An unusual walk

I discovered, late last night, the source of my deconstructivist, dissect-everything-psychological thinking. Walking my mini-schnauzer on a slight variation of our typical route, I was visited by my inner baby. It appeared in clarity, for the first time in my life, and became my calm but disturbed home for the duration of the walk. I want you to know this was strange: I came to see, to feel who I really was, at the state of true identity. The essential human was still in Caesarian birth trauma or incubator trauma, crying or screaming or frozen. He had never embarked on the train of the world. Nothing after that was legitimate – I mean this at the axiom level, not the lived level. This inner baby could never be right to greet people in the customary way, speak their language, smile at what they smile about. He would forever be his own world. He would be furtive, sneaking – feeling delicious and botched – around human camps, entirely self-enclosed, never looked at or at least never seen. He could never conform, join the rules, the common beliefs, go to a party, play games. He must be his own morality; any other would be a suffocating prison.

I’ve always seen through those eyes, but never acknowledged it with a thought. Being there always, everything hence would be dissociation, the wrong train, unreal-feeling. This is the quiddity of much of the human race. This is what happens when the injured baby or infant is shoved along the path without healing, has to replace his self with his body.

Based there at the one-celled root, I have had the urge to dig to the root of everything, such as the screen nature of a belief, one’s actual feeling beneath adult living, the meaning of musical performance, the meaning of meaning. And the rest fell into place: beyond atheism to agnosticism; dissolving free will; the difficulty of friendship. This dichotomy between the core truth and the life that has to be lived is, shall I say, grand and inexpressible. One thing I see is that all the people out there with absurd existence – crime, rage, irrational beliefs, lostness and complete lack of wisdom – are each hermetically separate worlds that are right. The only joining, the only consensus that is organic and real is that which pre-exists between children without birth trauma, or with lesser trauma, and is left to grow. All the other community is manufactured, to keep the machine running, to keep the self running.

The marital individual

I don’t have the Marriage and Family Therapist license and don’t know what gospel those clinicians pick up en masse in the classes and the culture. Here I’m thinking of the matter of doing individual therapy with one spouse outside of the couples work. Slightly afraid of getting whapped on the snoot by the MFT herd for admitting I’ve done it, I leap to this safe space: an individual session with the husband, with his wife listening in at the other end of the couch.

We had all established, over several weeks, that the husband was a different species, always beautifully dressed from business, hunkered within himself, listening askance with covertly attitudinal dissociation. I don’t remember if he actually admitted his Narcissism or just couldn’t find the words to dispute his wife’s charges. He didn’t look like a sophisticated man-about-town, more of a child’s naughty face, yet he and his associates would party, consort with paid women. Lying was pathological. She doubted, after a decade of marriage, that he liked her.

So while this was intended to be marital therapy, I took him aside (in effect) and asked him to look inside himself. These were not hippie, New Age words. I asked and taught him to descend to awareness of the body’s “felt sense” history, the subtle feeling-experiences of his lifetime. This was Dr. Gendlin’s Focusing therapy (see blog post*). One learns one’s deeper truths – our real feelings – that accumulated in childhood and later through living, not by thinking about things. Our thinking is superficial at most levels, self-medicative, prosthetic identity-producing: rationalizing, intellectualizing; the paradox of shallow and defensive that feels true and profound. I gave him examples of people who “thought” one thing but came to realize they felt and really lived another: the woman who “loved her mother to death” yet never visited her at the nursing home. The man who’d “always wanted to be a computer programmer” but inexplicably couldn’t bring himself to study. My own example of majoring in philosophy, freshman year college, and avoiding access to the body feeling – “that is dreadful.”

I felt strongly that we could get to the bottom of the marital impasse if he would learn himself, and not just feelings in the now informed by his history. No – also his identity, the seeds of his Narcissism, his feelings about girls and women, his quotient of human need and feeling lost inside the ocean of an insular being.

“Know yourself.”

I don’t know that it’s impossible for a Narcissistic or other-alienated person to find, by the solitary, molecular search, his human part and decide to live that instead of the main. To realize a deep dependency that belies his “playing around,” loner, bitter self, and re-dedicate to his wife. What I do know is that relational process, even couples’ inner child work, will not reach this depth. When marital therapy is about the relationship primarily, aren’t we missing a big show by not focusing acutely on the psyche of the troubled person, each person?

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* https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2015/01/rabbit-hole.html, along with Gendlin videos, the website – http://www.focusing.org/ – and the principal book – https://www.amazon.com/Focusing-Eugene-T-Gendlin/dp/B004HWKYSU.

Drastic Definitions #1: Personality Disorder

A personality disorder is a delusional way of seeing and feeling the world and the self. The person, owing to developmental failure in infancy and childhood, cannot tolerate his own reality. His reality is pain and feeling wrong in the world. “Wrong” is his immaturity and out-of-sync-ness with his chronological age and therefore with life.

Personality disorder is a new world that the person has wrapped herself in, a world of thoughts and beliefs that “read” the body’s feeling states to conform with those thoughts and beliefs. As I’ve written elsewhere,* a Narcissist doesn’t wake up in those first few seconds feeling good. He feels wrong because he never grew up (frozen in his mother’s solipsism, neediness, lovelessness along with father’s absence), but interprets his fear and contempt and need for identity as a feeling of superiority.

See the childishness in the personality disorders. A “man-baby” Narcissistic, black-and-white-thinking, rage-based oppositional-defiant crash-and-burn president. A Borderline woman rips out hair and cuts herself if a friend misses a lunch date. A Dependent thirty-five-year-old who needs and wants her mother to make decisions for her. An Antisocial man who sees all people as bad, as his victims, who never grew morals, who needs instant gratification. An Obsessive-Compulsive Personality with futile, hidebound pursuits. A Paranoid Personality with vulnerability fear oozing out of his porous mind.

While most of us “have” a so-called inner child – our adult character carries regressive parts of ourselves – the personality disordered individual is his inner child: It is his ground and structure. Since the lost child is his predominant quality, it is “ego-syntonic”: not merely in harmony with his view of himself, but one with his life. The adult is the window dressing, the outfit he wears poorly or relatively comfortably.

It can be difficult to identify a personality disorder, because defense and immaturity exist on a continuum. We know adolescents and adults who are egotistical but not Narcissistic; immature, impulsive men or women who are not Borderline; subservient, domestic violence victims who are not snugly Dependent; someone capable of transient cruelty who doesn’t qualify for Antisocial Personality. A therapist, unsure, is likely to check off criteria in the DSM-5, hoping for what seem to be enough to reach the diagnosis. We may let an arbitrary number of client behaviors decide: A psychiatrist I knew assigned Antisocial Personality if a man had a second incarceration. I often look for a feeling theme in the person, an emotional philosophy that is wide and deep, defining a whole life. A sense of self that goes beyond bragging to self-perfection. Sometimes just a facial expression and tone of voice prove it. Not merely a middle-aged woman leaning on her elderly parent, but complacence about, endorsement of leaning.

We want to know the presence of personality disorder, because it is the defense that undergirds all the others and undermines everything. It is immaturity, a forever-inchoate identity – a troubled six-year-old in an adult’s body – that can’t be fixed by time or standard therapy techniques. It may be addressed by regression, sometimes by brutal insight.

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* https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2017/08/mini-statement-don-one.html.