A logical point: Drs. Gordon and Janov

I may have read, a little over four decades ago, that Albert Einstein came to his great discovery, E = MC², by starting with some assumptions about matter and energy then using implacable logic – algebra – to jiggle the three factors. The equation reconfigured with mass and the speed of light on one side and the E of Eureka! on the other. Though my memory could be wrong, I’m satisfied to use this tale to background a (broadly) similar logic:

I believe that most therapists would accept the validity of Dr. Thomas Gordon’s (Parent Effectiveness Training) thesis:

When a person is able to feel and communicate genuine acceptance of another, he possesses a capacity for being a powerful helping agent. His acceptance of the other, as he is, is an important factor in fostering a relationship in which the other person can grow, develop, make constructive changes, learn to solve problems, move in the direction of psychological health, become more productive and creative, and actualize his fullest potential. It is one of those simple but beautiful paradoxes of life: When a person feels that he is truly accepted by another, as he is, then he is freed to move from there and to begin to think about how he wants to change, how he wants to grow, how he can become different, how he might become more of what he is capable of being.

Gordon further makes his point by contrast:

Why is parental acceptance such a significant positive influence on the child? This is not generally understood by parents. Most people have been brought up to believe that if you accept a child he will remain just the way he is; that the best way to help a child become something better in the future is to tell him what you don’t accept about him now.

Therefore, most parents rely heavily on the language of unacceptance in rearing children, believing this is the best way to help them. The soil that most parents provide for their children’s growth is heavy with evaluation, judgment, criticism, preaching, moralizing, admonishing, and commanding – messages that convey unacceptance of the child as he is.*

The “beautiful paradox” he describes exists not in “life” or in human nature but in the irrationality of many parents. Nature knows we must be free and not tied up in pain and self-defending in order to enjoy our energies. It’s only psychologically frozen parents who believe that criticism, force and expropriation are effective ways to motivate children. We want parents to value the personhood of their child; we accept our clients with empathy and without judgment, in order to help them explore themselves and grow.

I believe that if we accept this principle, then we must accept the primacy of deep-feeling, “primal,” historical, emotionally expulsive and explosive therapy. I recently wrote to a former client:

My perspective says that you have to have a sort of feeling epiphany. That means you would evaporate your self-protective armor that we talked about and let all the grief of childhood loneliness and invisibility pour forth.

The enemy of psychological healing is all the straitjackets that keep us locked in our childish or adult persona. This includes self-protective character – “oppositional-defiant” and the personality disorders; the emotional repression that keeps our Self lost and depressed; the intellectualization and “racing thoughts” that keep us in our head. Freedom of the inner self, within the benevolent ground of love and acceptance, is the key that unlocks the straitjackets and allows both painful and healthful energies to be released to their targets, whether these energies are tears and rage, or joy and creativity.

If Dr. Gordon is right, that the child has to be accepted as herself to thrive, then the most radical historical feeling therapies** (rather than cognitive therapies) are right: We must help our client find and express the true self, the core child self, still sitting enclosed, deep inside.

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* Thomas Gordon, PhD, “Nobel Peace Prize Nominee,” Parent Effectiveness Training, Three Rivers Press, New York, 1970, 1975, 2000. These excerpts are at – https://www.naturalchild.org/guest/thomas_gordon3.html.

** Arthur Janov, PhD, The Primal Scream and many other books, including The New Primal Scream, Primal Man, The Feeling Child, Imprints: The Lifelong Effects of the Birth Experience, The Janov Solution, Primal Healing, Beyond Belief, The Biology of Love, Why You Get Sick – How You Get Well: The Healing Power of Feelings. Though Arthur Janov died in 2017, his blog is still accessible: http://cigognenews.blogspot.com/.

Some observations about the Imago Dialogue

I’ve never asked any Marriage and Family Therapists if they use the Imago Dialogue to teach partner communications. The crown of Harville Hendrix’s approach, the Dialogue is part of the common self-help literature* and may not seem sophisticated enough for licensed clinicians. I, a generalist Counselor, use it and have seen it sometimes heal a mutually wounding relationship. The script has the two parties apply, and maybe learn for the first time, reflective listening or “mirroring,” validation of the partner’s grievance, and empathy for her pain. Once the “receiver” of the complaint has gone through this eye-opening and caring process, he is now in a place to want to help solve the partner’s problem. Or as I’ll sometimes say to clients – After hearing clearly without self-exoneration or agenda; after validating the plaint as substantial and not-crazy from the griever’s autonomous frame of reference; after feeling in oneself empathy for her, “you’d have to be a psychopath not to want to help against her pain. ‘Gosh, honey, if only I gave a damn.’”

