Sabotage

Jimmy Carter,* in a recent article, referred to his father as “daddy.” I wonder – Do adult Southerners call their mothers “mommy”?

I’ve written throughout this blog, and have conceived in my sessions, psychodynamic metaphors such as “some people have a heavy emptiness inside them, an anchor holding them back.” “A splinter in the soul” that does damage despite the soul’s lofty plane. We are a “molecular mess.” Old-timers may remember the Dr. Joyce Brothers-type conception, “fear of success.” Janov wrote of “housewives”** who’d always leave a room or two in disarray, as a clean house, a completed task, would give them the feeling, ‘Is this all there is?’ In a way, many of us are like the father of the little girl, Twilight Zone episode 91,*** who falls through her bedroom wall into another dimension. Leaping in to save her, he is lost, floating, but then is lurched back to ground: A friend had been gripping his leg the whole time, but he had no awareness of it. Our past, the most exotic dimension, has us in its grasp, and we are not aware of it.

The explanations one woman gives for losing guardianship of her son to her terrible father! It’s as if her true north were quicksand. Another woman smiles wanly, tells me her mother has won custody of the grandson on spurious charges of bad parenting.**** And watch out: When she gives birth in a few months, her mother may come with CPS and snatch this child, too. Helpless to stop it! I see a woman whose theme song has been self-ruination: Friendships curdle, gifts are rescinded; her mind colludes with her body not to be able to work; plausible plans to escape the city are spoiled; people who’d given her a room change the terms and kick her out; her son won’t talk to her, but a couple months ago they were getting along.

The many people who lose or quit one job after another. Something internal stops moving, and they wander off.

My wife and I, professional people with a strong relationship and a nice set-up, are so bad with money that we could potentially get in trouble from ten different directions.

In a bad mood, I’d want to give all these people (except myself) a tee-shirt that reads: “The dog ate my homework.” Your life is excuses. Grow up, find a backbone! Grow some fucking anger! Take off your stupid diaper! But I know about self-sabotage. Its seeds, of course, are in our childhood. But it’s complicated: soul and splinter. Depression versus the desire to love life. A twenty-three-year-old cries and whines in that gut-twisting sing-song of a child. I’m all alone. So boring at home, nothing to do! Sister criticized him as selfish when he asked for help. We haven’t yet found the awful splinter that poisoned all four siblings (the parents have a lovely résumé), but we know he cannot grow up.

Even when we seem to hit all the milestones, we may look and see there is no path. The engine is revved in neutral but the road is a decline and we move. We feel good then bad within two seconds, hopeful then inert within two seconds; expansive, then old hates emerge. Probably no one knows what real maturity means. How much, what kind of youthful psychology can we manifest that’s actually adult, not regressive? How much is nothing but regressive? People gamble much of the day, play video poker all night. It’s neurotic. (But when James Bond sits at the baccarat table, it’s very sophisticated.) Grown men play macho, women talk serious but look frilly, men make money of prime importance, women don’t report sexual harassment, people in therapy reveal they are ninety percent child. The past is so embedded in the present that we see only one thing: nothing, our blindness.

I’m wondering, as I write, if any immanent past must be a saboteur. Mine is: Future seeking, forward seeking has and will always be prevented by my particular problems. The ruining woman has to show an invisible father that she is homeless forever and in pain. The job quitters need – absolutely need – to be taken care of. But what of people who seem healthy and moving, happy, serene, accomplished? Has their past held them back? I think the answer is like quantum mechanics, where there’s a very different truth at the deepest level. If we look inside, we will feel where we have never moved on. We will find emotions that have never “matured”: still the child’s that are still attached to child’s things, though they’ve shape-shifted: A craving to be seen has become a need to impress; day camp has become a resort in Vail; a need for touch has become an extramarital affair. We will find our anchors.

Are there any conclusions we can settle on? The past in the present, the brake pedal always pressed, some. Even “failure” can be a kind of success as it tells the truth, where success often doesn’t.

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* https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/21/opinion/sunday/jimmy-carter-lusts-trump-posting.html. Maureen Dowd editorial – “Jimmy Carter Lusts for a Trump Posting”.

** The Primal Scream, 1970. Arthur Janov died on October 1, 2017 at the age of 93.

*** “Little Girl Lost,” 1962. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Girl_Lost_(The_Twilight_Zone).

**** See “Warning to grandmothers” – https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2015/05/a-warning-to-grandmothers.html.