End of year summary, part 2

I never know how much effort to spend addressing and integrating the Goa’uld larva symbiote (Stargate, SG-1*) and how much to deal with the human host. That is, how much work to help the client “process” her inner child – the source of her dysfunction, the seat of her feelings, the name of her failed development – and how much to treat the adult persona as if she’s most real.

Obviously this is not a question contemporary therapists wrestle with, as they don’t know other than to assume the adult is the “new primary,” an entity-in-itself. And the depth therapists I know of – Primal and Primal-related – believe therapy is principally about the damaged child.

So I see this woman and this man (and many others) and am solidly clueless about what will really help. The adult persona will generally be trying to make life work. So she’ll get a new career, focus on some inner ray of serenity, he’ll latch on to his little daughter as his savior. I collude with this person, appreciating the positives even though the underlying disease remains in place. There are nightmares, breakdowns, relationship storms, the anxiety that comes from lowest self-esteem.

Other times, we’ll pay homage to the sex-abused girl or boy. Unlike Primal therapy, though, the child never fully emerges. This is frustrating, but I can’t say if it is bad or good.

There should be a formula, a principle of healing that answers my question: What helps? Maybe it’s this: No one substantially improves atop their disease, so we go to it where and when we can, until the client stops. Either she quits therapy, having touched this partially healed wound to her limit, or now remains week to week on her surface self. This is what I’ve seen for twenty years.

2019 – let’s see if there will be new ideas.

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* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goa%27uld.

End of year summary

Over time, I go through internal cycles or biorhythmic changes in my feeling about my abilities. Accompanying them are morphing views on the effectiveness of psychotherapy. If this amounts to an evolution in understanding, it is not Darwinian-type withering away of bad ideas, but more like a slow sinking into quicksand, touching motley particles but on the grand scheme richer and darker material on the way to the bottom.

At this moment (which may last a month or a year), my sense is that while children can be made happier, by improving their parents and environment, adolescents and adults need to be disturbed by harsh or sobering news. Making positive, in therapy, is like planting flowers on diseased ground or telling jokes in a war zone. People find enough ways on their own to soothe troubled feeling. They do not need to come to therapy for that.

Recently, an intelligent 18-year-old said he felt uniquely helped by our first session. I told him that his pervasive sense of “guilt” was mislabeled. He didn’t feel guilty: He’d simply been made to feel bad about himself in his malleable childhood. We also deconstructed his belief that his depression damaged other people’s lives. This was “splitting off and projecting”: Seeing people through the eyes of his internal devastation, he assumed they were as collapsible as he. No! They are resilient. You are wrong.

Did these crucial corrections make him happy? Yes. No. They made him stronger. What can ultimately make him happier is crying and his mother’s deep apologizing and his regressing to boyhood in her arms. And that can only go so far down into his quicksand. He has already lost so much.

Four questions: Marital therapy by acid and microscope

After reading some of Esther Perel’s anthropological, New Yorker-ish, historical, Gottman- and TED-ish and Holocaust-based wisdom on marriage, and choking on these clouds, I have to land my cleats in the mud and splash it on your forehead. So here is how to help with a marriage (male pronouns used for convenience):

Ask yourself: “Am I too psychologically messed up to love anybody?” You may be. Most adults are still starved children who need a given-to relationship: “Be there for me.” A couple decades later and they’ll have an empty, sucking spirit which cannot give or love, but manipulatively.

A big Inner Child, can you put some of your absolutely critical need for unconditional love aside to give of yourself to your spouse? That means: Can you leave your hospital prematurely, stand on the shared earth, find some inner molecules of actual objective appreciation for the here-and-now despite your remaining bleeding, feel your spouse as a person worthy to live completely apart from your need? That is very, very hard. Can you do it?

Are you ready to leave her if, after you’ve apologized and mercilessly named your flaws (which is different from admitting flaws, which assumes her coloring of them), she refuses to see hers? Remember that she, too, comes from a childhood that later needs revenge, and may see you solely through the eyes of an injustice victim. If so, she will be a lost cause while you are there.

How will you answer the conflict between your abject need for a person who seemed to once look at you with love or understanding, and your eventual starvation by her? Is it a matter of shrinking yourself down to nothing, canceling yourself out? Is it better for you to be nothing than to have nothing?

These are the questions you need to ask yourself to know about your marriage. Any other therapy that assumes there is an adult apart from its child, a tree of love apart from the salade de merde from which it grew, will be a fantasy, and you will have to fantasize for it to work.

It’s clouds or mud, and mud is solid.