Idiosyncrasies #2: Psychosomatic origin

Owing to the molecular mess* in me (and in all of us), I will experience transient moments of heartbreak whose source is the landscape of my present informed by my childhood. To fall into the feeling would be to fall into a hundred oceans at the same time, which I typically don’t want to do, especially as the feeling might overcome me while I’m walking the dog before work. I had one such experience this morning. This time, though, I played with it briefly, and the play gave me a “provisional” insight.

What happened was: The mildly terrible feeling sat in my chest – a powerful physical-emotional presence. I am a good and practiced feeler, so I allowed the felt sense** or emotional facet to dwell, to speak its wordless message. But then came my play. I erased the emotion. This was my effort to simulate what clients often do, as I know that many people do not want to feel their sick dark feelings. When I obliviated (suppressed, dissociated from) the emotion, what remained was the physical chest sensation of being an invalid, ill. I then realized – that is, I had an insight valid for myself – that the physical infirmity I felt was still the fusion of emotion and body but without any conscious recognition of the emotional disturbance. Presto! I was now physically “disordered,” in a heavier, more pressured way than a normal illness would feel, because of the invisible, hidden emotion. I was psychosomatic. Were I to then maintain the emotional suppression throughout, for example, my entire childhood and adult life, I would come to be alarmed and oppressed by this and other similarly derived physical problems in an especial way: a way that silently spoke whatever tragedy or loss was the true origin of the hurt. And there would very likely be more and more physical problems as time passed – because of the cumulative emotional burial, its pain and tension.

I would become like psychosomatic men and women. They walk in pain, at snail’s pace, as their back has been ravaged by “a little bulging disk”*** or by nothing detectable at all. Their life is now about their back. Somehow it has extra meaning. Her hands are painful, numb and tingly. Somehow she can’t work, ever again. She is “my hands.” The clients who say their doctor is “looking for an auto-immune disorder,” because they have such deep “tiredness, drowsiness,” or maybe the magical “fibromyalgia.”

They need to look under the rock where they buried the emotions in their history. They have to feel these feelings, and go back to their original roots in their childhood. The physical pain will not be doing double-duty then: bad back or knees or shoulders or ankles or muscles embodying and carrying childhood tragedy. There would be a division of labor, lighter on body, heavier on soul. But not all that heavy, because they would now be seeing their emotion. They would be seeing their self, with understanding.

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* See https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2013/10/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none_6.html, https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2013/10/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none_10.html, https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2014/07/molecular-mess-3.html and https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2017/09/molecular-mess-4.html.

** The “felt sense” – a term in Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing process.

*** I think this is a quotation from a Dr. John E. Sarno video – tv show 20/20 episode.

Shrapnel #1: Facts to hate but swallow

Poisonous grandparents

I have heard way too many clients claim that their awful, even monstrous, unrepentant parent is nevertheless a wonderful grandparent to the children. In a kind of self-hypnosis, they say: “My children need a grandparent” or “they adore their Pa-Pa.”

I believe – no, I insist – this is impossible. Paterfamilias has never lost his poisons and will have invisible poisons that go straight into the grandchild. He had no love for you, so what he gives your child is not love. Father preferred your younger brother over you – and look how he turned out. Grandparents like this – who may have shamed you, raped you habitually, called you worthless and a fuck-up whose every action he had to sadistically do over, who made you go back outside and defeat the bullies who had just beaten you up and not return until you had “won,” who kicked you out of the house at 13, who beat you with high heels or big belt buckles, who lied to hospital staff about your suicide attempt: “It was an accident,” so you could continue working and supporting his drugged ass, who gave you a full bottle of whisky on your twelfth birthday, who sabotaged your going to college, who let her “man” sexually abuse you so he’d stay around, who donated you to his best buddy Ken, who wailed, when her brother died, that she now had nothing to live for, or edified you that she had never wanted children* – are “good” by the power of spite, by sneering revenge to make you feel awful all over again. They are preferring your son or daughter exactly as they preferred your sibling, from the same immaturity. They know how to get down on the floor and play: They can use that part of their inner child. And, the same as competent psychopaths, they can impersonate the patient and wise elder.

