What you usually don't say to a young teenager

A 13-year-old boy was explaining his sudden transformation from good and engaged sixth grader to seventh grade poor student who couldn’t focus, stay on task, keep up with or care about his subjects. Math was easy in sixth grade, but pre-algebra was not. Essays were required in seventh grade English. Teachers required “a lot of work” from students to prepare them for their “really hard” life in eighth grade.

This was our second session and I explained, to dispatch the common cop-out on children, why I didn’t believe in “laziness.” I also stated that his reasoning was not valid, as he was obviously highly intelligent, partly as his father was a scientist, he was an only child, and the two had been together all of his life.

I explained that he had, as I once had, a “developmental maturity” problem – along with so many other youngsters – where we were just not ready to move up to that next step of maturity, independence and responsibility. That is the step generally from age 12 to 13, from sixth to seventh grade, from elementary to middle- or junior high school, from umbrella childhood to standing alone in the rain young-adulthood.

We were not ready to grow up.

Choices were mentioned. He could feel this structural out-of-sync-ness and still push some of it aside, focus on the schoolwork anyway despite the small child sitting at the desk, despite the depression that had placed a blanket on his growing. He would come to therapy and we would work on the historical depression. But another choice was: Don’t worry about being where you are. You can’t force growth, success. You will need different supports. A therapist who can help you feel OK to be just who you are, who can help you finally express your younger hidden and bypassed self. And a parent who can do the same.

Loss and its failure of expression were the crux of the problem. The boy had never been able to voice his sadness and worries to his father. Feelings kept inside don’t grow, don’t grow up. The child doesn’t grow – despite what you think or want to believe, parent. And now what needed expressing were those old, or rather, young, emotions and truths.

What had he hidden of himself? Loss of a mother, an indifferent mother. The problem of being with an intellectual father who conversed with his intelligent boy, not the needy one. If he could open the door to his real self beneath his repressive and quiet nature, feel before speaking, cry before sculpting his subtle-tinged approach, he’d become someone we could reach, someone who had returned to planet Earth. No longer the “ADHD.” He would sit in his mother’s lap, sometimes for hours, would have no tasks like pre-algebra. He’d be young again, really for the first time, for a long time before he had to be an old seventh grader.

Fantasy manifesto: The urge to be an identity

With everything there is in the world, the entire cosmos, to be curious about and enjoy, why do human beings spend time – sometimes every minute of their lives – focused on themselves? On their ego, on their pride, on the buttressing and admiring of an identity? On small scales, and from the perspective of origins, this seems absurd, even ugly. Does a four-year-old child watching, spellbound, a praying mantis’s slow-motion devouring of a grasshopper, think: “I am special to see this”? “This accrues to my list of accomplishments”? “My friends will be jealous of me”? “I’m the boy genius who understands praying mantises”? Hopefully not. He exists to live and appreciate life, to be driven to see, to feel pleasure and disappointment, boredom and anger, to wonder about that little ball of flame burning the block of wood under his magnifying glass. He does not need an ego to get in the way between his sight and his feelings.

Obviously the answer is neurosis and damage, early in childhood. I believe our parents give us an identity, more than they show us the palette of existence, then judge its worth. I remember reading in a child therapy book this notion: It can be problematic for a parent to say “I’m proud of you” for getting A’s on a report card, rather than “You should be proud of yourself.” The first remark makes the child’s value contingent on the parent’s appraisal, while the second grows the child’s internal sense of goodness. But what if both attributions are unhealthy? What if, instead, the response was: “Wow! You must really like science, or history, or art!” Is there a need to even point to the child’s worth or quality?

That’s the theory. But of course we live in a world of injured egos needing bolstering, revenge, repair and nurturing in childhood and adulthood. We live in this hospital ward of punctured identities.

In a parallel dimension, which I hope we never intrude upon, people enjoy the cornucopia of existence and therefore excel to their individual nature: Enjoying and doing and excelling would be identical. It never occurs to the unwounded soul to have self-referential pride or superiority over others, as all focus would be on the enjoyed or loved other. In this place, they would be like our animal kingdom, though with heart not instinct.

I know it sounds so distant from us, but as alternate dimensions are, it is also immanent in our reality. Sometimes I sense how nice it would be to exist only for the curious and the loved.

People are not individuals

At work, fellow therapists believe the shallow culture: You can deep-breathe your way out of Irritable Bowel Syndrome and anxiety. You can say to yourself: This is not “pain,” it is “discomfort,” thereby making yourself a lot better. A symptom or a behavior should be the focus of psychotherapy, not the active origin of it in one’s history.

People accept that eating many courses of traditional food on a holiday is meaningful, that all this weight and variety is meaningful.

They swallow their parents’ religion. Or they absorb the implausible idea of a first thinking and feeling cause of the universe and that it should be worshipped.

They allow themselves to “believe” ideas, smorgasbords of disparate statements of a political ideology or party, as if these were found in nature or discovered by genius.

They do not question their global prejudices – hates and loves – that their country or their father or their neurosis fed them. Good – patriotism and self-sacrifice; bad – political incorrectness. Women are sex objects. Women are “strong.” Men are the handlers of tough situations. Men with money is a Collective Unconscious good, carved on Mt. Olympus.

They believe in “good” and “evil” as entities or products of God and Satan, when it is clear that the ocean is made of grey, context, and the deeper meaning of a behavior.

We are the mesmerized audience to other people’s need for an audience, and we believe the show is important: pet rocks and boy sorcerers and reality television and youtube stars and the bling-y rappers and café troubadours who take all their sturm und drang from the communal well.

I think the reason people are not individuals is that life is a ride that we need to be easy because it is hard. Life is hard for the human mind so we sleep, find desserts where we can, symbiote and clash with others to not be alone with our thoughts which, alone, settle into an unaccustomed reality.