The perpendicular

“I came to work one morning and couldn’t log on to the computer. That’s apparently how this agency informs employees they’ve been fired. I had been riding along in complacent mode, assuming I was secure because of my prestige as a therapist. I saw, over the course of three years, my various faux-pas as excusable or right. When I earnestly informed the unit manager that she was good at ruining a perfectly fine day; when I hung up the phone on a hospital nurse who was short with me and disrespected my assessment; when I did the paperwork my own way not the company’s way – I assumed my positives didn’t merely shine, but burned away any demerits I might have. It is true that I had deep contempt for the manager, a fake-laughing back-stabber who appeared to have no therapy skills of any kind, but rather a personality disorder the size of her Social Work degree. It’s true that I was quickly angered by the nurse whose job was to take my information in a friendly way and pass it to the psychiatrist, not sniff at it. Clearly I didn’t fit into the confines of this mediocre, bumpkin-y mental health bureaucracy.”

Actually . . . .

“I don’t like people, and I am coldly, contemptuously hateful of anyone who has authority over me. This is Narcissism, which grew out of a terrified, inchoate child out of sync with and inferior to everyone. Thank God for the Narcissism! Without it there would be an infant fumbling disorganized in his play pen, a little boy crying and lost forever in the grocery store aisles of the world. At work, I do me. I help clients for recondite reasons, but haven’t the slightest interest in peers or other adults. It was the little boy who didn’t see the axe coming. Because he assumed, as he always had, that the big people would give him a pass – the “pampering is neglect” of my childhood. I’d get the extra serving at dinner or dessert; my silly fantasies would be faux-complimented; my lies would be overlooked; I could be invisible in class. I was impervious to life and people – in the dream I lived.”

*           *           *

Over the years I have come to be disbelieving of all explanations adults give, except for the answer: “I don’t know.” A question I’ve added to the typical Diagnostic Assessment is: When you were a senior in high school, did you know what you wanted to do after high school? Those clients who did know – cosmetologist, counselor, wealthy house flipper, elementary school teacher (majoring in Early Childhood Development), computer programmer, writer of the Great American Novel, nurse – did not know their choices came from subterranean psychological itches. Most had not become what they’d named, meaning that there was a deeper itch than what they were aware of. Those who did become their aim would, many years later, have empty explanations for it.

My disease of disbelief spreads everywhere. Politicians don’t really know why they want power over people. Partners don’t know why they fell for their spouse. People don’t know why they’re in a rage, or are distrusting, or forgiving, or generous, or drug using, or procrastinating, or use big words. Conservatives don’t know why they prefer capitalists to altruists, nor do bigots know why they hate millions of total strangers of a different shade. Down-and-out neurotics don’t know why people come to them for advice; men don’t know why they are chauvinist pigs or feminists. You don’t know why you are so bendable to a woman or why you have a huge ego. Everybody has an explanation, so many explanations, but no one is in touch with the pilot light of their life. Or what lit it.

When you conceive a reason for your behaviors, you are usually coming from a self-medicative place that covers an underground terrain of pain and loss. Why do I love Romantic classical music? It’s beautiful! Or really, because it’s intimacy and deepest bonding that I never had, crave, but best not touch too close up: That would be too uncovering of my starvation. Why does that woman continually return to her cruel and loveless mother? “I hope she will finally see me, love me.” But why does she hope for the hopeless . . . like a child?

Does it matter that the entire adult world lives on a plane of needful pretension, of explanations perpendicular to and fragilely intersecting our primeval truths? I’d say it does matter, because explanations hide hatred and need. And since they are our balms that soothe us, they coolly, confidently justify our genocides and prejudices and wars and crimes. If we were in touch with the hatred and the need, we might heal them, or put them away.

Inspiration #1: Wrong and effective therapy

Listening to a new client today, I realized that in some cases there is the right way to do therapy, and the wrong and effective way to do it. The thirty-five-year-old man was a shambles of trembling panic, distrust, suicidal depression and ineffectiveness, and had been since he was a child. Nearly lethal sex abuse by female babysitters; a Borderline mother (“I love you.” “You’re disgusting, so why not kill yourself?”) who would dump him on a poker hand’s worth of indifferent relatives; seven elementary schools in six years; a Mob stepfather who beat him; a schizophrenic father who used meth and saw angels and demons and shared them with his son; severe school bullying of this wimpy victim boy. One would label him B-movie maudlin with his despair and self-pity. But it was one-hundred-percent real. He was a toilet of loss continuously swirling down the drain.