They are doing damage to your child that will be lifelong. Your little boy knows grandpa or grandma sees you as sorry baggage, but he can’t say anything. You are wilting in his eyes, slowly and inexorably. And you are being rejected again, time-release fashion, by two generations. Grandmother’s poison pours in her tone, her sarcasm, the tension in the room, the likelihood that one grandchild is favored over the other, in her hegemony in the house that turns you, too, into a child.

You are blind, and you are needy, and you are a dearly needy child if you think this is a “wonderful” grandparent. Do you even know what love is?

Non-evolution

 

In this Year 2018, the preconscious** of men still feels superior to women; of whites, superior to blacks; of the rich, superior to the poor; of adults, superior to children; of the intellectual, superior to the “other.” These sicknesses are not vestigial to history. They are viruses continuously swept to the four winds and seven seas, nourished by the words and faces and actions of the parent generation.

Psychohistorian Lloyd deMause writes of the evolution of childhood through the “six psychogenic modes” that prevailed at different stages in history. They are: Infanticidal mode, abandoning mode, ambivalent mode, intrusive mode, socializing mode, and the present-era helping mode. Ambivalent mode, for example, around 1200 A.D.***, embodied the “parental wish”: “Mother: ‘You are bad from the erotic and aggressive projections put in you.’” Socializing mode, around 1700 A.D.: “Mother and Father: ‘We will love you when you are reaching our goals.’” Intrusive mode, after 1500 A.D.: “Mother: ‘You can have love when I have full control over you.’” Studying “the history of child abuse,” deMause said that “The propensity to reinflict childhood traumas upon others in socially approved violence is actually far more able to explain and predict the actual outbreak of wars than the usual economic motivations, and we are likely to continue to undergo our periodic sacrificial rituals of war if the infliction of childhood trauma continues.” Nevertheless – “Our task now must be to create an entirely new profession of ‘child helpers’ who can reach out to every new child born on earth and help its parents give it love and independence.” And “such a parent outreach movement is already under way in a few cities. . . .”****

Will there be a next psychogenic mode, in several hundred years, where the feeling of superior no longer exists?

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* These examples are gleaned from around three weeks of sessions.

** Preconscious: “In psychoanalysis, preconscious are the thoughts which are unconscious at the particular moment in question, but which are not repressed, and are therefore available for recall and easily ‘capable of becoming conscious’ – a phrase attributed by Sigmund Freud to Joseph Breuer.” (Wikipedia)

*** Rough dates, from my looking at deMause’s rough chart. http://psychohistory.com/books/foundations-of-psychohistory/chapter-4-the-psychogenic-theory-of-history/.

**** deMause – https://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/articles/the-history-of-child-abuse-lloyd-demause-the-journal-of-psychohistory/.

NRA's psycho-etymological error, and more

I recently dished up two comments to a MotherJones.com article on the “March for our Lives” teens. Here, with additional commentary:

Gun fanatics actually have an etymological problem – the meaning of the word “gun.” They appear to believe that any device created by Man or Woman that ignites gunpowder and projects metal chunks is, by virtue of being labeled a “gun” or “rifle,” sacred and somehow tied as a unity to the 2nd Amendment. Seriously – How could any fanatic draw the line between a simple handgun and an assault rifle, and an assault rifle and some theoretical weapon that could shoot five-thousands rounds of metal-piercing bullets per second? Cherishing “guns” as they do, drawing such a line would be completely self-contradictory and arbitrary. I think the point has to be to redefine “gun” and “rifle” NOT to include the murderous weapons of war presently at issue. (Or else, the fanatics must realize there have to be established levels of differentiation, sanctified by law.)

While it seems absurd to suggest that the NRA and fellow travelers came to have miscreant beliefs because they were confused by two poorly defined nouns – “gun” and “rifle” – I believe there is a kernel of truth in the notion. We can’t say these people think hard about values outside their hidebound fears and hatreds (of other people’s needs) and loves (owning guns and shooting). They have a neurosis, coming out of childhood injury, that grew angry and self-protective feelings, which then came to attach like a magnet to gun love and often to other self-enclosed ideas and philosophies such as survivalism, patriarchy and global anti-government nihilism. It is this neurotic chain that allows their emotional conflation of the term “gun” with anything that shoots and kills.

