A statement about adultness

I close my eyes and lob my mouse at a random magazine home page: Slate.com. “Trump’s Ex-Lawyer Blasts Giuliani for ‘Damaging Trump’s Case Immeasurably.’” “The Hollowness of ‘Have You No Sense of Decency.’” “Report: A 6-Year-Old Girl Separated From Parents Twice Abused at Migrant Facility.” “Catholic Church’s Abuse Cover-Up Looks Worse and Worse.” “Trump Thought He Was Friends With Turkey’s Erdogan. Now He’s Mad.” “Photo of Don Jr. and Mueller Captures a Moment in a High-States Game of Cat and Mouse.” “Black Man Accuses Sean Spicer of Using Racial Slur, Trying to Fight Him in School.” “Decade-Long Republican Gerrymanders Could Be Undone By Reckless GOP Emails.” “Glass Ceiling Broken! Kimberly Guilfoyle Shows Women Can Be Alleged Fox News Sexual Harassers, Too.” “If Trump Knew About the Russia Meeting, He Could Be on the Hook for Conspiracy.” “Facebook Temporarily Banning Alex Jones Plays Right Into His Hands.”

Does one have to see through my strange eyes to wonder: Is adulthood just a fantasy that children read in their bedtime fairy tales, then later come to believe from false nostalgia? Let me disabuse anyone’s possible delusion that anything immanent in these headlines is adult, mature, the strength and wisdom to support children, the ethical and decent life most of us contain in our “collective unconscious.” These headlines are about wayward and delinquent children, children who failed the psycho-developmental stages and now lurch about in suits in the ridiculous world they’ve made.

I have grown such an allergy to these “adults’” falseness, pretension and pursuits that I cannot care about them but for the most impactful nonsense (Trump’s impeachment versus survival, for example), and feel some withering sorrow for everyone else who finds them vital; who grants them a validity and importance that should be given to our own private concerns, and to nature.

To reiterate: The adult world, at least that we read about, is irrational, ignorant and wrong about self, hunger-based, pain-based, power-based, revenge-based, masturbatory. It is mask-based, the mask of thought, thought that lives so far and bent above the childhood feeling truth of it that we are effectively trapped in an illusion, a dream. A dream that most will never awaken from.

Is it worth even thinking about what real adultness is? I think it features a tendency to be aware of our flaws and source tragedies (childhood and later) and not let them ruin us, or others. That’s the “artificial” component. The natural component could obtain only if we were raised in love, to be free and decent people. A quick thought that I suspect is accurate: No one who travels into the public, political sphere had that kind of childhood.

Existential therapy, no Yalom

When you have a blog, sometimes you’ll write a polished, complete thought-idea, and sometimes just a feeling or ventilation that, at first contact of pen to paper, has no meaning or conclusion. In that spirit –

Never at any other therapist job have I seen so many late-twenty-something clients who are in a formless shambles. Obviously it’s not peculiar to Las Vegas, but “something” seems to form them here or bring them here. What I mean is the young persons whose life is getting quickly desperately serious – they are moving through their twenties toward the trough or “city upon a hill” of their thirties – but they’ve been too wind-tossed and chained to the poop deck of their childhood to have a theme, a background – or backbone – of meaning or purpose. They are living “one day at a time” (Alcoholics Anonymous’s jingle that I have always considered impossible and reprehensible). And sometimes one minute at a time. You could say their identity is food, survival, relationship, doctor appointments and the almost ubiquitous “I’ve filed for Disability.”

Maybe I’m wrong about the absence of a theme. In their teen years, they often became the druggie or the partyer, the one who accompanied the friend who robbed a store, the abuse victim, the pregnant high school dropout or runaway father, the two-job carrier of the family. To some degree that is how they see themselves. That’s a self-definition or theme of sorts. Contrasting that, they will have either no idea what they want to do after high school or will have the airiest neurotic thought – psychology, criminal justice, child development, culinary.

And they – more often than you’d expect – come to therapy with an interesting noble insight that comes second. “I have depression and anger.” A moment later, “I don’t know who I am.” They’d certainly name the second problem first if they hadn’t been immersed in our stupid psych culture with its mental illness labels.

