Casualities #1: The here-and-D'oh!

A client in her late twenties wanted to focus on her here-and-now this session, not her childhood. This was fine, though I didn’t know exactly what that meant; that is, how to handle it. As if her present problematic ways of living weren’t child-bent. I was game, and we had an enjoyable hour. It’s amusing to me when clients think their behaviors are just adult dysfunction.

One bad date after another. Immediate sex (Oh, this memey app-deep younger generation of which I’m jealous!), followed by an unpleasant outing as the man was concretely inquisitional, didn’t show any ardent or warm feelings for her, just insect curiosity. Goodness! Why (she might say) do I keep doing this?

Here’s how we avoided going into the past, which of course is the hobgoblin that left her severely needy for “closeness” (sex), which left her oblivious to the fact of actual emotional attraction. Here I am white-lying. She didn’t actually express angst over her serial failures in relationships. What disturbed her was her inability to articulate the precise nature of her objection to this last of men. (Why this emphasis and not the other? She was in the here-and-now!) So I taught her Gendlin’s Focusing process, where you dive into the body’s chemical feeling history, your deep history that knows your actual meanings of everything.

Every once in a while a daymare nags me, for five seconds: What if there is only the here-and-now? Or, what if all can be solved there? But then I realize that’s just my transient happiness talking. Who, feeling good, wants to believe their sad or starved childhood could still undermine them? And another reason: The here-and-now is where we began, in babyhood and infancy. It’s our primary nature, though we later become dissociative, thoughtful entities. Even if there were some problems on board, we were compelled by the immediate world, hopefully in love with it. So, as adults, we’re always pulled to be that child. But . . . um . . . it’s now.