But less- or other-disturbed individuals will not buy this conflation, this cockeyed umbrella under which “anything that shoots” is a gun and is therefore protected by some herd-interpretation of the Second Amendment. Just as they are acute enough to differentiate a firecracker from an atomic bomb, even though both explode, so they easily see qualitative, meaning, and politically actionable differences between a handgun and an assault rifle.

Defining terms or concepts in psychologically idiosyncratic ways is not peculiar to gun folk. It’s universal. “Love” is “internally defined” by people as deep intimate admiration, as lust, as need for or ownership of the other, as dedication, as “a choice,” as a word they endorse or feeling they have but can’t describe. “Self-esteem” is defined as the sense of personal efficacy (Nathaniel Branden), the belief that one values oneself, a portable sense of OKness, or possession of one’s Real Self and feelings (Alice Miller). “Success” is variously defined, for reasons rooted in early childhood, as power or money, prestige, independence, happiness, constant growth and improvement, or in reverse, contentment without having to struggle for it. Many people will agree that “we are human beings, not human doings.” Many will not.

The NRA and its sympathizers have substituted their neurosis for a principle – carte blanche gun rights. That dysfunction has rewritten their dictionary: If it shoots a slug, it’s a gun, given them by the Hand of God.

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I agree that there is reason to look fondly upon these youngsters. But from a psych perspective, it’s a fact that many of them have been ripped out of their childhood by these traumas, and it's never mentally healthy to have an aborted childhood: Development needs to proceed along its "organic" path. So these youngsters who might otherwise have grown and crystallized their natural interests (or might have gotten psychological help if they had no interests) now have two incubating problems: They've been forced into the ideational (cognitive-heavy) world of adulthood, and they've been injected with a meaning or identity – champion for children’s safety, crusader against assault rifles – that may replace whatever would have been a more natural growth. While most people will never notice, at least consciously, the problems these displacements can later cause, it's a certainty that depression and identity problems percolate up, sometimes decades later, in individuals who had to "grow up too fast."

I think this comment is pretty self-explanatory. But I’ll add that it troubles me to see adults admiring 11- and 13- and 15-year-olds giving speeches before crowds of thousands, being interviewed by reporters, being the center of a movement. My feeling is: You are forgetting these are children. You are seeing them as effective adults, you are letting them be the adult. What does that make you?

Letter to students at Allegheny College

This morning my smart phone sent me another article about the droves of college students with mental health problems: Time Magazine’s “Record Numbers of College Students Are Seeking Treatment for Depression and Anxiety – But Schools Can’t Keep Up.” So many students under the pressure of intense course work and number of courses required. College counseling centers have long wait times; private counselors are expensive. There are now anxiety therapy groups with meditation, nutrition, yoga; virtual reality programs where you are immersed in and desensitized to and taught coping for anxiety-causing situations. You can also learn how to take notes.

Dear students:

God help you if you are as neurotically screwed as I was during college. However, maybe He helped me graduate with a music degree though I was a sub-mediocre performer, couldn’t compose two bars with any art or intelligence, demurred my way out of giving a senior recital. Though Allegheny College had a fine reputation, it somehow purveyed an educational philosophy that was enshrined in this unorthodox regimen – three courses in each of three nine-week trimesters. Yes, nine or eleven classes in an entire year was considered solid future-prep.

I would actually recommend this for students who are not terribly comfortable imagining they are adults or will soon be adults.

I don’t think I would ask tense and troubled students to fall deep into their psychology, which would mean to dig into roots and causes and into arcane yet smack-you-in-the-face questions of identity. That’s an undermining thing to do, unless you’re in the Piquant Elite for whom sickbed psych (the embracing of diagnostic labels) has become a self-medication or, bluntly speaking, your badge of honor. Most of you want to feel you are being yourself, not hitchhiking on your parents’ ride. You want to feel OK, not anxious or depressed or suicidal. You want to not question the rightness of your being there.

But you may not be able to feel or have these values.

So I will do the psychology for you.

Twenty years of clients have taught me that most adults, all the way to age ninety-nine, have existential and life meaning questions about themselves. They have never come up with definitive answers. That they have often stopped asking the questions over the years, or have grown a personal serenity, or have numbed the questions or buried them under species of “success,” doesn’t alter this. One of the various benefits that have happened is that adulthood comes to be like many kinds of fears: It is much more fearful when anticipated than when joined.