How do we, therapists, handle a stagnant person who hasn’t become a thing, just a wanderer? I don’t know how others handle this existential issue, or if they even identify it as such. My answer is often to help the person understand why this is her existence – floating, not knowing, not feeling solid. And to encourage all the feelings of her life – the pre-insight ones, the during-insight ones, the after-insight ones. We come from a morass of childhood that didn’t let substance grow. Only when we face this – our face turned for hours and hours to this ghostly storm – can we then find a root in the present, some errant positive shard in the brain that formed some-when, and join it, and realize that what it says is our transfiguration, our second life. That’s poetic or vague but what I mean is a shard that says teach or counsel children or open a bakery or write the next-level computer game.

Self-medication is more important than truth (otherwise known as – The feeling is the fact)

People are prone, by human nature, to equate feelings with the truth. They see Donald Trump being pusillanimous before V. Putin, and they state conclusively that he is strong. They hear his blatant, provable lies, and they know they’re hearing truths. Human beings have always seen nothing but death after life, yet they believe we have eternal spirits. They see cruelty to foreign children, and they are certain it’s a factual good.

But “they” isn’t the minority population that voted for an empty-souled con artist. Or only people with the “wrong” religion. It’s everyone. And it must be.

Your 18-year-old son swerves his car to avoid hitting a dog, smacks a street sign which breaks off and decapitates three bystanders. You are shocked to learn of it, feel acute sorrow and horror for the victims and their families. But there is no way on earth you would accept that your son should spend years in jail. Everyone in the world thinks he was reckless and irresponsible. You are certain he had an unfortunate but excusable accident. Perhaps he should pay a fine, but that is all.

There are ten candidates for a psychotherapist position. All have a doctoral degree but you, who have a master’s. You are rock-solid certain you’d be the best one for the job. You know your skills, your knowledge, your therapeutic character. And you “know” that individuals who pursue the doctorate are, paradoxically, more apt to be lost than found about psychology: Wanting to be expert in numerous different and contradictory theories and schools of therapy, believing that many approaches are valid, means that through their bachelor’s and master’s studies they have never found themselves or understood their own psyche. And they want to wear the Napoleon Complex armor of “expert” when there can be no experts in the human psyche.

You are certain that the only good society is communal and liberal. Your brother knows that the only good society is individualistic and conservative.

Why must feelings supersede objective facts for all of us? Before addressing the question, we have to observe that there seem to be two distinctly different subjects of that question, what could be called preference and delusion.

To want my son not to be imprisoned, losing critical years of his life in suffering, would probably seem rational to most people. That is my feeling, my preference. I will be defining “guilt” or culpability differently from the world’s definition. And beyond that: I would shamelessly believe my definition should be insular to myself: If your child decapitated mine because he thought that a dog was more important than the safety of human beings in public spaces, he would deserve to be put away. Though I’d be defining “guilt” in accord with my personal feeling, I wouldn’t be considered delusional.

Is that scenario different from some right-winger’s certainty that Donald Trump’s inaugural crowd size was the biggest ever, period? Doesn’t that seem to be rank delusion, not merely a feeling or preference or re-definition? The answer, I believe, is that there is no difference, despite the appearance of one. It is feeling that determines a person’s definition of guilt; feeling that determines his construing of “biggest”; feeling that determines her definition of the moral, of scientific truth about matter and spirit. What differentiates preference from delusion is simply the direction in which one points one’s strongly invested – need-based – feeling. I know, as do those of the Democrat persuasion, that Trump’s inaugural crowd was inferior to Obama’s. But I also know that had Obama kowtowed to Putin just as Trump had done, I would perceive him to be intelligently strategic, right in some way that I was too unsophisticated to grasp at the time, strong. Or possibly – grounded in brutal reality as I believe I am – I might well acknowledge his uncharacteristic failure in that one area, but would nevertheless defend him as right and true and moral and admirable in the overall picture. Just as Trump’s followers defend Trump.

I’d be delusional in my way, you in yours.

A delusion can be defined as a belief, a certainty one is critically emotionally invested in, which is demonstrated to be wrong by objective (“unemotional”) measures. We are invested in a belief in order to save ourselves from emotional or identity devastation. I cannot lose my 18-year-old son. You cannot abandon your need for strength to be hard and cold and superior, because those are the qualities that protected you against deep losses in your childhood, losses that would disintegrate you to feel again.

In a way, this is proof that each of us is born an island, an island with an inborn urge to have a sense of self that we can accept. Between cradle and grave we may believe in an archipelago: We are humanly linked together. But that’s a delusion.