So, good therapy would be loving encouragement, grieving and raging or whatever was in there, years of it, that needed to come out; visibility for the first time in his life. And maybe some Cognitive-type logic, though the torrents of his feelings constantly scattered his thoughts and his ability to hear.

The wrong and effective therapy would be über-Newtonian: more than an equal and opposite reaction to the crimes.

* He must force an emotional backbone within himself. Breathe deep, rich, made-calm. Go to your new job, no matter what.

* Hate your criminals with grim strength. Get a baseball bat attorney and don’t let your evil mother get custody of your child, as mothers like this love to try to do. Yell, with poison, their abominations at her and your two stepfathers. Let them try nothing, not get a word in edgewise.

* Cry like a baby in here.

* Bring your mother to a session. “Look – here you are in Lawson’s Understanding the Borderline Mother. Yes, you’re that sick, a universe of sick. Yes, you were that useless. You have no argument. You don’t deserve to touch the hem of my client’s garment. Now get out.”

* Go to the mountain top, shake your fist and shout your new life to the old world and your new world.

* Cry more, be cared about in therapy and in the groups.

* Walk away from your family, leave them in the dust.

This would be the right, the best way. This would be rational, as rational as combating weakness with strength, injustice with justice, submission with chain breaking, and the removal of germs. But we don’t go there. We don’t go there because of the nice, false hope factor. The ethical factor. The cover-your-ass litigation factor. The autonomy factor. And one more –

He loves his mother.

Spouted grains

There is a great deal of listening in psychotherapy, a great deal of investigation, process, catharsis, abreaction, empathic communion, confrontation, and the considering and sculpting of possibilities with supportive hands.

There are times, though, when I’ll spout a few certainties to my clients.

“That’s a platitude, an old wives’ tale. Talking out loud to yourself is not crazy.”

 “We don’t have an ‘inner child.’ We are our inner child – the adult self is the window dressing. Our head is a little boat in the deep ocean of our body and history.”

“The past is not the past. It is our roots, our substance. Picture a hundred-year-old oak tree. Now use your x-ray vision and look beneath the ground to the roots. They are ‘the past.’ But not only are they alive: They continue to feed every leaf and branch on the tree.”

“You ‘love your parents to death’? I’m hearing a cliché, a sleepwalk, a holding pattern.”

“ADHD, as I’ve seen it, is the person’s inability to sit still on a feeling. The mind is trying to save her from pain and fears by distracting her with thoughts and dissociation. To be quiet, to stop your mind from flapping its arms, would be to land on a feeling. But now, distracted from truth that needs outletting, you are tense. And the body shows its tension in hyperactivity and agitation.” I might add:

“Sometimes there is meaning in the tension. Your foot rocks: You need to kick. For me, spontaneous jackhammer breathing meant I needed to launch myself into some anarchic action, because I had always been so suppressed as a child.”

“Your alcohol abuse is your self-medicating of pain, pain that began deep in your history. When you stop an addiction, you will feel proud of yourself for a few minutes or a few days. But then everything – all the frustration, pain and loss – you were drowning in alcohol will rise from the depths and hit you in the face. That is when we can deal with it.”

“People are often resistant to deep sea diving into their childhood, old memories, the wounds they’ve suffered, because they fear they may end up blaming their parents, and that can feel like the double-edged sword of abandoning and being abandoned. The ultimate point, though, is not ‘blame,’ but truth. What was true? What did the child feel at the time?”

“I’ve known many people who have carried a sense of guilt or badness from their childhood into their adult lives. But if you could go back to those moments when you became a guilty person, you’d likely find that you had just been made to feel bad about yourself by an angry or sad or sick parent. There can be no ‘guilt,’ because you did nothing wrong. Getting a ‘D’ on your report card was not doing anything wrong. If you had gotten all ‘F’s,’ you wouldn’t have done anything wrong, because there is always a reason, a good reason, for a child’s behavior.”

“Children don’t make mistakes – they have learning experiences.”