I would swear on a stack of bibles, bubbles and baubles that there is no established, ratified ascendancy to the State of Adulthood. Not at 18, or 21, or 13 if you’ve “become a man,” or at 11 if you had to “grow up too fast,” or at the loss of your cherry or your devastation by a mass shooter, or at graduation or marriage or first job, apartment and lava lamp. We each of us have the seeds of our own kind of grown-upness in the kernels of our birth, nine months pre-birth, our childhood, our adolescence. These factors write our personality, our defenses, some of the substance of our horizon, and our philosophy which together, in their idiosyncratic origins and nature, must be completely unique, not some inadequate or superior petitioner appealing to societal standards or consensus. You are yourself, insularly, even invisibly to the world. And setting aside the extreme difficulty of knowing one’s own molecules, you can accept that no one else can really see your essence. They don’t know. And therefore, they have no right to assess or judge you as adult-worthy. As worthy. Maturity is individual, as a million differently bowed and bent trees are beautiful.

The young adult you are will have potholes and roadblocks that come from your history. These obstacles or “dysfunctions” are not defects in your soul, your birthright, though they can bend your heart in ways that hurt you and others. They are injuries and they are learning experiences. Possibly two of the best insights (though in the nature of lead balloons) we can gain are that we are holistic in mind and body and time, where the past is not the past: It is our foundation and living roots. And that we are messy works in progress at the very moment we are needing to enjoy the fruits of our life.

I was a lost soul from my first steps on campus to my Dissociative Day of Graduation. I can “brag” of a feat that I’m pretty sure few to no other students can claim: Not for a single moment, not a millisecond during my time there had I entertained the twinkle of a thought of what I might do with my life the day, month, year or decade following graduation. Can you imagine . . . missing that cogito for the entire four-year rite of passage? Additionally, I was too self-blind to know I was a depressed person, and framed my wan aesthetic nature as a kind of disturbed positive. Then there were a few years of floating around the country on Greyhound buses, getting jobs here and there, meeting people but staying neurotically on the perimeter. In time, it took a bad marriage – or should I say a good teacher – to get me to look inward at my own demons (which started with a troublesome birth and benighted parents), feel some stillborn painful feelings, find a real direction for myself.

We all know the truism that college is “not for everyone.” And it is certainly true that anxiety and depression and moribund feeling may be prohibitive burdens. I would suggest, though, that if you want to be here on this campus or another, notwithstanding these troubles and questions of “who am I?” and “what is my meaning and purpose?”, for reasons that come from you not your parents’ flowchart, that in itself means it is right: You are reading something real in you, something organic. But remember that this rightness is a beacon within your history that has roadblocks and gold nuggets, potholes and sun-drenched seeds. I urge you to be the profound and sober college students you can be: Get help for injury – help to feel and know. Accept the uniqueness and complexity of the human state – your human state. And sally forth at your own damn pace.

Whence anger?

I had been working to help a young man, age 20, with his anger and “short fuse” problem. He had one of those “character armor” know-it-all-attitude faces that will, on a bad day, bring out the sissy inner child in me. That led me to sometimes produce stumbling lectures that grew more airily meaningless as they went along. But we both seemed to know what to focus on: His father had been a sarcastic, demeaning jerk to him for the first eleven years of his life, until the parents split up, after which a very decent stepfather came in and stayed.

My client had recently lost his girlfriend because of his demeaning attacks. He’d be contemptuous of different absent-minded actions or her failure to know something that should be known. Once he had melted her with a ridicule harangue when she couldn’t name the make of her family’s car, another time when she had “straightened up” the room and put his wallet in a place he never looked.

We reviewed, with emotion, the hurtful and harassing putdowns his father had scoured him with all his young years. We knew that these injuries had stuck, had bent him with grief that froze over with anger. I talked to him about regressive pain and rage process – Daddy, don’t hurt me – but ruled it out because he was, pert mood aside, still too young, dependent and tender to give way to his tenderer child. But I felt there was no other way to work into the compressed coil of grief and tension. I recommended “tying himself to the mast” whenever the short fuse caught fire, literally sit down and let the deeper complexity of feeling (hurt-burnt-needy-frustrated rage is complicated) swamp him with the past, and express it through a boy’s words. Therapists know, or should know, that when a self-medication – whether alcohol or binge-eating or tic behaviors or a rage act-out – is suppressed, a result with be the percolating up of historical buried pain.

