My hippie moment #2

There will always be someone coming along who changes the world. Whether an Aristotle or a Hitler, Einstein, Gates-Jobs – somebody will change the channel of the river we flow down, though the destination will be the same. Actually, some changers will create a different destination – one’s inner sense of meaning that travels on through one’s years. Hitler changed meaning for many people. But I doubt that the invention of the computer or smartphone or automobile can change any person’s fundamental capacity for happiness or unhappiness, her deepest center. Idea systems – Platonist or Marxism or Christianity or Ayn Rand’s Objectivism – can alter an impressionable person, but not someone who thinks on his or her own. I was once a Randian capitalist-egoist-rationalist, but it faded away decades ago.

Mostly we are each alone in a populated world of objects and events, discoveries and wars, politics and the great classics and popular songs, colored lights and news stories and the millennium, where all of it is just the dim backdrop to our own life. None of these fantastic things gives us meaning. We have it from other sources.

Music is deceptive. I can listen to some classical piece and while it plays I’ll feel like a different person, from ganglion to soul. A Gershwin turns me into a worldly New Yorker of the 1920’s. Rachmaninoff’s Second Concerto puts me in a universe where a celestial choir does sound and reveal the noble meaning of everything. A Grieg Lyric Piece or folk tune and I am a poetic peasant, Norwegian mountain variety. Chopin, and I am the drastic child who was ahead of his time in neurotic feeling. But end of piece, these changes evaporate immediately, completely.

I may be less susceptible to internalizing meanings than many people, partly because of my dysthymic placidity, partly because I no longer look for them. The dysthymia means that baseball or travel or possessions don’t give me a powerful feeling. Only two things do: my marriage and my work. When I’m sitting with clients, though, an instinct always kicks in that says benefits like a relationship, a job, a relocation, a hobby, a pet, a clean bill of health, are good meanings. I know these are right, though they are better than I can do.

I think one thing could give me another piece of meaning. If someone were to invent a personal starship that traveled with the “spooky action” Einstein abhorred: vast distances instantly, or pretty much that fast. I think that would do it – seeing new sights and always going toward the mystery that no one will ever solve. But . . . .

I doubt that I’d be able to leave my wife or my work.

The Lady Shop*

Part I

Is there anything we can make of the fact that a counseling practice I have joined part-time** has an overwhelmingly female clientele (maybe ninety percent) who want to see a female therapist? I am the one man at a Lady Shop that is quietly Amazonian in feel. I believe I have an attitude about this, thought it remains unplumbed and open to reason.

Life coaching, EMDR, womanly empathy, sisterly encouragement, motherly-like love. The natural camaraderie. The comfort of not sitting with a male therapist while opening up about sexual abuse five or forty years ago. Pretty offices with imperative-inspirational slogans on the walls (“do what you love, love what you do”; “yesterday NOW tomorrow”; “You are worth your weight in [gold bar image]),” and many pillows. Where are the floaty go-nowhere music and aromatherapy?

One of my big ignorances about the history of psychotherapy is: I do not know when the drastic surgery of psychoanalysis and depth therapy turned into happiness promising and quick-fix making. When did shrinks in their cloistered offices turn into sunshine and lollypops, smiling ads, “strength,” “solutions,” numerically measurable “objectives” and “goals,” cookie-cutter “trauma” techniques, guarantees of joy, twenty-four-year-old Social Workers with gentle empathy and 10-oz. CACREP theories under their belt, life course redirection and better thinking inserted into malleable brains?

I wonder but do not know: Is there a causal link between the two – the rising of the sea of female therapists and the sea change to love and positivity? Is it therapists’ competition with psychiatric drugs, like Hanukkah competes with Christmas?

Part II

I have for once held a deliberately depressing session. The client, mid-forties, had been adequately successful, worked as a handyman, had many abilities. He would also periodically lose what he’d gained through neurotic relationships, becoming bored with a town and moving on, sabotaging himself in small fry ways (hobbled by warrants after failing to pay parking fines, for example). One day he got in an automobile accident that caused him some mild-to-moderate neurological problems – decreased alertness, iffy depth perception.

He never worked again.

In sessions, he sullenly described his incapacities, the unpayable warrants, his helpless attorney, the Disability Income litigation limbo, his failure to get a break of any kind. I listened, offered encouragements and empathy. And when he finally asked – with masked frustration – for some feedback, I said:

‘People such as you and I came from a depressive home that blocked and bled our natural energy, our capacity for a passionate true north. So as adults we carry within us an empty anchor. We are held back at the root. And this root makes success feel subtly tragic, some kind of wrong. Now you have gotten hurt, and the early injuries of your childhood have been re-proven. Once again no one is there to see or care. You can no longer move on. You “can’t work,” though I am sure you could if you could ignore your inner truth, as adults do.

‘I think we have to know our anchor, and how our range has been narrowed by our childhood. If you then have compassion for yourself, you can look outward from the lower hills and valleys. You won’t be punishing yourself for mountains that don’t exist. You can then find smaller gems. You’ll be in your own world, not the one that was supposed to be.’

My client fell into this session, participated at a deeper level than he had in the months before. I’m not assuming, as we exited the office, he was happy. But he seemed to have something new moving inside, something brighter.