“Domestically violent men are terribly needy little boys. Their father shamed and beat them, their also-victimized mother did not protect them, and now gutted and abandoned and unable to move beyond their starvation for bond, they’ve become him and cling to her as their defenses against collapse of their soul. You are his wife, but you are his mother. He cannot have a ‘partner,’ because he is a child. If you leave, he will explode or disintegrate.”

“I believe that hallucinatory voices and visions such as you’re describing are the person’s waking dreams. In sleep, some defenses are softened, and old feelings and memories – extreme good and extreme bad – disinter and create stories. People with psychosis and early trauma are weakly defended – their gates over past hell are porous – and this past floats into their waking hours. No doubt that feels crazy.”

“If you will let yourself feel it, you’ll see that your brittle, hair-trigger rage is old hurt that was never seen or helped or given a damn about by the people who should have been there for you. I find it interesting that we are so important to ourselves that this critical disappointment, at the moment we needed care, can make us rage ‘til the end of time and want to destroy everything. What we need is to collapse into a caring someone and rage and cry – for a long time.”

“Positive thinking is very hard to do consistently, day after day. It’s a burden to brute-force these made-up or true thoughts that try to cover how you really feel deep down, what your body says. Positive or rational thinking – Cognitive Therapy – is like taking pills. Unpleasant little things. You can’t think or inspire your way out of your history.”

“We are what we were. It’s a real fucker.”

Our natural hypocrisy

There’s the dream bubble, and there’s the reality. In the dream, children are taught fairness, consideration, wrongness of being cruel and violent, to be careful about waste, responsibility with possessions, with other children’s possessions, with money. They’re taught natural and social consequences, and making thoughtful and mature decisions, and resolving angry conflict. They’re shown the value of work, maybe the pride of it, and of being one’s own person.

But then there’s the adult world, the one in every day’s headlines, in everyone’s lives. Government wastes trillions of dollars on selfish ends, with nihilistic debt. Wanting political power over millions of dependent people is the culture. Interfering in other countries and in people’s personal choices is the policy. Childish insults and conceits, bullying, gaudy materialism, normalizing of concrete thinking, primitive racist and bigoted beliefs. Fighting in a boxing ring or in a presidential race. Groupthink, where the concepts in our heads are those fed to all, chewed by all. A world of the popular people, shiny objects, hit songs and juicy gossip.

Why do we have these two diametrical realities? Or rather, talk one reality and live the other? Even reverse-logic realities, where children are good and stand tall, while adults shrink to savagery and pettiness? On the surface, it almost seems like some cosmic hypocrisy that we perform for the game of it. Earth, the Hypocrisy World. But it is actually individual psychology that requires this polar existence. We glance at the children and remember some moments of good from our earliest years, and we think we are giving that to them. But mixed with these gifts, or hypnotic residue, are the pains and frustrations we also suffered. There were many things we needed in childhood and did not get, and we were angry, or made cold. We seek them angrily, or cold, as adults. We were emptied of our good power, and now seek power to cover the emptiness. We needed love, and now fill that vessel with material objects. Thinking was our escape, adolescence on, from poisonous, needful feelings. These primitive feelings re-emerge when we have to act the adult.

Don’t you feel, in dizziness, this bizarre incongruity? Doesn’t it want to be cured? Can we question President Trump’s infantile and lost way of living when we really don’t question our own?

TMI (too much information)

I recently saw a young man, 21, who had these complaints: He has “no energy, no motivation” to do anything. Nothing interests him, including activities he used to enjoy. At college, he pursued a major in Oceanography, but found everything about the curriculum painfully unpleasant and failed every course. He left school but recently returned with the mildly desperate purpose of having “fun.” He’s into the Art Education major. When others tell him his projects are good, he doesn’t believe them. Several days a week he goes to a camping-related job that should be, almost by definition, pleasurable. It’s just work to him.

It was very clear from my client’s tone and from his missing words that he had no idea he was depressed. Therapists know that a Dysthymic person may not be aware he has depression. But the young man was naming textbook features of an acute disorder. Yet he identified himself without it.

I gave him the name of his problem. That seemed not terrible to him, though he had an expression of “dull stun” rather than one of acknowledgment or acceptance.

But when I explained where depression comes from, from depth theory, it seemed to be terrible for him. As the session came to an end, he looked like a changed person, as if everything looked different to him now. He had said that his family was problem-free, though he and his slightly-older brother had never gotten along and had recently reached a cold détente about it.

