Transit #2: Carrying my family to work

Family-of-origin dynamics manifest all over the place. The childhood injuries we become magnetize us to certain romantic and life partners. The injuries then manifest in the marriage, where one’s spouse becomes a failed need-meeter – of  our submerged childhood needs. We may be the authoritarian company head where we’d been the “responsible” child, or the “good listener” or social worker where we’d been the “placater” child of alcoholics. James Framo* has on occasion seen two marital therapists at a party, each treating one of the conflicting spouses, both consciously and unconsciously enacting their respective clients’ arguments.

My 1950’s family was a roll-of-the-dice assemblage of fake-emoters and sleepwalkers. Growing up, I was inert to any feeling about “family” or “happy family” or bond or loyalty or love or even reliance. Pick a dozen or two random words from the dictionary – “nostril,” “bridge,” “perambulate,” “dish,” “rally,” “circumference,” etc. I will experience more gut feeling for any of them than I do for “father” and “mother,” “mom” and “dad.” Those terms do not compute in my psyche. My placid eyes and galvanic skin response would prove it.

This history has, through the forces of repression and defense, developmental arrest and projection, made me a quirky employee, with only slight improvement from age sixteen to sixty-six. Independent Contractor – that is fine. I float in and out and through the building, a rock or an island in loafers. But as soon as I have joined a humming machine, the constant cycle of moneyed purpose, which some employers like to pretend is family, I feel odd. Different from. Better than. Less than. Viscerally needing to not be seen. Contemptuous, yet needy, and frightened of camaraderie with perpetual strangers. My preconscious feels the other employees have undeserved power and prestige: They are competent in irrelevant ways. The boss, decent as can be, is a torturer because he has, by hiring me, turned me into a child who must follow arbitrary edicts. I am either a haughty prince or an urchin. There is a soft-ish authority problem.

So to work and have naturally accruing Social Security income, I conjure the family feeling at interviews. It may even last a few weeks through orientation and initial productivity, before it becomes obvious: I am never eating with coworkers, or joining or attracting dyads and triads at the water-cooler, or having happy hour rendezvouses. If I weren’t sincerely warm and humorous in one-on-one moments, as I am, I know I would look neurotic. As it is, they can’t place me. Maybe the impression is “odd, quaint duck.”

One boss was circus ringmaster friendly and a worshipful Republican. S—, carrying her own teddy bear around, talked baby-talk, was Betty Boop. Ohio crisis manager was a fake-jolly back-stabber. Her Santa’s tummy shook like a bowl full of snakes. P’tricia seemed too numb and old-girlishly naïve to own a multi-division practice; maybe her husband did all the work. One employer didn’t say twenty words to me in two years – the boor. Forty years ago, the owner was a poet who wrote “lave” when “wash” would have cleaned up the stanza. Age sixteen, there was dour Don Watson, grounds supervisor, who felt I wasn’t trimming the rich people’s edges fast enough. Silently, I walked off the job – my first.

I see myself and clients having to be mature in many spheres, in some more painfully or impossibly against the grain than in others. You and I imagine we are the different species: grown-ups. But our past is not just a little undigested lump in the gut; it is siren’s music playing underground, the music of family’s inverse legacy. Therapy can help us grow and change, but more likely grow and reconcile. There is cognitive therapy, which is workable if you are someone who is always on the idea and thinking self-medicative plane; otherwise, swallowing store-bought logic and positive outlooks wouldn’t mean crap to you. My way will sometimes be to acknowledge and feel our never-grown child’s legitimacy, and help you feel seen and heard and accepted. We nod. A wistful smile, a long exhaled breath of acceptance and irony. Psychodynamic water cooler goodness.

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* James L. Framo, PhD, Family-of-Origin Therapy, Brunner/Mazel Publisher, New York, 1992, pg. 10. “A not uncommon experience is watching two therapists at a cocktail party reproducing the argument of married partners that each is seeing separately.”