This all seemed as right as I was able to get. There was no way that, starting his adult life with a bent back and bleeding wounds, he could just put on a “strength-based” suit of cognitive and action processes and sally forth.

But then the deus ex machina appeared, which derailed me.

“My mother,” he said, “infuriates me with the way she’s always done things.” He described, beautifully, actions of hers that seemed trivial or mundane, but hearing them, I felt an absolutely certain, crazy-made rage. She would remove an almost-empty roll of toilet paper from the bathroom but not replace it with a new one. There he was – six years old – with no necessary supply. She would throw out his old toothbrush and leave the holder empty. She would mop the kitchen floor, using such a great amount of water that the place became a flood zone. It couldn’t dry – it had to evaporate over time! Meanwhile he’d be squishing and splashing to get a snack. I felt a craziness in these behaviors, but the reason they felt crazy was not obvious and I strove, cautiously and haltingly, to understand for both of us. Didn’t she know her little boy had needs? And more, that he had a need for the predictable to be delivered, predictably? And still more: Her failure to be a normal mother who finished things and didn’t do nonsense was crazy. And even deeply more and essentially: Her vacuous obliviousness to his upset was crazy. She always acted as if his frustration did not exist: She couldn’t hear it; it didn’t register in her self-enclosed mind. She’d fix the problem in a simple workaday fashion.

Here’s what we saw: One parent shamed him, whittled him down. And then there was his pleasant mother, the idiosyncratic solipsist, blithely destroying sensible reality for him. He and I realized, through a mind experiment, that had he somehow passively bought into his mother’s existential illogic, he might be impaired now in the most peculiar ways. Possibly gutted, fey or un-masculine, with no sense of the completion of goals. Maybe a felt philosophy of the rightness of not doing, or the completeness of the incomplete. But to his salvation, he had and kept his puzzlement; he never let it slip. It grew and “devolved” into anger, an intolerance of absurd ignorance, of the failure of competence. Anywhere these flaws happened, such as his girlfriend’s forgetting the fucking obvious, made him the un-mothered child, brought back to crazy. And that was an opportunistic injury, allowing the shaming to come marauding in.

The recipe: Confront your mother. Be eloquent with a razor. “That, mother: crazy! That thing you would do, crazy! Nuts, impossible, insane. You gave me a two-plus-two-is-seven childhood. You gave me a ground where a mother doesn’t know she has a son with needs, where a half-circle is closed. You were off in your own world, and I had no one. Feel this now, what I’m telling you. Blow away the clouds that sit between your eyes and your brain.”

That was a session.

Lobotomy Dynasty

If the CNN series, The Kennedys, is speaking true, then the children of Joseph and Rose Kennedy were lobotomized puppets imprinted to live their father’s life for him. Joseph wanted to be president, disgraced himself as a Hitler appeaser, then retrenched and bequeathed his aim to his sons Joseph Jr. then Jack. Growing up, the nine children were posters, billboards of “success.” The small children had to be, at the dinner table, world savvy and “articulate,” and in the possibility they were ever asked to give a speech – instructed Rose – had to have something “appropriate” to say at the ready. And somehow there was a sense of death in them, or the chemistry of it. Jack, always sickly and in pain and consigned to a clerical job, was pushed into the military by his father, then launched himself into a physically torturous and near-suicidal appointment – commander of a PT boat. He screwed up, got some and almost all of his crew killed, was no hero, but his father spun the press to make him look like one. U.S. Navy lieutenant and first son Joseph Jr., poignantly aggrieved that he was not the star, sought a way to family glory. He was killed in an especially dangerous mission. Earlier, oldest daughter Rosemary was forced by her father to have a lobotomy because she had “learning disabilities” – was not the performance intellectual the family required. The operation made her a vegetable, and she remained hospitalized for the rest of her life. “Kick,” another sister, married outside the family religion; soon after, her husband was killed in battle. She then consorted with a married Earl, leading her mother to threaten to disown her. On a flight to the French Riviera, they and two crew were killed when their plane crashed into a mountain: The Earl had demanded that the pilot fly in turbulent weather.

All the family photos and movies you see in the first episode are of these smiling, dapper and fun children of Camelot, with patriarch grinning like Power in the background.

