For the new year

Never, until a moment from now, have I paused to consider how there can be such a contrast between the bleakness and fatalism of my psychology and the positivity and sanguine warmth of my sessions. It’s not as simple as someone’s “knowing we’re all going to die” yet being high on life.* I believe our psyche is essentially a curse, where the inevitable early injury is almost never healed and becomes the crooked, painful ground – the feet – of our adult life, our significantly pre-determined adult life. Whenever we cease to muscle ourselves forward – cognitive and physical muscle – and away from our deeper history, we are again in touch with our incomplete childhood, all the losses that leave sadness, fear, anger, craziness and emptiness in us.

But I believe we don’t need to make up bright thoughts or appeal to some truistic realism (“it’s not all bad”) to lighten depression or feel a clear, good path. Instead, we can reclaim the deepest, and maybe smallest, indestructible kernel of love-force in us, inherent in our first cells. This is something all people – but for the born psychopath – have. We start out “pro-life” – a fact, sense, and the root of hope that can’t die, most evident, paradoxically, when we suffer the deepest existential pain.

What “spooky action at a distance”** can reach that kernel? It could be smelling a flower, music, feeling love, sometimes just waking up and the kernel has floated to the surface during the innocent night, before it descends again. For me, one source is the presence of a person who wants help in my room. That’s a personal thing. My entire childhood, after age eleven or so, was anxiously, dissociatively shut away from people. For decades after, I was never present with anyone. Now, broken out of this shell, to me people are a startling phenomenon. It’s as if one has given a child a pirate’s treasure chest of absurdly magical toys and a map to Neverland. Almost as if I were born at each encounter, I am jolted by the existence of another human being. And while being jolted is not entirely positive, my room is made to receive only the best part of this “birth” experience: the hopeful, the caring, the mysterious, the tangible and intangible.

This is how “the pessimist” rolls.

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

** Einstein’s objection to quantum mechanics – https://www.technologyreview.com/s/427174/einsteins-spooky-action-at-a-distance-paradox-older-than-thought/.

There are few songs

The last song on Phil Ochs’ final album, 1970, is No More Songs. “Once I knew a saint who sang upon a stage / He told me about the world, his lover / A ghost without a name / Stands ragged in the rain / And it seems that there are no more songs.” It may have been an early suicide note: A few years later, Ochs hanged himself. Or possibly, a related epitaph: Disenchanted that his beloved 1960s peace-and-crusades movement was fading from rainbows to dust, slipping into a workaday world, he could no longer write.
 

Similarly, but without the moribund factor, I’ve lately been thinking there is no more psychology. Human existence has its two spheres: our living of it and our detachment from it, traveling and adventuring versus introspection and insularity. We are blind to our inner workings and believe everything is on the same life plane: happiness and suffering, successes and mistakes, wayward dramas and peaceful endings, passion and indifference. That way we may fly, or flail and spin in circles or crash and burn, but it all seems like the juicy stuff of life. Or – we stop, turn inward and realize there is a genuine conflicting force, a malevolent force, the anti-life. We are not just interesting or eccentric or moody, we are sick. Our lost love is not melancholy, is not a “story,” it is sabotage planted by our parents thirty years earlier. Our personality is not our self, it is scar tissue over injury. Seeing this, we are no longer traveling, adventuring. We are in the prison of consciousness, no windows out, wondering about causes.

Some of us live in one of these places, some in the other. I think most people are probably eighty-twenty: not too aware, just going about on their surface. Therapy messes everything up by making the mirrored prison necessary and respectable, when it is the worst of the two ways.

In twenty years I’ve taken around sixty “continuing education” workshops. Not one of them has had the slightest value but for some facts about professional ethics. Beyond that, I sink deeper into a unity or nihilism. I don’t see diagnostic categories anymore. A person is depressed. What does that really mean? Look for where in his deep past the life force got buried. A woman is anxious and depressed, one state. In what scenes did that chemistry happen? The prodigal son in a celebrity family binges, like a vortex, on dough, sweets, junk, alcohol, speed. What did his parents deprive him of? A woman hears command voices day and night. What was the slow boil that caused her to leave reality? In fact, people have no labels. My client feels all sorts of emotions but has no sense of agency or identity. A woman can’t identify what exists inside, other than feeling naïve, but she continually moves into needy men’s homes. There are no labels. One can’t paint the ocean.

Psychology, I’d say, is just holism. Mind and body and time and never-healed injury, all one. To “heal” is to change. One might doctor a seed with chemistry, an embryo with stem cells, graft parts of two saplings together, and the end product will be a new life form. But people, a sort of balanced holism, can’t change significantly with all the coaching or tampering or purging in the world. We are already alive.

There is little psychology.

Fragile bags (this would be the cup-half-empty perspective)

The closer I get to a client – I mean literally closer: inching forward on my wheely chair – the more I feel and care about the humanity, feelings, meaning and history of him or her. If I’m at a clinical distance, five or six feet, the interaction may be too intellectual except for occasions when we’re deep into emotive work. But whatever the distance, I always see people as fragile bags, fragile bags waiting (sometimes their whole lives) to explode or implode, shake apart, rip, melt, go crazy, become gibbering insensible vacuums of a non-existent Self. I see them as untenable chemical solutions poured mindlessly into a test tube, with eyes attached to a deep fire, hearts attached to twisted gear systems run amuck, minds running from early nightmares. I see people as absurd unfortunates, entities barely holding themselves up, trying to create a homeostasis of viability out of some unrealistic supposition.