What do you think, ladies?

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* This is Dry humor, or wet seriousness #3.

** I have since resigned.

Negligible #1: The superior white men

We’d like to be able to find some statement of such great power that it would stop these universal haters and ungrown white men in their tracks and turn them from sickness to health. Acknowledging the magicalness of that thought, I guarantee that therapy’s words can at times give a person a sudden new awareness of himself, altering his inner landscape and his approach to the world. More often, though, we are only a hand shaking the topmost leaves of his tree and the trunk remains unmoved.

It feels almost compelled to insult and have hateful contempt for these desperate, rageful adolescents. Their greatest agony, which they project into the atmosphere, is that they were punished and love-starved children who had to grow up. They were crying, brutalized infants and youngsters who were taken from themselves: They had to get older. Hurt, they needed to be helped in the crib, held by mommy in their childhood bed. But they had to grow up, leave their true but invisible real self behind, and live like adults. The pain of this discongruity is a death that goes on forever. It may as well be the eternal hellfire of the Bible.

“Strong” men need to become weak to get better. They need to have their pain touched by a father-figure, a mother-figure, so they’re not carrying their burden by themselves. I’ve seen this happen in therapy: a solid man – a medic returning to Afghanistan – whose face transformed to his six-year-old when he remembered the compassion he had missed, the coldness he received, a little boy. But I, like you, can hardly imagine that happening to the members of the masses in their camo and gear, raging together, feeling the womb-like warmth of fellow haters. They don’t want my warmth.

So we see around us as much pandemonium and failure as there are atoms in the world. Man-children carrying into the grim battle of job or rally hundred-pound loads of their closed past; those who live on poisonous ideas – hate blacks and immigrants and Jews – as if they were the green ground and clean air. I wish there were a way to broadcast to all of them the truths of being a human being, truths that struck each one personally. I know there’s no such way. But this world could use a little magic.

Returning from El Jobean

Thirty-five years ago, on an evening in an early year of my first marriage, my wife spoke a four-word sentence that I believe is a key to Borderline Personality Disorder and other global warps of the self, including the peculiar problem of our president.

“E___” and I were driving back to Sarasota (FL) from a visit out-of-county. There had been a gathering of her friends, fossil hunting aficionados, at one member’s house. As usual, I’d been carried along by my neurotic passivity, sitting politely without identity, ignoring others’ enthusiasms. Suddenly I was jolted into a feeling of “queasy alarm.” E, engaged in the show-and-tell revelry, had tossed an autobiographical claim into her presentation. The discussion went on. I, however, could not return to my quiescent state.

As we drove through the night, I found that I had summoned the courage to say: “E, why did you tell everyone that you have a Master’s degree? You don’t have a Master’s degree.”

Her reply is the material I’d like you to consider. I will admit that I am only considering it now, first time, in any depth beyond its occasional usefulness in therapy sessions.

“Pardon me for living!” was her retort, intoned so righteously that hearing it, I felt the kind of innocent and stupid confusion only a young child can experience. I don’t remember, these many years later, if I rejoindered at all or what I might have said. But would any, or no, response have mattered? Could there be any answer that would join a shared reality?

Look at Trump and hear the man’s continual lies, which obviously feel as true to him as anything could or need be. Hear my ex-wife assuming – assuming – that her lie is valid and unquestionable. We could easily judge her as immature or as casually insane. Instead, let’s see her remark as literal. Pardon me for living. This is what I need for life. This is what I need to not disintegrate. We’d been married for over two years, yet I had never heard her say that phrase, so I don’t think it was a personal mantra, as was her over-worn “rude, crude and socially unacceptable” or “incest – it keeps it in the family.” It was sparked afresh by my throwing a terrible reality at her: a knife to her siege ego.

She was telling me that she had lived in fire and that oxygen would only make her burn up more. She was telling me that the way you are born is the way you live. She was angry because anger comes from being painfully bent, childhood on, and that’s who she had always been. “Living” meant struggling against the enemy, which was the strange present that had no love for her.

Borderline Personality, Masterson says, is the “deflated false self,” while Narcissism is the “inflated false self.” False is false, though, and when parents make this falseness live in the real world, it or the world must lose. A shadow doesn’t want light; a person on fire can’t be held and loved. Pardon her for living alone among us, in a different, darker atmosphere.

Don One

The narcissist wakes up in the morning and he doesn’t feel good. There is no automatic sense of glory, there is no basic happiness. His bedrock is not made of bright material. A troubled feeling – which he will either not notice or will misinterpret – sparks his self-medicative regimen. Thought (“I am perfect,” “I am uniquely special”) may precede and trigger a chemical sensation-emotion which is interpreted as superiority or powerful expansiveness, or the sensation may come first – triggered directly by the negative fog at waking or one later in the day – and bring some warm reminiscence of being admired recently or winning at something. These are chemical and ideational reactions not to the outer world: They are reactions to the deep self, the historical self that is a dark and unmade child. To escape, the brain and all systems have created an internality that is a perfumed bath, and that colors, uses, bends reality, makes it his name. That is to say, it is delusion, between orange and yellow on the spectrum of insanity.

This is what has duped its way into the White House.