When "strength" is impossible

Here is a fragmentary idea, vaguely described and hypothetically explained. It lingers in my brain and wants to be better understood.

There are adult clients who, during work on more fundamental issues, complain and grieve about their abuse-of-power parents or ex-spouses. A session starts off with actionable energy, or it seems so: Alarmed and insightful, they detail one indignity after another: divorcing husband calls Child Protective Services on his wife for malicious purposes. Parent treats live-in thirty-year-old son like a humiliated prisoner of war. Father forbids forty-year-old opiate addict daughter, who lost everything and had to crash at his home, from taking medication of any kind including her antidepressant. Grandfather sues his daughter for “grandparents’ rights” or custody, treats the little boy like a king, the girl like baggage. Mother slanders her daughter to their friends. Father restricts adult son’s use of toilet paper and doesn’t let him sit in “the master’s” easy chair. New stepmother barges in and harps every time son phones his dad (who probably colludes in his own pussy-whipping).

There is nothing suspect about these complaints, on their own merits. Fairly early on, though, I will get the sense that the client is in narrator mode. He has one predominant tone throughout the speech, an inscrutable one that brings to mind humorist Dave Barry’s compliment to readers who sent him grist-for-the-mill anecdotes: “alert.” There is no anger. There is no sense of resignation, victory contempt or rolling of the eyes. There is not a sense that this is a problem to solve. And it may be just when this mystery strikes one’s awareness that two equal but coup de grace ones appear: The client has chattered his litany for the entire hour. And my interventions have been unheard; they have had as much effect as a leaf flittering down upon a charging bear.

The leaf, though, eventually takes a stand. “You are naming all these crimes,” I say, “but I get the feeling that you are somehow one with them, are not really ready to do anything about them.” The client’s response is: “He drives me crazy! Sometimes I just want to sit in my room and be left alone, but he stands at the door yelling about how much gasoline I used or that I ate some leftover he wanted. And my mother doesn’t believe me: She and he are a perfect team, though she sometimes listens. When my sister visits, she always takes their side. I try to be as polite and reasonable as I can be. Sunday night I listened to him pacing – or marching – back and forth outside the bathroom door as I was doing my business. I guess he wanted me to know I was taking too long. . . .”

If only these clients were as single-minded and driven in their health as they are in their misery, their chains would be broken. Or it seems so.

What generates this reportage, this constant list of small rapes and murders and abandonments? How does the client say them and not revolt against the saying? Is there an unspoken feeling within him that I am not grasping? I wonder if it’s the feeling: “Daddy, mommy, please love me, don’t hurt me!” In these jeremiads, I have never heard that feeling, but is that what is left when all the other expected expressions are not there – anger, humor, strength, futility? If this is so, then therapy would have to reach that need, and help (frankly speaking) a pitiful client be more pitiful, a childlike client become the child. He or she would need to grieve past losses dug up and snarling in the present. And I would have to put aside my own sick need and not push the client’s anger and resolve and rejection of the parent. Strength is not what I think it is.

Onward and upward: Beyond our self and the world

A person can be born in trauma (soaked in mother’s depressive chemistry, ripped out by caesarian, shut away in an incubator); have no bonding; grow up out of sync with his age, with his peers, with life; repress and lose his feeling core and real self in his childhood; live an anxious dissociated then manufactured persona; grow a warped ideational field that covers just about everything; live an ambition or a momentum that is entirely non-real – not based in a core organic person who never existed.

And we will find him a normal, standard-issue person, like you or me. He may feel something wrong, but it won’t stop him from moving about in some mundane direction, and he won’t know it’s this wrong which is getting in his way. Or he may be bizarre or berserk or personality disordered or a comedian. But still, we’ll think this is just a person with flaws, a guy with some challenges.

He could be a malignant demon, and be Mr. Rogers.

What keeps us unreally stable is our mind, which lies on a bed of repression. Picture this simple fact: Assuming we are troubled anywhere close to the person described: If we lived only our feelings, were lost and mutantly made as can possibly be, we would be a ball of acid on fire, rolling like the apex of torture crazily through a hellish life. It is thinking and ideas and mental attachment that create the anesthetizing, counterbalancing stability for us. Pain and loss become “understood.” A completely absent sense of self (and self-esteem) is replaced by belief or hope or narcissism, or by perceiving – our cognitive eyes – the outer world not the inner one. A sense of never having been fully human (Modrow’s* idea about the disintegration leading to schizophrenia) is saved by delusional ideas. Serial or seamless tortures in childhood are Band-aided by inspirational sayings or crusades or by having the identity of PTSD.

