Choosable you

A client and I agreed that owing to birth- and child-level loss and sadness, “the heavy curtain is always slowly descending” in our psyche, in our inner future. Every moment, the stage is moving but the curtain is always inching downward. We also realized that knowing this can be incorporated into a good life. “Good,” of course, has to be defined in very idiosyncratic ways. As does just about everything in a person’s life.

Most therapists, I’d wager, believe we can choose what we feel; for example, to be happy. From the “Cognitive” perspective, they’d say this comes from deciding to think in a certain way. But it’s possible to touch and be tinctured by a feeling in our deep stream, have it be primary, without thinking. We have a smorgasbord inside, and each sensation is valid in its own way: serenity, desolation, pleasure, anhedonia, fear or expansive bravado, love and hate and the rest. Any of which we might touch and choose.

Still, this is sick valid. Children don’t choose a feeling. Feeling chooses them. Feelings are first primary colors, and then when in time they become more blended and complex, there is an overriding one, or there is an underlying one which is in effect the child’s theme. A happy-jazzed kid may have some trepidation about whitewater rafting, but the overriding feeling is the happiness. A bullied child may have just gotten straight A’s and been awarded Honor Roll, but the victor is the underlying fear.

It’s when we are older that we may no longer have a theme, when everything has piled in and nothing stands out, when so much quotidian repression of feeling and sensation has left us without a meaning. Then we may think we can choose what to feel, the death instinct or the life instinct, the strong or the weak, the affirming or the moribund. To not choose, to sink into the unnameable color of our ocean, would be to reach our history that is hardly useful now.

That is, I don’t mind admitting, where I prefer to be. I have never been able to stand Cognitive Therapy’s notion that we can think and behave our way to being. For Christ’s sake! Picture how much work that would be if you actually tried it day after day! Nor can I feel real to summon, to be, a specific feeling for any length of time. So I recommend relaxing in the ocean: You won’t drown. And in moments of worst darkness, you can hold a magic clam, or a mermaid.