I let him know that depression is in the ignorance of the family, of mother and father. They don’t see you, who you are. They are riding along on their own life, and you think that’s normal.

– Mommy, mommy . . . the teacher was unfair to me today.

– Now dear, the teacher was only trying to do his best.*

I told him that lack of empathy in a normal home creates a different child because he never gets to be himself unless there is a listener. He never gets to feel loved without someone’s eyes and words and smiles drawing him out. The home may be lively and busy, with kaleidoscopes of conversations, laughs and activities and purposes, but without empathy, without being drawn out, it is a place to lose your life.

I don’t recall going far beyond that, but it was enough to cause him to land on planet Earth, no longer float along. He looked back to sense his origins. He could no longer assume that life is necessarily good but for some surface flaw that you call “depression.”

It’s not unusual for first sessions to feel good, warm, like an unexpected odyssey. The client’s eyes are wide, deeper. She feels this was very different, even very important. Almost always she returns. This young man – I wonder not only if he will not return, but if he may wander off to some underground continent where one’s eyes never close to the darker and emptier self.

Questions I ask myself now: Should I avoid telling very surface-living clients, such as this young person, about their problem? If no, and as the facts are not mitigable, is there a way to have depth therapy without falling and drowning in the deep end? If yes – we should avoid knowledge – what can really help this problem, depression, that turns every cell in the body and mind into a clock whose hands read “the past”?

I’ve learned the history of psychotherapy and have read the old “legends” – case histories that all seem so drastic and moving – so feces and incest, dreams and libido-twisted – but more as intellectual mind-fucks in the musty pages, less so in the impeccably dressed supine patient on the couch. Real change may have only nipped the surface in our modern, feel-all culture with Esalen and Whitfield and their inner child, Bass and Davis and their women sexually abused as children, “codependent no more” and est and Perls and Oprah. And still, I’ve seen almost no approach, other than Janov’s primal therapy, that brings our buried roots into the room to be healed, or at least worked with. And even that system of radical insight can only help those who are already partially better: men and women who’ve read the books and know of their killed childhood, who accept that there’s an ocean of blood waiting to be screamed out. Most people, most clients who come to therapy are on an adamantine plane of unreality. They cling to the parents who have ruined them. They choose only the present and ignore their history. They are uncomfortable with silence, and lying on a couch.

If I could redo my session with the ignorantly depressed young man, I might say: Do you want to know what has tired out your interests and energy? Do you want to know where your depression comes from?

Really?

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* From Paul Vereshack’s online book, Help Me – I’m Tired of Feeling Bad -- http://www.paulvereshack.com/.

A letter

Earlier (https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2014/07/intervention-tidbit-1.html), I wrote about “Greyhound therapy,” a term of scandalous meaning – clandestine busing of undesirable psychiatric patients to another state – that I co-opted to describe a different and benevolent approach. This was for a client to leave, sometimes wrenchingly, a long-toxic relationship (typically with authoritarian parents and enmeshed family), to cut the umbilical cord and begin anew with troubles in tow in a far-away state. I used to find myself suggesting this drastic renaissance to maybe three or four clients a year, though it’s now been a long time since I’ve found the occasion to propose it. I don’t know that anyone ever carried it through as a direct result of our work.

Here I want to describe a different but, one could say, related intervention. It cuts ties, too, in an internal way. At this moment, I cannot think of a reason that I might suggest – a client's situation might suggest – one severing instead of the other except that traveling might be for the young. My own experience is to have done both, young and older.

Many clients were, in their childhood, the black sheep or “identified client” or scapegoat in their family. The stories I could tell of children who were the deliberate torture object of sick parents, who mother told to “shut the fuck up” or “stop whining” if they expressed a feeling, who were punched in the chest, sexually abused with the family’s knowledge, who were painted shit while the siblings were on pedestals, who were the designated slave, breadwinner and de facto parent to also-abandoned siblings, who were colluded against and shunned by three generations of inbred clan. Many years on, everyone grown or old or migrated away, the familial ether settled underground, binding all across different states, muttered and impotent until someone – my client – stirs the pot because he or she – finally he or she – needs help or wants to hope. Then the bipolar sister pounces, slathering her venom, the Borderline Medea* mother stabs anew, factions find a way to abuse her financially or emotionally, stain her reputation on Facebook. She is devastated again, still the child, ever the target, ever invisible.

