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.”