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.