If all sessions could be as good as the first

I wish I had tape recorded this first session with a hopeless, self-hating, manipulative and drug-addicted twenty-year-old. She was so empty of self-worth, so poisoned by self-hate, she wanted to “run away” from herself. She watched herself demanding daily money from boys, for the privilege of dating her. There had already been a handful of psychiatric hospitalizations and rehabs. This was the rare diagnostic (intake) session where I skipped the childhood question: What situations, events, family atmosphere do you believe had an impact on you? (I rarely have to specify: negative impact.) This was because we started late – she was an end-of-day hospital referral – and because we were floating in an unusually benign and healthful mineral spring that was all the good we needed for the moment. I must admit that this was largely a fluke of good feeling I had Wednesday late afternoon, just before the office closed for Thanksgiving. There she was feeling denuded of meaning but garbage, and the atmosphere was friendly, even sweet. There wasn’t a miserable acknowledgment she made that wasn’t accepted, understood, OK in pretty much a dear way. A rare thing happened then, where she was anxiously sad that the session had to end. But before it did, I broached the subject of Borderline Personality Disorder and disorder in general, or in its cosmic nature. Borderlines and others are manipulative, because as my old professor said, ‘manipulation is the person’s effort to get her legitimate needs met in a way I don’t approve.’

And then I remembered a line that was made for this moment. “We are not defective. We are injured.” I’d like to think that if you say and explain this right, especially after proving that our strange character is a survivalist one, you will get a person with almost too much hope, but not too much that you can’t offer real assurance that it will be answered.

Sometimes the first session is so good that later ones can’t be that good, for a number of reasons. One is that so many clients are diving for hope and healing, and maybe love, into that room, into that therapist, and one can’t keep diving: You land somewhere. You land in defenses, in reality, in character.

In one of Lynn Grodzki’s books on starting a private therapy practice, the author notes that therapists should not give away essential goods at the beginning. The client will feel enlightened and won’t return for sessions. I believe that failing to do so is a sign that the therapist has no principle, no direction but the anarchic process of Rogerian being-there.

I hope very much that my client returns. I hope that she will dive for a long time.

I seem to have become meditation

Barring the occasional insight that strikes me in the client situation, I have no ideas. I’ve recently discovered this: My old ideas were just ego-clingers, or a desire to have a theme. But I’ve now seen that none of them can be valid. Look at some ideas that are nonsense: Life is nasty, brutish and short. Life is beautiful. People are good. I’m in love with love. Service to country is noble. Service to family is admirable. I am important. Liberty is right. Life is an adventure. Children are our hope. God exists and is moral. Each of these ideas can be found to have exceptions or to be unjustifiable.

I’ve also discovered that I can’t accept any identity feelings. I am not too much of any one: sad, content, happy, loving, wistful, angry, pathetic, anxious, afraid. They swirl in and out, like a liquid kaleidoscope.

And yet, there is a primary substrate of myself. It is a loneliness that started with birth and removal to an incubator and to a depressed mother, and that has always been the underlying axiom. Though needfully married, there is always a silent room between us. Sometimes the room is very thin. I have never in five decades sat in on an employee lunch or birthday party. I walk the dog at night, a car’s headlights approach from the distance, and I am angry. My two friends are states and many decades away. All my coworkers and neighbors are ships passing in the night. I’d say that is a feeling, but I’d be chary of calling it my identity.

So the upshot is that I am meditation incarnate. When I walk, or sometimes at the computer, there are no thoughts and no stories of mood, only the kaleidoscope, only silence. I have no ambition, which would be a sort of energy, but to do what I do.

An odd thing happens, though, sometimes. Thoughtless, and no spiritual goal in mind, I will press a couple of leaves on a bush, or touch one of the big rocks that are made into walls throughout my apartment complex. This gives me an odd feeling of reality, and the lightest possible feeling of affection, for lack of a better word. I don’t dare pollute that goodness with a thought. The phenomenon is the child that remains: He was once nothing but connection, or nothing but the need for it. Through neurosis and years, my eyes have become too distanced from things. But touch breaks through. If I had more ego or anxiety, I could turn that into a “truth,” a meaning. But there’s no reason to.

Mini-rant: These hibernated accusations of sexual abuse

The Pessimistic Shrink, hiding behind his wife’s name as a Slate.com commenter, wrote the following:

I don’t disbelieve any of these men or women (the latest accused, as of this minute, may be George Takei), but at the same time, my eyes are rolling. Every week in therapy, I see a couple dozen adults who remain emotionally crippled, in part because they have never held their abusers to account: parents, siblings, uncles, stepfathers, neighbors. Many adults would rather remain cowed, punctured “codependents” than own their anger at a physically or sexually abusive parent. Clearly the celebrities are relatively painless targets of delayed justice, despite the courage it may take to finally open one’s mouth about the abuse. To me, it’s real courage when the woman – ten, twenty or thirty years later – calls her father a pedophile, or condemns her mother for failing to protect her.

My argument’s best raison d’ȇtre is that it was probably these earlier abuses, in childhood and within the home, that created the teenager or adult susceptible, years later, to the wiles and pressures of an entitled bastard. It was these earlier abuses that created a quiet person who could not speak out for decades, who suffered the emotional problems that keep therapists working, that make such a troubled world. There is also the more exotic theory* (clinically evidenced though not by me) that the psychological origins of “stars” – those who need fame, power and the adulation of the masses to build a semblance of ego – is in homes where the child received approval** – for her looks and talents and ability to please – not unconditional love for her simple being.

