Articles I don't like #1: Teen therapy

It took most of a session, but I eventually proved to my 16-year-old client that she has always been unheard in her family. To therapy, she brought the problems of insecurity and fear of displeasing anyone, with an undercurrent of vindictive anger. (Along with these was a growing global pessimism, but this wasn’t a “presenting” issue.) The psychoeducation was impelled by her belief that she had already obtained healing justice with her parents and could continue to get it, through naming her grievances and anger to them. With parents thus removed as a cause or factor, her disabilities must come from other sources.

What this teenager didn’t know is that the home atmosphere remains hypnotic from cradle to grave; parents’ eyes may never open to their child’s separate personhood; her upset and grievances cannot really be accepted in a culturally moralistic or religious home. What she didn’t know is that the past doesn’t heal through present expression: Early pain requires regression to reach it.

Adult clients say that they were able to stand up to their parents at some fiery moment in their teen years. That’s when they voiced their anger at unfairness. What they would not let themselves know was that this was effete or worse: Brief storms, little fires of attitude generally reinforced her impotence because mom didn’t care or dad didn’t want to hear it; there were punishments; and teens are still children. 

What she didn’t know is that all the days of the past, not healed, folded under moments of unreceived catharsis in the present, forge the character of the future. 

I wonder: Do therapists think it makes any sense to show young people such a truth? I don’t know what the majority do, but discussions with some therapists lead me to suspect that adolescent work becomes hollow if it is future-oriented with a cognitive approach. I believe it is generally palliative of a terminal disease – death by parental lack of empathy – that hasn’t happened yet.

What, if not to reveal the parent’s flaw, is the best answer? Let her continue to think she is defective? Let her blame teachers and disloyal friends? Help her force skills and optimism upon a foundation of unresolution? Let her continue to think her parents are “doing the best they can”? The answer is there is no answer. Teens are in the twilight zone where they can’t grieve loss of caregivers, who are still the fountainhead. Even mother’s or father’s epiphanic transformation would be too late to redo their child. I recently saw a 22-year-old who sat stunned through the second half of a session when he realized he was right to hate yet also love and need his mother. Teens are a few years premature to that capacity.

Introspective #1: We are two worlds

My worst dream, which may happen once or twice a year, is of me as a middle-aged completely lost soul. The feeling of desperate and anxious life-failure helplessness is impossible to put into words. I am around forty-five or fifty and I have no profession or job, no way to support myself. In my real life I used to be a typographer. In the dream I may be the most pitiable “anxiety sack” looking around for a typing job. The salient fact is that I am never a psychotherapist in these dreams, never someone who is someone other than a name, an identity of non-competence and a telltale childlike affect. I cannot describe how awful the feeling is to never have grown a way to live well into my plateau years.

I have no skill in dream analysis, but I can assume that this is how I really feel about myself below consciousness: a lost man-child. How can that be? I have always – since I morphed into this profession at age forty-three – had a stable pride in my skills and in my self-discoveries and acts to reach those skills. I never feel unmanned. Yet deep down . . . .

There are also dreams of the most wonderful romantic and sexual feelings, but the scenes and feelings always stop at a place of childish touching, no consummation, with “opportunities for advancement” that numbly fade out from unfair or circumstantial reasons. That must be the latency-stage me. And yet that is my most wonderful feeling in dreams. Is this how I really see myself? Is this who I am?

I am not one of many who have “another person” at the base of their self: I am one of every. Did Citizen Kane feel Rosebud, or was he Rosebud? How much do we change? My teenage clients show their little child every session. My adults manifest their parents every session, parents who were still children. And in all these deeper selves is the whole world as we lived it then. Strange question, but consider: Do we really have room for another whole world on top of that one?

What's left to think inside the systemic debacle of Trump?

It is easy to momentarily find oneself sitting outside – uncomfortably, detached and partially dissociated – the zoo of limping political animals, looking in. Juvenile delinquents in suits have given us a new atmosphere of crime, of immorality, contempt and childish lies. Ineffective adults know not what to do. Sentence the leader as an adult? Put the misguided youth on probation? Our ancient collective unconscious – the inner child that feels adults are powerful and competent – has been booted to the ground by some grubby Nazi SS and we’re now standing around staring, very nervous, in a different world.

I suspect Trump’s base’s lives are going on as usual. The rest of us are changed because our country is not supposed to be infested with cancer. It is supposed to be healthy, always.

In my childhood, a classical music lover, I used to fantasize that a glorious piece of music like Rachmaninoff’s Second Concerto would be broadcast from an Olympian mountain – like the real God or Messiah – and all the people of earth would hear it, their heads raised heavenward, and be moved to some great unison Meaning. That was the only way I ever had a feeling there was a oneness to humanity. It could never come to be, I suppose, but possibly in some distant future. What I am certain of is that our present world – yes, the one created by picayune, scurvy politicians – would ruin such a fantasy for any child. There is only scattered rubble.

Pathetic as it seems, my sense is that the only ballast keeping things afloat right now is the editorialists and pundits who produce serious and eloquent discourse about this national rape by clowns. They will discuss until they’re carried away, or possibly ’til some Rachmaninovian figure appears from the mountains or the towns and revives our collective unconscious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4zkc7KEvYM