Maybe there is an internal feeling of death and dying if you have to buy in to not owning your own life, and if you have to barrel forward along the precipice of the highest peaks, and if your inoculated purposes are un-Self, humanity-wide.* President Kennedy, pushed into his first political fight by his father, who practically paid for the election, was plagued with an auto-immune disorder and other infirmities that may have been psychosomatic: caused by stress and buried, denied tragedy. The narrator noted that Kennedy had always had a fatalistic sense and talked about death a lot – before he was thirty.

Psychology is always the river running beneath, whether you are “happy,” or making millions, or winning elections and the presidency, or winning the American Dream. Smiles and success don’t tell the truth: The deep river does.

If only we weren’t such a goddamned surfacy species.

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* Wikipedia entry, “Kennedy family”: “The descendants of Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. and Rose Kennedy include six members of the United States House of Representatives or Senate, one of whom became president of the United States; as well as two U.S. ambassadors, a lieutenant governor, three state legislators (one of whom went on to the U.S. House of Representatives), and one mayor.”

Death bed chats #1: The universe is droll

“A universe from nothing.” Such a silly idea: Thanks, ingenious physicists. A universe from a Creator. Just as silly. Since our intelligence is only another form of the cosmos’s ignorant energy, we can never know nature. And this means that we – human beings – cannot understand what “something” and “nothing” actually are, what the words can possibly mean. Literally. That’s how ignorant we are: We cannot know what “something” could be, and should therefore remove the term from the scientific vocabulary.

I thought I’d try to imagine myself on my death bed, around age one-hundred-and-three, to see what thoughts and feelings might generate.

* I’ll wonder why people never tried to befriend me, despite my lack of interest in friends and my off-putting nature.

* I’ll picture my wife with such choking, ineffable poignancy that I should die at that moment, not in an hour or so. If, on the other hand, she outlives me, I’ll cling to her like a desperate baby to its mother – drowned in the chemistry of infant, child and adult love and need.

* I’ll scoff with some disgust at the universe for being so fantastic yet so ultimately slippery. “What in the heck are you?” might be my last words.

* I’ll picture the difference between my psychotherapist life and my truth, which is that I remain a lost little boy who was born on the wrong planet.

* I’ll wish to go out to a piece of music. It might be a simple Grieg tune, like his Peasant’s Song, or the first movement of Rachmaninoff’s Second Concerto or the third movement of Grieg’s A minor concerto, or Dinu Lipatti playing Bach, or a Chopin Nocturne, or Paul and Paula’s “Hey, Paula.” That’s if my wife isn’t there. If she is, then her eyes.

* I’ll hold my blog with a tender but firm grip, because I’ve had some meaningful thoughts, though most are too unpleasant for people.

* Like most or all people, I won’t be able to really, fully believe in my “end.” How can I be gone, in life or in dreams, when I feel like the infinite?

* I wouldn’t want to look in the mirror, because at sixty-six I’m still under the delusion that I’m adorable and young-looking for my age, and I would not want to be forced to break that delusion.

* I believe I’d want to walk or hobble outside, preferably at night to see the sky. Even though I’m still the child and really only feel good under the blankets in a state of blurred consciousness, I’d want to appreciate the world one last time. God, if he or she appeared, would not impress me because I wouldn’t be able to believe it. But if the heavens opened up and a shining gold staircase appeared, leading to a greater truth, I would love that, would climb it.

* I will have to put my regrets and sorrows aside ’til later.

Wish list #1: Sometimes I'm tired of what I know

I recently had the effete fantasy that there should be new or different, unique and brighter therapy ideas than what exists in the cognitive and depth approaches. (I reject touchy-feely EFT and similar nostrums which masturbate one’s self-delusion capacity.) I suppose I can see why therapists go to workshops to scout out new tricks. Secretly, they hope a new “skill” will replace what they fail to understand about human warpage through personal smarts and introspection.

Partly, I’m a cop-out. I don’t take a woman out to an abandoned barn in the boonies (as a Canadian therapist did) to have her hurl glass bottles at the wall – her father – while screaming invectives at him. I don’t touch clients, on a stage, on tender body parts to bring forth a torrent of tears and regression, as I once read Upledger did in his CranioSacral Therapy. I suppose I wish I could bring the men out to a field, as David Calof used to do, to demolish a junker car with their bare hands – raging against their rapist or shaming father. I don’t do marathon groups to wear people down to the needy heartful id. I don’t even do Primal Therapy anymore, lacking a soundproofed room with padded walls, dimmed lights and a mat not a chair.

