Soldier boy and soldier girl

I remember reading in an Intro Psych book, many years ago, this fact: Viet Nam War soldiers diagnosed with post-traumatic stress were not “simply” those who had suffered singular or cumulative overwhelm or a near-death experience during combat. Rather, these were individuals whose recent crisis lay upon the porous ground of childhood troubles. I think it will benefit clinicians to take this as both baseline assumption and treatment inspiration for those in the military – women in the higher percentage, according to a recent NPR report – who have attempted or completed suicide.

The most wrongheaded aspect of the numerous therapy approaches to battle trauma is the assumption that these soldiers are the persons they seem to be: adult, competent, strong yet mortally stressed, in a career they’ve chosen with open eyes. Psychology knows that early injury – on a continuum of incest and brutality to neglect and lack of empathy – creates the base of later problems. We know, too, that personalities are formed in the crucible of childhood pain; personalities that see the world through self-sacrifice and need, through immaturity and anger, through errant convictions, through fatalism and revenge. And there is reason, coming from the therapy room, not to be surprised that certain backgrounds lean to certain career choices. Troubled kids’ inner fragility often gravitates to an interest in forensic science and criminal justice, to a desire to join the police or the military.

Why does someone want to become a “killing machine,” a passive actor in a world of hierarchy, discipline, medals, vigilance and the inebriating ether of macho, in a time when his or her country is not under threat? Could there be a problem embedded in that? The teens I see in therapy who wonder about the military are lost selves, though you have to look below their stubborn surface to see that. They are creatures of anger and sadness fused together, acid opinions thrown at wide targets. They were held down in their childhood injustice yet are trying to look outward. At some moment they may have felt like suicide, but would leave the house and go to the woods to hunt or the street to skateboard. Their fathers may never have talked to them, but harshly or distant.

There are countless ways this background might be ignited – not only by the military, but by the adult world itself. Rejection by a girl- or boyfriend. Failure to be interested in the job; having a belittling boss. Scattering of childhood friends to moves, drugs, college, marriage. Next to the mundane world, the military would be a forest of matches to their pool of gasoline. Powerful father and mother figures – and frozen regression to that dynamic. Forcible growing up. Friendships based on similar wounds, macho and aggressive dreams. And in the extremis of trauma and death and killing, the love for their fellow soldier is forged stronger but more desperate than all the life they ever knew, because that is when they were most alive and most dying: the greatest beauty melted to the greatest ugliness.

These are ungrown boys and girls for whom death, the end, became the norm before they became their own life.

If you want to help the wounded soldiers, you must be kind and cruel enough to point them to their child inside. Turn the clock back, let them know their anger came from hurt, their present from their past. You cannot accept they are their warrior self, this character that says “yes, sir!” ten thousand times and marches off to kill strangers. Suicidal souls are not “simply” in pain, but have never gotten their pain out, have never expressed it, given it to a strong heart, a listening person. If in therapy you see only the soldier, as empathic as you may be, with care and camaraderie and the telling and retelling of his story, and eye movement therapy and peer support and Suicide Hotlines, he can only be the soldier, and the deeper, younger person will remain unseen and unheard, and possibly too lonely to keep going on.

Human cosmology #2*

It annoys me, it gnaws at me with aggravation, that photons travel at, well, the speed of photons – the speed of light – the top speed of the universe as Einstein would have it, as if they were cursed or blessed with rabid energy without appeal. It’s absurd to me that these tiniest of massless particle-waves (that is to say, minim mysterioso**) work so damned hard as their nature, their root existence. Other things stop, start, slow down, stumble, peter out, rest. Does a photon, in the relative vacuum of space or air or water or Jell-O, ever weary, lose energy, get the stuffing knocked out of it, die? Why in the hell not? Huffington Post headline, July 2013: “Photons Last At Least One Quintillian Years, New Study of Light Particles Suggests.” (A quintillian is a billion times a billion.) How utterly convenient that photons are just what we need, and travel as fast as we need them to, in order to see. Outside of that, what could possibly be the purpose for all that mindless drive?