On the couch is a person who has never completely grown up. He tries, but his back is too bent by all the people and injustice he’s carried. Or she grew the most cynical, chronic trauma-based personality that keeps her chained in the basement where she lived as a little girl. With so much a failure in her adult life, her deepest pain may be how she knows she is still seen by her family, how there has never been an inkling of justice.

I wonder if my client feels it is time to rip the smiles from their faces, the neurotic complacence from their brains. Time to make them very, very uncomfortable or angry. Time to rip off their shut eyelids and cause her to be seen for the first time ever.

I suggest a letter, a letter sent to every family member at once, that comes from blood but no wound, from serene anger, strength and knowledge. It says:

To this family –

I know you are all sick. You’ve lived in the dark and the shit all your lives, as if that were better than the rose you bore. The child. Me. Let me introduce myself. I’m the one you didn’t want, had no ability or desire to care about, needed to be silent and defective. The one you dumped your pain into. I’m the sibling who took care of brother and sister, which a parent should have done, so now you are botched, helpless and vindictive. I’m the niece you never talked to, aunt and uncle. I suppose that wasn’t your job. But you might have been a human being. Grandfather: I’m the grandchild – you crap – you forced sex on. Do the others think you’re the respected and loved foundation of our family? You are sick, you have been eternally sick, and you are in hell.

After many years being lost, set on a blind path by you, I have grown because I’ve had to. You – mother and father, sister and brother, aunt, uncle, cousins – never had to, and you didn’t. I’ve learned in my therapy that many people never grow up. I see and hear and know you, and you continue to wallow in your own filth.

You will not have any more contact with me. You won’t see my children, you won’t know my celebrations, and I won’t remember your funerals. Maybe it would be nice if you could wake up and see what you are, that you were inhuman to abuse and degrade and make invisible a child, and are still children yourselves. But I don’t expect it. What I do expect is that your always-whining and always-masturbating denials will echo among you until you bite your faces off and fall asleep drunk. And I’ll be as oblivious of them as you have been of me.

I don’t, of course, give my clients these lines to say. I only reflect their own pain and describe a possible value of autonomy, and the pain of losing even a poisonous dependency and being so alone. Some do write a letter.

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* Christine Ann Lawson, Understanding the Borderline Mother

New and improved God*

I recently slipped into a strange but placid teleological position. I’ll describe it here, mostly as a record for myself.

I have an extremely reductionist mind. It tends to question the truth or sanctity of almost anything, such as what “belief” really means, if people actually feel love, why we’re attracted to our partner, why boys really become soldiers, the legitimacy of forgiveness, the legitimacy of our thinking, the value of family ties, whether our pleasures are noble or masturbatory, the nature of wanting, cognitive therapy, “strength.” And other sacred cows. A big one, I suppose, is the nature of the universe.

Like many people, I wonder what everything is, where it came from. Unlike some smarter people, such as physicists who believe an extremely small something exploded out of the blue, created time, and became absolutely everything, I see no sense in a theory of one beginning or many beginnings. Arbitrary creation and infinite regress are theories that are child’s ideas and meaningless ideas, as I understand it.

My teleological position came out of the undeniable insanity not only of existence, but of our required thinking about existence. That is, we cannot assume that a smallest particle of existence exists. We cannot assume that a largest or limited universe exists. And our mind is not capable of conceiving an answer to these problems: Once we contemplate existence, we reach nonsense.

To be clearer: The mind cannot picture “smallest.” It cannot picture “largest.” It cannot picture “beginning” without “seeing” something right before that. It cannot conceive of nothingness. In other words, all our rationality – and there is a good amount of it – sits on a ground of the complete absurd.

So comes my belief system. Reality itself seems to have no limits or cause or sense, which is absurd. However, our mind at its best can only conceive of nonsense, which is necessary and inescapable. Therefore, it is likely that Mind is the basic state of nature. Mind that knows nothing, and thereby is the basis of an unknowable universe.

I hope this satisfies my readers. We’ll call my new theory Fred.

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* Alternately titled -- Your move, Larry Krauss.