Let these women and men continue to name their perpetrators, have courage, receive the stage and receive care. But maybe . . . maybe do not keep hidden the earlier, formative abuses and neglects that made you the person you are. To unearth these takes therapy, storm and stress, battle-like courage, not a microphone.

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* and ** – Arthur Janov, The Primal Scream and other books, and Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child and other books, have described the early dynamics and consequences of approval versus love.

A very dumb society: The latest shooter

One of the blindest and most contemptible features of present culture is our gaze at the adult lives and motivations of mass murdering shooters. Twelve hours ago, a twenty-six-year-old killed twenty-six people at a Texas church. Reports give us the news about his black outfit, his rifle, whether he got it legally, what he posted on Facebook and LinkedIn, how he walked through his spree, his dishonorable discharge from the Air Force, his domestic violence against wife and child. We may soon learn what jobs he had, a quick sketch of his personality at work, maybe the “human interest angle”: what some classmate or friend thought about him in high school.

Useless, stupid, useless.

What matters is who his parents are, how he was raised and treated during his elementary school years, if there are siblings and if they, too, have had problems. Was he a head-banging infant? Were there two parents in the home, were they immature, emotionally selfish, loveless, “working all the time,” jerks? Did they hit him? Was he bullied and did his parents have cruel or indifferent or weak ways to deal with it? Was he so cut off from them that it would never have occurred to him to tell them his troubles? Did an uncle sexually abuse him? It would be good to know what made him a misérable who dealt with pain by causing it in others. Do we want to know how these things happen? The parents would be interviewed, put through individual therapy. We’d know their incompetencies, because there is no doubt in the world that they dropped most of the balls they were thrown. Was the killer ever in therapy, and did it fail as it so often does? Therapists do have to be gullible for a few minutes, taking in information openly. But if they see a dysphoric young man who speaks anger, they have to work damned hard to find a buried scrap of heart and reach it. If the child is “callous and unemotional” or the teen is a pre-mature psychopath – these facts are observable and alarms need to be sounded. Of course, not everything can be done to prevent the youth from further corrupting. I’ve confronted the deeply injured, joined them in their misery. I’ve confronted young psychopaths. Sometimes maybe all we can do is call their bluff: “I see your game,” hoping to disenchant the defense of this personality.

Because of this Olympian-sized missing the boat, society often looks to me like a joke or bad theater: playing adult-land. We could see the child in us. Think of how strange that world would be! We’d be looking at parents and families and children’s lives, not “chemical imbalances.” We’d all know basic depth psychology and see people with standard x-ray vision. We’d see children as influenced – good or bad – every minute of their day. We’d morph schools into education and therapy. We’d absolutely kill the “stigma” of mental illness, which is emotional pain and what happens with it. I don’t know a single solidly sound person without this pain. Do you?

My strange cynicism

A certainty of mine: People are too complex to be able to validly endorse whatever they claim to believe in, or claim to feel. A twenty-six-year-old woman says she loves her mother. But her mother was always immature, whimpery and self-enclosed, never acted with primary consideration for the child. So the young woman actually hates her mother, feels like a dead rock in her mother’s eyes.

Bertrand Russell, philosopher and mathematician, said: “I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting. Many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold; surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about man’s place in the world.”* I do not believe that Russell felt the meaning of these thoughts, but would be in a frisson of disconsolate and other emotions at the real consideration of his imminent death. And the man on the scaffold? A desperate dissociation of terror, anesthetized with some storybook noble or learned feeling: “pride.”

A man loves his wife. But he simply lacks a capacity for empathy. This is understandable, as he never received a single atom of loving-care from his parents. He is empty of it. So what does he really feel?

People believe in God. Does having a good or self-bolstering gut-chest-feeling about something you’ve been taught equal belief? Does some kind of mental attachment to a weakly logical notion (the essences of the universe can never be comprehended, so the Incomprehensible must have caused them) equal belief? Does saying “I believe” make belief real? It seems so (try it!), but how could that really be? People’s beliefs weather, they have doubts, their wine turns to water.

Does a white supremacist hate black people, Jews, Hispanics? Hatred, like “cause(,) is not what it used to be,” as Lord Russell noted.** We know that hate starts, in the person’s life, with hurt, with the failure to receive what should have been given by parents. Loss congeals over a pained heart and becomes fire over ice over fire. This, then, wants an idea, because thinking distances us from pain. “Immigrants are not real Americans.” This is not a belief. It’s a desperation.

I deconstruct people in this way because I have to: It’s both how I see the world and a feature of my therapy.  But another part is the blindness that is our molecular, organic structure: We just live and we just feel. We don’t “know,” we don’t “believe.” I’d like us to feel better and maybe to wonder what everything, what anything, is.

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* Bertrand Russell quotation – https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/28449-i-believe-that-when-i-die-i-shall-rot-and.

** Russell, lecture “Why I Am Not a Christian” –  https://users.drew.edu/jlenz/whynot.html  – subheading The First Cause Argument.