Sunday, May 26, 2019

Trump: The chemistry of bad (with added tiny hands song!)


Not infrequently, I will slap a comment on the rabble sounding boards of Slate.com or MotherJones.com. This is in the nature of a knee-jerk, balancing emotional catharsis, akin to throwing up when nauseated, or staring back when someone stares at you.

Today’s:

“I can see why the Democrats are afraid to impeach Trump. He was so ingenious – so uncannily ingenious – to know that nearly half the U.S. population could be hypnotized by its hates. This has been intimidating to them.
“In fact, he knew nothing of the sort. It’s his particular brand of primitive Narcissism that caused him to assume people are as psychologically immature as he is.”
Among all the disturbances of character this president embodies, the nature of his assumptions, or “emotional philosophy,” must be among the most repugnant. I believe the sentiments – and pretty much the concepts – of decency and warmth, love and benevolent feeling – were killed in him, by family, in his early childhood and immediately replaced by alternate survival values. Psychologically attuned people know that for many children, love has been replaced by the provision of material goods. In reality, these “spoiled” children are the deprived and empty ones. In Trump’s early life, love was replaced by material goods, winning and defeating.

There are different ways a person may think he feels “good,” different chemical compounds in the brain that can be self-defined as a positive or happy feeling. But I think we can know that not all of them are valid. We are deluded by our thoughts. Extracting the thought, the chemistry of revenge feelings, of mocking someone, of acquiring needless riches, of having power over individuals and unnamed masses, of lying and getting away with it, of offending allies, of acquiring sycophants – could not possibly be the organic nature of human health, stability, bond, love. How can we say it is happiness?

I believe there can be no doubt that the president, like other narcissists, solipsists and sociopaths, sees people as surrealistically, almost insanely, as someone with severe Derealization Disorder would. That dissociated person doesnt observe three-dimensional human beings, but rather automatons, wind-up toys moving by program and mechanics. They trundle and zip on a background of two-dimensional stage props, cardboard trees, painted buildings. We wont know this is what he experiences: It is his internal problem. Trump cannot see your heart as a good, as formidable. Its his kryptonite. Close to him, it would make him feel the pain of his safely walled-off heart. He cannot grasp your benevolence: It is manipulation or weakness. He does not look into your eyes and see a soul, but a cross-purpose. He wants to marginalize those like you and be around fellow emptied people who support his defenses, dont challenge them. Beyond the specious “positive of his sense of perfection, there may be one type of optimism that he can feel: the belief that most people share his heart-gutted values.

Trump’s organism has always been the poison of deprivation and alternative morality. To survive, his mind has had to say poison is nourishment. To know real good, real love, would be to know his deprivation and abortion. See how the spoiled child kept taking from his father, well into adulthood?

Trump was lucky, we suppose in a sick way, that so many people have grown up with survival good, with loss they’ve had to run from. They have proven his optimism. A showman, he could hypnotize them by their anger, hate and hurt. He knew nothing. He could only assume. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aGBI-XFNkE. Not to mention, the leaves bowed down when he walked by.

Saturday, May 18, 2019

Motley crew #1: Change that you and I don't understand


I see a 17-year-old Asperger’s Syndrome client who is very “high-functioning,” or at least high cerebral and high talky. He wants to work in nanotechnology or nanobiochemistry or some-such as his profession. He is unflappable: generally blinkless calm. I told him he must be on the alert when digging into these tiniest of quiddities. He might run into God, who can only be the smallest – the irreducible kernel of existence – not the largest. Nothing I’ve said, so far, to this young man has caused him to raise an eyebrow, skip a beat. It’s possible he knows everything.

“Watch out for Pee-wee!” No reaction.

There’s the thirty-three-year-old who needs to get a “drug assessment” several weeks out of prison. He is a lucky man to have elderly parents’ support, full family support. By a fortuitous network, he was offered a great job and career that most felons would never get. He’s clean and wants no more trouble in this new phase of his life. Question: Should I inform him that he has Antisocial Personality Disorder? That would kind of call his bluff and say “reliable future failure.” He might not like me after that.

And a different teen Asperger’s who, we have discovered, also has a full-fledged splitting “I hate you, don’t leave me” personality disorder. His autism “spectrum” kills access to a feeling place that might contain the seeds of solace – an eye within his hurricane. Some Borderlines can take their foundational childishness and, by desire and access to this eye, grow a fake decent adult upon it. I can’t see how he will ever do this.

And finally, the poor woman who, growing up, was forced by both parents to be so selfless and everyone else-centered that now, a debilitating flush of shame can prevent her from meaning, and saying, the word “I.” (I have asked her to read Ayn Rand’s novelette Anthem about a society so suppressive and collectivist that the word “I” is lost history and each person refers to him- or herself as “we.”) It took me two months (to my shame) to realize that she is not letting her feelings stir and move, to be discovered and worked with in sessions, but just sits and waits for my word.

Our work, as therapists, cannot fundamentally be to get people to “think healthy,” not fundamentally to introduce them to the “strength” that they should have, not even to have them cry their deep hurt. There are intermediate steps, pause points of mini-crises, startling truth, where they are presented with change, meaning not being themselves. How we work this must be idiosyncratic, must make the difference between individual therapists that has absolutely nothing to do with this or that therapy paradigm – cognitive, existential, behavioral, EFT, primal-related feeling-centered. How do we help someone not be herself, her original flawed structure? Become a major sea change of outlook, of internal feeling engine? If we see the client through these eyes, we will realize, with some deflation, that a few good insights or catharses are not this change. She will come back the next week the same, and the week after. And sometimes the month after, she may be her worst.

I don’t have the answer to this question, except that sometimes I have seen this change from one week to the next. Yet for no good reason, I suspect that mostly it’s going to be internal growth post-therapy. The stuff, the atmosphere in our room, and maybe in our peculiar personality, have given them the partially cooked seeds of evolution.

Friday, May 17, 2019

Radical need


It just occurred to me that I should have been surprised, many times over the years, that clients so rarely name a presenting problem of neediness. While its reflected in so many of their problems, adults never tell me: “I am so needy for even a single molecule of love that I fall into the first man, any man, who gazes at me.” They never say: “I become sand, I become a still photo that will never move again, when a woman leaves me.” But that’s the immanent truth. It is legion in the world. Symbiotic neediness, to be immersed in another, to have an exclusive held-tight companion for daytime and nighttime ’til death, is literally “second human nature.”

An honest, fragile 15-year-old girl knew it about herself. First knowledge was that she feared her friends disliked her, thought her obnoxious. Second knowledge: Not because she clung to them, but because she had to pull away in the strange mood energy of someone who wants to melt into them, give love, be loved, but knows its too needy.

This is not, of course, how it should be. Children should be “filled” with love by their parents, early and ongoingly, to where they now feel fine in themselves, a kind of complete. Then they can see other children, or teens, or twenty-year-old immature “charming” or exciting men, not as salvation but as separate people who may pique their interest, disgust or affection or admiration.

I presented myself (with modulated self-disclosure) as an exemplar of that neediness, where the concept of “motivation” would be a foreign word in every language to me were I not to have my wife. I know about the kind of neediness that one can’t try to indulge because it would be to crash into the first mother-child bond that never happened. This makes neediness angering, and rejecting. It makes (to put it another way) its opposite.

This may be strange therapy, that I might help my teens normalize something that most of them would never want to know. Maybe I’m cultivating the next crop of neurotic therapists.