Photons are my symbol for the incomprehensibility of the universe: Lord Nobody’s joke on human consciousness. Pure, relentless energy that never dies? I thank God that I don’t take them as the role model for my life: I have practically no energy and find the idea of chronic, or even predominant, movement (“progress,” success, struggle) laughable in a caustic way. I don’t even have racing thoughts. Like many spiritual people, meditators and the dysthymic, I value the idea and fact of stillness – a quiet, or empty, or perceiving, or just emotively sensing mind, gazing out from a mountain top or at a starry night. But inside that mind there is plenty of movement: electrons, fluids, blind busy nature. I wouldn’t want any photons in there, little bastards!

I think we are most fooled when we believe we are different from the momentum sludge of the cosmos. Even a professional deep thinker like Sam Harris, who has argued intricately against free will, wants the possibility that consciousness is a separate existent that may survive death. He’s an atheist, but that is his substitute for God. What if we – our thoughts, beauty, loves – are just the same celestial wheel of All, turning inexorably? As meaningful as a facial expression molded in clay? Though not a pleasant thought, that seems it would put an upward limit on the power of our passions, our direst screams, our deepest needs, where soul would revert to molecules. As light speed is supposedly the upward limit in nature.

This is why we need, ultimately, more feeling than awareness. We just want to feel love, in the end, not sense its limits.

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* https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2013/10/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none_27.html.

** I made that up.

The seeds of our politics

My political opinions should be acceptable to everyone, because I dislike all politicians, parties and ideologies equally: Hillary, Trump, Bernie, democrats, liberals, socialists, conservatives, republicans, alt-rightists, libertarians. To me they are all wrongheaded because they are systems, and their believers, that grew from individuals’ childhood psychology – from feelings – which can never accurately translate or be “projected” into universal policy. The political world today is an acting out of this interior logic: “I hurt, so the entire world must pay and be prevented from ever hurting me again.” All ideologies, in their bare essence, follow that logic. Differences are due only to the nature of the hurt and one’s defenses against it.

A liberal may be someone who, early on, suffered powerful, controlling people such as parents or teachers or bullies. He may have been inculcated to a bent-over self-esteem that says we are our “brothers’ keeper.” In his adult life, he will value the poor by despising the wealthy and powerful.

A conservative or libertarian may have been an ego-less and falsely loved child who manufactured self-esteem from a creed of alienation, individuality, ultimate autonomy (“I own my life, and therefore all the property and goods that come from my individual effort”). Out of touch with his own heart, he will not see, or want to see, the heart in others.

While it is easy to object to my idea that all who believe a dogma or have joined a political club are injured “inner children,” this is more apparent if we look at the defense mechanism of dissociation. Dissociation is the burying or stifling (repression or suppression) of our pain – practically the Operations Manual of childhood. We lose touch with our Self. In that lost place, we become more suggestible, impressionable, to where a network of disparate notions (capitalism and socialism sleep together in both major parties) or agendas can be “believed” as if they were a singular principle. Secondly, children’s self-suppression is the incubator of global attitudes that, again, gravitate to emotional ideologies. Who, after a moment’s awareness, can’t see that our lofty political systems are feeling systems – ‘They need, you must provide, I deserve, they don’t deserve, we demand, get off my lawn, get a job, distribute your wealth or we’ll do it for you’?

We are children who grow up to carve our pain and our attitudes in granite and in our politics. Maybe because of this deep flaw, we should turn back, like children, to the golden rule.

Molecular mess #4*

This is another light self-observation. Presently my life is different: I have, for family caretaking reasons, removed one of my five workdays and now have a three-day weekend – Saturday, Sunday, Monday. My small Saturday cash practice ended. This means that all three days are at my disposal. My wife, a hospital nurse, does three 12’s that coincide with my time off. So not only can I be quite indolent; I have especial alone-time freedom from 6 p.m. to 8 a.m. three days in succession.

