I did it the right way

Habitual and faithless readers have seen my cold, declarative and terminal statements about my sister (and possibly other generic family thrown in). She is not a bad person; in fact, is probably an excellent person. She has done at least one astounding mitzvah: to raise her disabled adopted baby almost singlehandedly to be a high-integrity and accomplished man. I couldn’t have done that. My problem with her has been that owing to our family-of-origin hypnosis, she can’t extend her capacity for empathy to me. And I would need from family visibility or nothing. That’s the slogan: Visibility or Bust.

I’ll occasionally crack my principle of never writing to her or any of the others who may be still living. So here is this morning’s letter, probably after a year’s passing, followed by brief commentary:

Barbara – I discovered a while ago, with no pleasure, that I am completely incapable of talking to any of my family (meaning: if anyone other than you cared to contact me) about their here-and-now. It’s impossible to me: Like a law of nature, I could not possibly be interested in how or what anyone’s doing. You all just live in my past in my mind. So communication is basically rendered impossible. And worse – everything about the past that comes to mind is self-referential, except for one question: Did you ever learn what father meant in his statement (old letter) that he had spent some time living under assumed identities? Presumably post-war? I’m willing to accept that that nebbish wasn’t delusional. Everything else, it’s just about my childhood, and I would never want to go there with any of you again. The noninterest seems mutual, anyway. If I don’t get to hear that someone has died (Harry, Jr.), then I am clearly out of the loop.

Las Vegas – the air and sky and sun and breeze are nice. I don’t like the big bugs (https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-defenses-of-weak-and-strong.html). But Liz likes it here and has a main project of beautifying the apartment. At work, I keep getting both more subtle and more dull as time goes on. And have gotten to the point where I can hardly imagine learning anything new from a psychology book. Obviously that’s arrogant, but I’m open-minded and may pick up a new book some day. We have been essentially full-time caregivers to Liz’s 88-year-old mother, whom Liz shipped here two years ago from near-starvation in Madison, WI.

That’s all on my mind.

While all clients are heavily “adult children” with unfinished business through which they unknowingly live, the most childish of these may be those still drowned in their hellacious family-of-origin dynamics. These are usually middle-aged sisters – sometimes with an outlier brother – and mother still linked at the id: hateful, amazingly vindictive, huge sucking rivalries. They remain stuck in the past and have not moved on at all, either by growth or insight or willpower. They have carried the past into the present, and cannot see any difference between them.

I have handled the dynamic in the right way. I know I’m still stuck in the past – though only about my family of sister and cousins. I know the past can’t be mended by being mindful, positive or “forgiving” (https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2017/05/curmudgeon-2-forgiveness.html), and that we don’t really move on without mending. I have needed the empathic visibility – and likely the catharsis enabled by that – that this family cannot give. And so I have left them in the past. Many, many clients would be better off if they could do the same.

Thoughting #3: The Peterson mask

“If my stuff were popular, the world would be insufferably deep.”

That was my disarming answer to a fellow Slate.com commenter who suggested – by the process of catty free association – that I am jealous of idea-farter du jour Jordan Peterson, after I wrote that I’d enjoy having him as a therapy client. Indeed it would be delectable: Pontifical, vaporous and attitudinally toxic conjecture – Peterson's modus vivendi – is always an escape from root, child-level pain and loss of self. In therapy I’d be helping him reach existential pay dirt by questioning the validity of his universals – global prejudices that are dissociative self-medications of that pain and loss. I’d help him reach feeling that had no multisyllabic vocabulary, that was just the true self. Questioning the intellectualism defense, and so many other defenses, is always moving.

But what is good for one person would be insufferable for the world. We need to be our surface lives and pleasures. We need to believe our thoughts are valid. We need to have ideas and feel they’re wise or perceptive. We need to slide along in life confused or spuriously certain, then find a palliative bunny to see, then slide on again. We need to assume that we, adults, are grown up. Woe to us if we opened the door inside us and found a stillborn child still waiting to be held. What if we learned that we never recovered from that bully’s outrageous dignity rape, never moved on, still needed to be that child, finally helped deep and long? What if we realized that our ideas, colored balloons floating high, are connected by frayed string to sharks swimming in the night? What if we learned they are masks over a different dimension?

The world couldn’t take that.

Which brings up the questions: What kind of world is this? What kind of people are we?

Little rant #1: Enough of Gottman

I’ve just watched an hour-long video promotional by John Gottman, marriage researcher and statistician. It had always been an axiom, in my view, that Gottman’s approach is stunningly shallow and impotent. It traffics solely in generic concepts and dynamics – limerence, love, criticism, “regrettable incident,” contempt, trust, loyalty – without ever, ever, ever getting to their psychological and intrapsychic meaning and the “why?” behind them. Why a spouse is distrusting or shut down (“stonewalling”), why he has a critical or power-and-control nature, why they can’t communicate – that is, hear and understand each other, why he “loves” his wife but sext-messages other women, what unresolved problems (from childhood!) he harbors and projects onto the marriage – none of this seems to matter or possibly even to exist to Gottman, only that something adverse happens and that the couple needs to be motivated and taught to change. The video was more of the same, breaded with name-droppings and requests to read other books. Most painful was listening to the question-and-answer session. God! I was transported back to all the potboiler CEU workshops where attendees, drained of joie de vivre after six hours of anecdotes and technique retreads, ask wan questions to try to pick something practicable out of the speaker. The presenters’ answers were uneventful. A therapist wanted to know why the couple improved in her office but invariably returned to their misery at home. Gottman and his eternally lovely and sexy wife (he lets us know this) Julie had only Dear Abby-type advice and truisms to offer.

I assume that if Gottman were to glance at a decently depth-oriented marital psychology book like Harville Hendrix’s Getting the Love You Want, his eyes would glaze over and drift off to that bunny out the window. “‘Unconscious partnership’?” he’d murmur. “What could that mean. . . ?”

I need to ask: “John – do you know how fucking complicated a person is?”