Eight or ten
26-year-old female social workers ushering little kids through the hallways;
each therapy room with the same big cross-section dollhouse, people and action
figures and toys and games and plush pillows; splashy inspirational wall plaques
to make you wish they would “sink in” and fill you with forward-thinking joy.
With all these young zealous women at home in their pastel domain, why would
they need me, an AARP-plus bowels-of-the-psyche-thinking pessimist, to do child
therapy?
Beginning of
the ’90s I had my moment of existential desperation that led to my inspiration to become a therapist. I knew I had to help
children. Because so many of them had to be lost little souls as I had been,
and nobody ever seeing it.
Before long,
though, I felt that I could not really relate to the children. Winnicott’s Squiggle
Game. Coloring. Mood faces poster. Talking Feeling & Doing Game. Jenga. Six-year-old
girl’s drawing of her family with aunts and uncles and dog, but mother “accidentally”
left out. “Small Boat in a Big Storm” and “The Rosebush” evocative drawings.* 10-year-old Gary hurling wads of hard clay at his drawing of his gym teacher in polka-dotted underpants. The reason I couldn’t share their emotions and harmonize with their childness
was not simply that I hadn’t been able to live a childhood because of global anxiety.
Specifically it was the sense of alienation from my own kind. I had never been
in sync with my peers. First grade, I was shy and detached and envied the other
boys their sociability. Fourth grade, I felt inferior and emulated and faked their
macho, drawing sports cars and laughing about tits. Fifth and sixth grades, the
girls and boys were at school dances but I was not, because I was too young.
I learned a lot
about children – read books and attended workshops but mostly made my own personal
archaeological dig, to see some of the big and usually invisible ways children
go wrong by their birth and their own inhibitions and their parents. I remember
there was a transitional phase when, immersed in the work with five- and seven-
and twelve-year-old boys and girls, I felt distaste at the idea of therapizing adults.
With children, there was both healing and prevention possible (if the parents
could be softened and made human again**). Adults, though, were already
needfully stuck in their mental personality. Truthfully, I may have felt too
unsophisticated at that point to work with adults, who felt intimidating with
their “greater psychological size.”*** That was the ungrown child in me.
After the first
couple years, adult (and older adolescent) therapy became my medium. I realize
this came from my growing “realistic pessimism” made of two main factors. Yes,
we were once hurt and troubled children, but in the final analysis, we’re all
just inevitable adults. That’s the one direction and dumping ground. And as I grew
older, my emotional sophistication, and empathy and sympathy for adults ripened.
I knew they were, like me, unfinished children trying to make it in the world. What’s
interesting (the word is drenched in ironic meaning) is that so much of what I
do is to help them reach their child inside.
So in a way, I
still do child therapy, determined by the expertise of my own injuries and
partial healing.
- - - - - - - -
- - -
* Violet
Oaklander, PhD, Gestalt child therapist, Windows
to Our Children – https://www.amazon.com/Windows-Our-Children-Approach-Adolescents/dp/0939266067.
** Thomas
Gordon, PhD, Parent Effectiveness
Training – https://www.amazon.com/Parent-Effectiveness-Training-Responsible-Children/dp/0609806939.
And excerpt – http://www.gordontraining.com/wp-content/uploads/What%20Every%20Parent%20Should%20Know.pdf.
(See heading: “Be a person, not a ‘parent.’”)
Good to see SV finally moving over to the root causes of (distress) rather than detailing (albeit magnificently) the manifestations of people's dis-ease. See this YouTube video: https://youtu.be/hJOthJ-bWrU Science will get there in the end, it's just way too slow!!! Regards, Paul Wood
ReplyDeletePaul -- I have gotten fairly sick of Vaknin. Obviously he knows a lot about the symptomatology and the drama (self and relational) of the Narcissist. But to reify concepts such as the real self and false self, the child self and the adult self, as if they exist discretely to be therapized, is ignorant and useless. As I've described in some posts, the child "self" did not survive in any way apart from its juvenile and later adult defense constellation, its escape. Depth therapy, that actually must be feeling-immersive therapy (which I doubt Vaknin would ever do) must gingerly touch the shell-less egg of the child abort -- not confront, soothe, encourage it. Sam can go back to being a Narcissist, not selling the Narcissist.
ReplyDeleteYes, SV and narcissism, it did become a bit of a (somehow inhuman) mantra with him, so much so that, in order to make a career out of it, had to be canonised into endless theory (a la Freud!). I had the same reaction as you in the long term, one felt as if it was all being rammed down one's throat, that it really was his fixation, his need to cling to some form of rational reality (thereby avoiding feelings). Perhaps the phrase "be careful what you wish for" applies to Sam's choice of obsession. Psychological flexibility is needed. We cross rivers by jumping from stepping stone to stepping stone, not dwelling too long on any one stone. Still, personally I pay some attention, even to those who I perceive as being a bit "on the target, but off-centre" - it helps me hone my own perceptions.("Truth is an arrow, and the gate is narrow, that it passes through."). The only mitigation, though, is that in the video I earmarked, Sam seems to (at last) be acknowledging the root of most mental discomfort - growing up constantly living on the knife-edge of existence AND non-existence. Thanks for your reply.
ReplyDelete