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.