So I’m left working my knowns: insight into the child roots of current misbehavior; depth methods to pour out old pain, altering feeling and thinking. The cognitive-type processes I use come after he or she has done depth therapy. For example, after she learns, and feels, that her achievements (the one college graduate in the family; the professional in a clan of druggies and jailbirds, etc.) are more her escapes from pain than exuberance for life and will not forestall depression forever, then we can appreciate rationality, hope and positivity.

But I wish there was more. I look at the client and wish there were immediate ways to move the brain. “Insight is not enough.” Feeling some childhood pain is not enough. I can’t be her father. That would be too much right in a wrong world. I can’t be his lifelong companion. I can’t turn emptiness into substance, foundational immaturity into maturity, dependency into heretical autonomy. The paradox is that the longer I do this work, the more powerful I feel, yet the power is almost entirely illusory.

I will let you know when the magic arrives in my fingertips.

The present is the melody, the past is the harmony

I thought I’d try to write some of the clip-art, stock-photo, Muzaky, cloyingly truistic, feel-good, shake-hands-with-your-lobotomy fluff that one can read in all the other psychology and therapy blogs. To rejoin my cohort. Let’s . . . . go! –

I.

I once had a client who, seven or eight years old, while her mother was beating her with extension cords, kicking her and breaking bones, brute-forced this attitude into her mind: “I look forward to when I’m a grown-up.” This detached her from the moment and all the similar moments, a dissociation she bolstered with a rosy smile. Forty years later, her face looked like a tan balloon with a red grin painted on it. Her voice was cheery, always. She was perky and her ideas were jackhammer positive. Except when she had depressed breakdowns and could not stop crying.

Think of the good things in your life, milady! Your dedicated husband, your children. Forgive your mother, because forgiveness pacifies the heart. Cherish the lessons you have learned from your past. Join a support group of women who have struggled through adversity and stand, arms joined, on the mountain top. Get exercise and research good nutrition.

II.

The nineteen-year-old knows why his girlfriend left him. “I’m an asshole! I didn’t treat her well.” This is the kind of insight that heals. As Dear Abby said, ‘knowing the problem is half the solution.’ Add to this his awareness of where his personality came from: “My father is a jerk.” His father, with whom he still lives, denigrates everything he does and says. The atmosphere has been shame for the past fifteen years.

Heed today’s Psychology Today blog: “If you only look at negative things, then those negative things can become a part of your personality, and that may keep you in an emotional bind where life becomes more difficult than it needs to be.” “Holding on to pain is normal, but it is also normal to let it go after an appropriate period of time.”

It may be appropriate to wonder: Where on the clock are the hour hand and the minute hand when pain and injustice, depression and anger, lack of love and failure to grow evaporate?

Isn’t it worth asking –

When does the past fall behind us? Probably not five minutes or half-an-hour ago if something consequential has happened. If a distraught partner slaps your face, you may let it go quickly if you have understanding or if she is stunned with regret. But if she slaps you again, isn’t it a bit too “zen” to say you forgive the first but not the second? What of the first and second but not the third?

The essence of bad psychology is the belief that our mind exists in the present moment, that its thoughts and attitudes and feelings form in the conscious now. This is the conceit of the hider, the runner, the counselor who eats dessert first and never gets to dinner. He has painted a smile on his face because he’s conjured a positive thought, and he anxiously wants you to do the same. Even if he is one of those who accept that childhood matters, he wants to believe that because the present covers the past, it has won the battle. We are in the now – we win!

There is no reason to believe this if we realize that our eyes are old, that our mind is rooted in memory, our impulses are related to our earlier impulses, and our developing may have stopped decades ago. That growing up doesn’t change the harmonies nearly as much as it does the melodies. That old feelings emerge and tint or spoil the moment. That though the body’s knowledge is subliminal, it’s a magnetic reservoir informing everything. Including our identity. Sometimes we can see that while our adult doesn’t feel like our child, it can feel like a poor or sad or angry answer to it. And from that, we realize there hasn’t been much winning.

I will always have a terminal problem with contemporary therapists and their work, as long as they believe the anesthetist is the surgeon.