As humane and valid as the Dialogue is, I don’t recall ever seeing in Hendrix or in the google-able literature any warnings of fatal flaws that might sabotage it. Over the years I have noticed a few. These are:

One – Dialogue over a spouse’s message, grievance or need will fail if a deeper and more critical problem hasn’t yet been addressed. I often teach the process with this example: Wife, using the famous I-statement, says: “I’m really hurt that you practically never call me when you’re going to be late from work.” Husband would reflect this (“Let me make sure I get you. It really makes you feel bad that I usually don’t call when I’m going to be late. Did I get it?”). As his unadorned reflecting showed that he listened and heard her clearly, his wife would feel “heard” and have a feeling of satisfaction. But what if he suspected she has been cheating on him? Could he bring himself to mirror her statement without spin, contempt, or at all? “That’s right, dear. I don’t call you in advance. How else can I sneak home to see who you’re sleeping with?”

Two – The receiver of the grievance (both parties, of course, not just one) has to actually like the character of the other person. Marriages talk love all the time, but there may be no “like” or respect. People who when young got together in partying, alcohol and sex would be my best-known example of bonds that were destined to fail. In my first marriage, I said “love” from a place of lifelong depersonalization. Had a therapist asked me if I liked that poisonous Borderline, I would have jabbered, tread water in Great Blue Beyond silence for a minute, then had I any courage said “no.” Without basic like and respect for the Self of the other, the Dialogue must be specious: The words may be there, but the heart won’t be.

Three – Personality disorder itself. A partner may be as brilliant and benign as Socrates, but if he or she is thinking, feeling and speaking through a core emotionalized attitude** – a global defensive warp of reality – there will be no harmony of the minds. Again: My first wife would have known no other conviction but that it is right to denigrate men to her daughters; it is appropriate to lie to friends about her academic credentials***; it is right to be shaming and abusive to me. Imagining a Narcissist attempting the Dialogue, I think of Daily Beast’s Rick Wilson’s editorial line: “For Trump, there are two types of people: Donald Trump, and losers. . . .”**** Were Melania to complain: “I’m upset that you always seem to dismiss my feelings as less important than yours,” Trump’s surface id would be forced to say: “That’s because they are.”

I am about to see a married couple that will present the following challenge: She has a feminized Narcissism of pampering, entitlement and certainty that she is always right; he shut down long ago in response to it. Mostly, in Hendrix world, we see both parties as lost soul adult lava fields of unmet childhood needs where each can learn to help and nurture the other. Personality disorder can make this impossible, whatever the appearance may be. Does Hendrix think his Dialogue is applicable to that fundamental flaw? I believe it isn’t.

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* Harville Hendrix, Getting the Love You Want.

** Not the first time I’ve used Virginia Axline’s (Play Therapy) term.

*** See post – https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2017/08/a-bit-of-rough-draft-el-jobean.html.

**** https://www.thedailybeast.com/this-was-the-week-that-finally-broke-trumps-spell.

It's a matter of bleeding internally

A forty-three-year-old client who has for years been unhappy with his life. He never learned or had a career. A nice-looking man with no perversions, violence or abnormal beliefs, he’s never had a real relationship. He sees old friends on Facebook with their happy families, vacations, high-altitude careers, and that peculiar dreadful depression that says “I am nothing,” “I never became a person,” “I don’t know what I am,” engulfs him.

The only biographical facts we need to know are that his father was continually violent toward his mother, father “never cared about anyone’s feelings,” and the little boy would sometimes “defend” his mother. They are enough because they led to everything he became, and everything he didn’t become for all his days.

If we had a psychological x-ray machine, we’d see beneath the skin-deep self a person still in the past, stuck there. We’d see a boy who could never grow up, because organic, real growth isn’t what a person thinks – thinking’s easy and easily self-medicating – it’s what he feels deep inside, and nothing ever healed his painful injuries. Imagine continuously bleeding internally. You really don’t “move on.” This is a true analogy because the lifeblood of a defeated child is always being pushed out of the body by time that goes on without him. And time goes on. You continue to live and probably do things. But you really don’t move on.

This is what fools us: He opens his eyes and is anxious about needing to be in the present he sees. His mind says “succeed.” If he were to close his eyes and shut out every thought, he would simply feel the pain that never went away in his childhood. He would simply be the internally bleeding boy. That’s all he would be. And that would be the truth.

Mainstream psychology and psychotherapy don’t want to know this. They turn thought into the person. We are thought, changeable thoughts, correctable thoughts, educable thoughts. We have feeling, but we are thinking. So everything done in almost all therapy defaults to the windshield wiper of belief and idea and word.

From that terribly, terribly misguided approach, a therapist wouldn’t see that the man is a forty-three-year-old Book of the Dying under a contemporary cover. He is merely a phantom in the present. Therapy would usher him to have different thinking, express a feeling for a moment or two, use reason, go to college, not compare himself to others, socialize.

And the bleeding would go on.

There is a better way, that goes almost to the depth of the ocean floor but must stop just above it. It wants the person to know his worst, feel through his worst and hold his child while the therapist is holding him in understanding. That is the four-dimensional person. There is no other.