The mind of thought and word comes in to give us a false stage, a dream that seems real. And a bonus value: Thought makes us feel mastery, feel powerful. We’re now in a place different from our pain, from our roots, from the rolling ball. The thought occurs that this deception is related to the phenomeno­log­ical problem: our adherence to a universe of surfaces, of appearance, with no capacity to know the essence. But it’s only a parallel, that we live an illusion of ourselves and see and think only an illusion of the world. There is little choice about the first, none about the second.

Psychotherapy, on this plane, helps us find some happiness or peace by mixing our need for the self-medication of thought with our need for organic feeling in a way that “works” for each person. It doesn’t know how it accomplishes this (and probably most often doesn’t know that it accomplishes this). Our work is noble and blind.

- - - - - - - - - - -

* One of my favorite books, John Modrow’s How To Become a Schizophrenic, quoted elsewhere in this blog.

Ramble #4: Various

What should we like?

* Small children are jazzed by, stuck on, the phenomena around them. Old people are moved not by the world but by their thoughts of it. They are inner-dwelling even though they talk about things. Their landscape is memory and the philosophy their body has produced. Imagine the opposite: Lying on your death bed and becoming preoccupied with some unfamiliar insect crawling on the sheet, you lose your last three minutes on earth and are gone. It seems like the most ludicrous waste, the comedy of death by banana peel. Yet new experience – a bug, a grass blade whistle, a sliver of a moon – is the meaning of life for the child.*

Is it bad or good that we gain a self but lose the world along the way?

* Following all the politics and pundits today is a substitute for being alive. We have become “social metaphysicians,”** Nathaniel Brandon’s term for individuals whose ground is other people not the ground itself. We are built into the attitudes and delusions of movements and alarms, not personal loves or creativity. I saw the embodiment of that in a twenty-year-old girl (it must be said) who lived on the bobbing heads of friends, false friends, acquaintances of friends, gossip and fears of opinions. She didn’t see herself apart from them. Ambition, absorption in an object, doing something with her life, had never entered the scene. Maybe the youngest children are a healthy blend of realms. Saturday morning – plans on what to do; afternoon, they’re playing ball or swimming, nighttime they’re catching and inspecting lightning bugs. At school, they are learning the world they are in abstractly; recess, they are swimming in the hive of community, personal prestige, victories with and against others.

Is there some right point on our timeline when we should have finished picking up tools and started building something? Or, stopped being mesmerized and started being galvanized? People who want to only study and get more learnèd, people who want to read and read and collect books, knead thoughts into pies in the sky – something is wrong with them. I really wonder: If you’re living in ideas, are you really living?

New elevator speech

I always continue to try to be a better therapist. Part of this urge is, admittedly, my fear that there are either some elemental truths or some next-evolve insight of therapeutic relating that I consistently miss. For years I have oriented new clients to what might be called “injury psychotherapy”: The deepest and most enduring help comes from finding the poisoned roots of our dysfunction and getting the poison out. This is done through knowing, expressing the internal, sending it to the perpetrators, cutting the umbilical cord to them. These processes make us be less poisoned and feel different, and that means we’re a different person.

But this speech doesn’t address the close, caring, even parental and loving relationship that actually becomes the atmosphere and yes, often the fallback of therapy. Is there a way to incorporate that into my basic introduction to – pardon the hubris – their soul?

The client has described some of “what ails.”*** I’ve asked several or many questions. Then –

I hope you’ll come to see me as a different kind of friend. That’s because therapy helps when it’s a different kind of natural: a truth-finding and truth-sharing beyond where people normally go. All the things you have never said but needed to; all the feelings you kept inside and didn’t get to live and breathe; the past lost or never known, the now you’re afraid to say: All that is good and right here. The one predetermined part of this endeavor is that you’d need to decide it’s important to you. I’ve seen people do not nearly as well if they just come on a lark, here and there, or when some troubling feeling presses them. I really think therapy should be a meaningful part of your life.

