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.