Helpless and hopeful

With extreme confidentiality ruling the day, here are some past clients:

A “frantic” (her word, not mine) and very sexed young woman who must be scheduled at six p.m., last appointment, because she had such a fulsome aroma that no one should follow her.

A couple, after a stunning loss, are heavy in their individual misery and in their misery about each other. My empathy, loads of lessons and ideas about loss and justice could have knocked over a horse, but they sit and stare immobile, at the bottom of an ocean of malaise. The man, then, finds it appropriate to say that he doesn’t really love her, he is trying hard, but it hasn’t come yet. They are making my job very difficult.

A twenty-one-year-old comes to therapy because she dislikes her own personality, which is like her mother’s. She is happy and benevolent with a person, at first, but once comfortable, becomes critical and sniper-ish. She wants to be positive and mature. She wants to be nice. And I tell her no – she needs to be real with the abandonments, shaming, and sexual abuse she passed through from childhood to teens. She needs to be an angry, aggressive and judgmental person, unhappy, miserable, not nice. Will she even allow herself to hear this?

A thirty-year-old woman going on eighteen with blue hair exists in one primary emotional state: glum. This is the DSM-IV’s (earlier psych manual) hypothetical Depressive Personality Disorder, a self-protective garment that is sewn in childhood from scars over serial emotional abandonments, serial losses of hope. “The future will be as bleak as the present,” she knows. If you’re not an ex-lax abreactive therapist, diving in tandem into the fire of each loss, you don’t stand a chance of making a dent in this client. She is a block of wood; the termites have been digested into it. There is no talking or thinking them out.

A fifty-year-old man is so fueled by his thirty-year-old ghosts, so interminably storytelling, that there is no power on earth to interrupt him. Like manic flying, his words are his escape velocity. This would be the hardest therapy, or the easiest, because I could just sit back and listen.

I wonder how many therapists in all their offices are “bipolar,” thinking: “This is an impossible, sham career” when they see some clients, and “I do life-saving work” when they see others. I know my self-sense goes from champion to imposter failure in life, sometimes over the course of a day. It is unpleasant, but it’s led to a deeper perspective about life. And, it has leveled an eye on you, clients and potential clients. You can be helped, or you can’t. You have the “gene” for wanting to become and becoming different, or you don’t. There are many factors in this duality, the explanation of which would be laden with minutiae, so I will just say: You might look into yourself before you make that call, come in for your first session. Are you able to question your personality, and imagine there might be something different from it that is still you? Are you willing to have a sea change of feelings about your family? And at the most fundamental – can you be triggered or inspired by another person or only by yourself? For me, years ago, a thousand therapists couldn’t have budged my narcissism and dysthymia. Only I could do it to myself. I think it would help you to look that deep: Are you able to undermine yourself for a better life?