I might try that speech.

What should we like? part 2

It’s possible that the best way for the old man to spend his last three minutes is to watch that insect. He began in the world, and ended in the world.

- - - - - - - - - - -

* I mean, in an atmosphere of love. If love is missing, it will be a prepotent need that blanches or kills interest in worldly things.

** Nathaniel Brandon – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmQAnVh6K-4, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKfESlnzUjc.

*** Probably in the popular Love’s Executioner, Yalom says that “What ails?” is his opening question to the new client.

The defense mechanisms of "weak" and "strong"

Here are just a small couple of points that I’m sure most therapists have grasped. But they’re worth making explicit and adding to. We have a lot of women clients who are very confused about themselves. They say they have always been strong, or were always “the strong one” in the family. But now in their thirties or forties or fifties, something has happened: This strength has suddenly disappeared. They don’t know where it went, they usually don’t know when it left. Some of these women feel they are now falling apart. Others find they have something similar to the PTSD “foreshortened sense of the future”: Their hope and energy have gone; life feels that it is essentially over, there is nothing left to want or accomplish.

We have men and women clients who do not want to cry in session because they know it is “weak,” and they could not stand to feel this worst kind of weakness. Women are often in this place, too, usually the ones who became “strong” through their adolescence. In a world of coldness, parental immaturity and neglect and abuse, they became the toughened and suppressed carrier of responsibilities, the guarantor of the family’s or the siblings’ survival. Or in Child Protective Services and foster care, batted from place to place, they shut down but for anger and self-medication and a wounded form of selfishness or selflessness. They lost their child feelings, their silliness, hopes, they lost their ability to breathe easy or excitedly like a kid and now breathed with tension or deliberation. I’ve read (Dutton, I believe*) that men in Domestic Violence groups often look like sitting corpses. One can’t see their respiration. Beaten and debased children, they came to hold their feelings of fear, betrayal and rage inside by tightening their chest muscles and suppressing the “breathing of their emotions” in the moment when feelings would be the deepest weakness: the collapse of their heart, their death by shame.

Of course, the women were never really strong. They were just tight, lost, and they pushed themselves. As Claudia Black observed,** they had diversions and struggles through the up-slope to middle age, but then when the challenges were met or had burned out, they “plateaued.” The emptiness they’d lifelong been trying to both fill and run from re-materialized. Mother-naturely codependents become angry then. Selfless women become incompetently selfish: They can’t keep serving entitled people, but there’s not enough self to do for.

We tell the men and women that what they call “weakness” is just touching the truth of who they are, the deep pain of themselves. That’s theory and fact, but it’s not the reality in their bones. That says to cry is to break the shell of their adult, to lose themselves, become the child who is no longer there. But look: Since that’s their singular roots, and because it’s to face the pain of irrevocable loss, to cry is the most astoundingly brave, strong thing they can do.

I rarely think of strength and weakness in myself. I would cry as much as possible, knowing that if I were to break through the deepest barrier I would become the infant who did not survive for the most part. I’ve always been too weak to save money. I am so terrified of the fast-skittering, translucent-brown roaches and water bugs that prowl the sidewalks at night that I do a pink-out*** sissy-dance when I see two or more of them. But I own tragedies that I fear will still kill my mind in the last moments of my life – a really terrible fate – and I contain them with a terrible acceptance. I’d protect my wife from all danger, and perversely enough would relish it because I disdain my old cowardice. I accept that I may be working into my eighties, still five days a week. I believe I have no false hopes. For me, strength may mean nothing other than facing my oceanic flaws and injuries and finding, by luck, some good feeling nevertheless. And choosing that.

When we have a client who decries her loss of “strength” or who avoids feeling “weak,” we may say you shouldn’t have had to be strong like that. We may say it’s not weak to be real. It is true: We are asking them to become different from the person they did become. This is why therapy can be such an absurd adventure.

- - - - - - - - - - -

* Donald G. Dutton’s The Batterer – https://drdondutton.com/portfolio/the-batterer/.

** Claudia Black’s It Will Never Happen To Me – http://www.hazelden.org/OA_HTML/ibeCCtpItmDspRte.jsp?item=100.

*** A legitimate variation of a dissociative black-out or a domestic violence perpetrator’s “red-out,” as cited in Dutton’s book.