The result has been a lesson in the psychology of a peculiar dysthymic person – or maybe of many persons. Depression, strange happiness, boredom, much questioning of myself, some anxiety, are all at play and mitigated by my personal philosophy of acceptance. I find that in an entire evening, the only ambition I have is to write an article. But that has to wait for an idea, and an idea usually has to wait for new experiences in sessions. So, like a meditator, or a tree that sees its landscape day and night but doesn’t move – not like an animal as I don’t excessively sleep or have strong instincts – I do little but exist in the world. Pretty much, in my apartment. All those moods stir. I come home from work; my wife has already left; and I have a delicious feeling to be alone with the full evening ahead of me. During which I will do almost nothing. (I know that if I had no wife, there would be no delicious feeling. I can be very dependent from a distance.) I’ve discovered, surfing, that I no longer like science fiction movies unless they’re recent and deal with interstellar travel, no monsters, or future time-travel. I would rather read a hundred cereal boxes than watch movies about drug cartels, the ’hood, and international espionage. Most dramas are depressing to me, because the people are psychologically botched yet this is presented as interesting and deep.

I wonder about meaning. I’m reminded of Slomo (see New York Times video), the early-retired psychiatrist who finds great meaning in the momentum of roller-blading day and night and conjuring fantasies (what he calls a “personal delusional system”). To me that’s all fake. Yes, movement can give you a sense of purpose or meaning. Yes, fantasies can feel good. But it’s all temporary, contrived.

Is there any meaning and purpose for adults that is not temporary, contrived, delusional?

I admit that in a very rare moment I imagine being magicked: being given a meaning by the recondite turnings of inner nature, or by the arrival of aliens in a big, beautiful spaceship. Mostly, though, I wonder what is left to those of us who do not have the wild hair of happiness or drive. My assumption is that there are the few among us, such as writer Ray Bradbury, whose original fuel packet of joy was never buried or poisoned. But the rest of us are also part of nature’s blueprint. There must be something right about it.

No matter how lousy, or nothing I feel, when I step out the door at dark and feel the breeze or stillness, see the far-off lights (yes, it’s The Strip and Vegas and Summerlin) and the regular dots of small planes over Henderson, see the moonlight on the path, and walk, I am good. But I know that were I to come out at, say, 4 a.m., and stay ’til the dawn and a bright day, the ‘good’ would evaporate and something else would have to engage. The day: too real, too demanding of action. That’s when I’d probably Slomo in some way or another. But before long, I will have my four days to see clients. Good, nice, engaging moments. Always meaning. I will wonder, though: What do they do in their hours between struggling?

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* https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2014/07/molecular-mess-3.html

* https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2013/10/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none_10.html

* https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2013/10/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none_6.html

Hippo Birdie Two Ewes

I may have a little debate with myself, tonight, about whether to write to my sister or not. In casual fashion, I “disowned” my surviving family some years ago. That is, I performed the ceremony in my head, with the exception that my sister knows I feel rejecting.

My reasons for being so cold are two: an immature and a mature one. The first is that I remain to this day the hurt, abandoned child who has always been unseen by all of them, and if they will not open their eyes now, screw them. My sister (nearing 71, I believe) and I have written deep-think earnest letters sparsely over the years, but I still judge that she knows nothing of empathy, cannot get, or see, outside of her polished armor over childhood injuries. The mature reason is that I have never – owing to birth trauma, early anxiety, and the neuroses of my parents – experienced the slightest atom of affection or emotional neediness for any family. Psychic neediness, yes: In fact, I will never grow beyond the loss of bond with my mother. That I feel nothing is, I believe, an honest and even high-integrity reason not to pretend, or make, a connection, even as we travel our final decades or years.

For a long time I let myself conflate need with affection. I’d write, have an ephemeral burst of faux-bright feeling, assume “the clan.” The others were more honest: They didn’t need it, couldn’t fake it, and even in high-opportunity moments remained cordial, distant, non-giving. There are two reasons for that: They were not reaching-out types; and for most of my life I was invisible, lost, unreachable. Only now, with a couple decades of self-birth and growth under my belt, would communion be possible.

But it won’t be.

Barbara –

Happy very serious birthday.