This is what childhood does to us.

We are made to become a paradox: anarchy and multiple pains wanting to have meaning and a positive identity. We have stopped and do not move on when we suppress ourselves in childhood. Our mind, now braked by suspended animation, destroys itself by pushing us on. Our ideas instantly become and remain nonsense: gaseous escapes that are not – were we to feel deeply into them – us.

The body is roiling sludge on fire, and that’s what the mind should be.

Even the most outrageous berserker patient or criminal out there is a held-together, false and censored person, still following rules, talking in mature sentences, sitting upright with his hands in his lap. But the bleeding out-of-sync energies within him want to bash against walls, lacerate them, scream every muscle, vein and organ projectile-wise out of his body or drown him in his tears. Our pain and wrongness want to scream and explode. But we don’t.

Here is the person: Picture a landscape ablaze, a great country burning, all of its history and loves destroyed. Now see it from afar, as in a movie, and hear sad or heroic symphonic music in the background. The scene is poignant now, meaningful, it has the contour of life, and we can accept it. But walk into the landscape, stop playing the music, stand there. You have the person in her natural state.

Imagine sitting two feet away from her for the hour.

In-house #7: Late thoughts on therapy

I have realized that lately, I put no effort into my work, into the hour, other than what the situation-at-the-moment calls for. This means rarely a technique, such as Empty Chair, sentence completion, Death Bed Situation, other feeling-reaching process, cognitive therapy procedure. I feel almost tabula rasa with each new person, and almost tabula rasa with regular clients at each new session. In the old days, I might see a client in the third session or after and assume he or she is already on a train of momentum: We are working on something, we are in the theme of healing. I do carry a knowledge base into each encounter, which is the knowledge that depth is true and the here-and-now is false. But after the person is shown this, it is applied only as it is workable and useful at the moment. The one energy or atmosphere, maybe, that is pervasive is the sense that the client needs some relief, and the kind that human communication can bring.

I have become less hopeful of great change, and thereby more compassionate, and my clients stay longer – long – and enjoy our times almost consistently.

We are the depth, always, but it’s not always good to re-experience it. After the beginning, I never go there again with some clients. Occasionally, someone is saved, and I mean literally saved, by knowing that the roots of her addiction and self-destructive life are her childhood with imperfect parents. It is not her fault. But mostly I have changed from militancy to the serious touch of affection, opening up, and insight.

I don’t really know why this has happened, but that it’s either that I’ve grown up (my parents always said I was a “late bloomer”) or that experience itself has evolved.

It’s true that real help will sometimes have to go to drastic depth. One elementary school teacher, after giving the brief history of her teen rape trauma and her derailing after that, talked mostly about her oppressive work with difficult students and their disengaged parents. One session, eight or ten in, I said, “Last time, we’d agreed to focus on you.” And she fell into old grief, revisited and relived this disaster to her heart and her feeling of being alive. So directly broached, so directly done.

Another woman, after a couple months we stared at her perennial tight fake smile, partially disabled it, then went into the feelings and internal map that life with a confusing and blood-sucking Borderline mother caused her, which that smile had always held under. What a good session. At the end of it she deceptively asked, “Do you think I should come every two weeks, or stay with every week?” How could she want to detach now, when we had finally reached a good place? As it was obvious what she wanted, I lied and said every two weeks would be fine.

We are “working on something” with some clients, but the fact is I can’t think of a single one, right now, whose theme is their past injury or even the solving of a current life problem. The “presenting problem” may have been depression or anxiety or bipolar or methamphetamine dependency, but what happens is that he or she just talks about serious things and fairly often becomes tearful, feels a little better, and talks about something else. Carl Rogers thought (if I remember correctly) that clients, doing this, were working out their conflicts. I don’t think so. I think they’re connecting to themselves in a place where they can put the brakes on their life, and so feel like the owner of it, and be seen to be the owner of it. For some that will be a good feeling, for some it will not.

Follow-up to 'Where is the answer?'

Though no one has asked, I want to address the “other shoe dropping” of my suicidal client. She does have this seemingly immutable identity of a death-waiting, death-needing-to-happen person. But she does give out the impression that were she to lurch over the Rubicon of symbiotic dependency with her mother, that may just bring her to a new world, one whose horizon wasn’t sick and stuck inside her. But there’s the additional sense that such a leap could be the death blow itself.

We had a session with good, relieving tears – that’s how she felt. Following those, her problem – somehow never yet stated – was: Do I exist if I’m separate from my mother? Everything is ripe and ready for her to move in with her boyfriend, who is seeming pretty good lately. She named self-deprecating obstacles to that. We shot them down with reality and humor. Seriously: We all laughed heartily. Breaking these objections, what she was left with were sanguine possibilities.

Is she a person if separated from her mother? I don’t know. How many of us are? Real “separation-individuation” is easily botched so early. I believe that most of us, children, are shoved to a distance from our parents rather than grow with then separate, like an acorn, already itself, falling from the tree then becoming more of itself. In this forced separation we are left bleeding out and in endless loss. It’s exactly that, see it or not. And unlike the physical, psychically one can bleed out for all the years of a life.

At this moment my hope is that she will push beyond the gravitational field, move out, live like a couple and endure the tragic, and the bleeding, and the incompleteness with mother. I think our inner life is so complicated that essentially we have to be diverted from it, while knowing it. That way – diverting while knowing – we can distance it with some unsatisfactory care, just like a parent does.