Do you remember the dogs we had when we were kids – Lady and Waggles? Do you remember anything about them? I only have the sadness of repressing my memory and feeling about them, because I repressed my life as it was happening. Did our parents get rid of Lady because a neighbor complained of her barking? Really? Did they keep our fox terrier outside? I remember nothing. What was she like? How long did we have her? I remember that I never grieved. I never knew what happened to her when and after it happened. How could I have been so meaningless in the family? I think I loved my dog, though I doubt she was mine. Mother’s? And Waggles. I don’t remember ever playing with her, but I can almost feel a happy stirring. Was I actually too shut down to get close to my own dog? I remember one night, sitting on the living room floor and seeing mom and dad carrying him (her? I don’t remember what sex Waggles was) out the door in a big cardboard box. She looked awful. All I remember or believe I heard, later, is that she had swallowed a chicken bone and was bleeding internally. I was never told things sitting down, to my face, with any attention to my response, my feeling, but only offhandedly as a perfunctory act, an aside. She never came home again. There was never a word spoken about her. I don’t know if I grieved. I remember nothing. Were you there? Did you notice we had dogs? Did you ever play with them, or hold any of the cats, or was your life too elevated on a different, superior plane for that?

– F.

I don’t know how many of my clients had lives so detached from themselves and parents and family. I don’t think I’ve heard, in twenty years, any of them describe an alienation this drastic: It’s always family problems, distance, pain, need, enmeshment; abuse in childhood and sick bonds into adulthood. But I can’t be so unique. Maybe even depth therapy clients don’t want to look in utterly cold places. One thing, though: I believe it’s made me a better therapist: understanding a bit more of human potential.

Theatre of farce and illusion

Not to brag, but I am certain that the term “lost soul” would lose face to the point of humiliating death were it to know how lost and non-functional a person I was at twenty-six and newly in a relationship. It was my first real relationship, and saying that, this image forms: “one to nothing,” as in a baseball score. But in my case, it meant there was one person on the field – my future wife – and in my place a non-existent, a cosmic error masquerading as a person.

Up to that point, I had wandered around on Greyhound buses, had been an embarrassing blight in music graduate school, had been a narcissistic waste of my parents’ money in college, had been so many kinds of neurosis growing up from childhood through my teens. Had certainly begun in birth trauma: failure at the starting gate. In the same way a comatose person can’t elevate himself off the hospital bed and push a boulder into the sky, I was incapable of answering, or even knowing, these questions: “who am I?” and “what am I feeling?”

Essentially, I was as clueless and unformed at twenty-six as I had been at four. But I could type, and worked as a typographer.

There came a day, maybe half-a-year into the relationship, when I experienced an unavoidable sensation: I felt bad. Not good, in the molecularly recondite and unknowingly meaningful way of neurotic feelings. Why was I not happy? I had a partner, and she had two little girls, I had a job, an apartment, a future, because the future is ahead of you when you are twenty-six. Many years later I’d know I had felt like a dying child in prison, but at the time I wouldn’t even have understood what “self,” “causes,” or “emotional problems” meant. I took myself to a psychiatrist.

This was a Dr. Hull (who, by a fluke, did psychotherapy, which is what I was seeking.) He may have been fine, but I only went twice, and could name – even such a lost soul as I – a plausible reason for stopping: My father, visiting from out of state, attended the second session with me. Narcissistically sociable, he and the psychiatrist schmoozed together like old war buddies while I sat apart, a third wheel.

Had I continued, though, nothing would have happened. Nothing could have happened. I could not have held a mirror. Lost, empty, opaque, timeless sat in that chair. Looking back, I can inhabit that person again, and it gives me a sense of the impossibility many people ignorantly suffer in therapy, to identify feelings when feelings can’t attach to a Self, because there is not a Self. Birth trauma. The abortion of early neglect and being unloved. I think you have to be something, a core identity, to feel what is not there. Otherwise you will feel a nothing that covers the deeper nothing.

This means, I am certain, that many clients are never able to find their truth. Their talk is always their character escape from a void – akin to a funnel starting at the point of birth or toddlerhood and widening to the “O” of their adulthood in which they live. They talk, talk and talk and are never there. Or they sit in silence, as unpresent as I was. I think this is what so much therapy is: theater of farce and illusion.

What can help, can show an invisible door? Information – about identity, early disturbance, the absence of parents who appreciate you, not their own needs. It can help to be seen by the therapist. Because by the workings of psychology, the barest smidgeon of identity awakens when someone finally sees you.