Ohio files: Sad fired man

“We used most of the hour to ‘study’ client’s Obsessive-Compulsive disorder, to which she added Depersonalization Disorder (she named the diagnosis herself). Client said that she ‘always’ feels ‘not real,’ as if she is living in a dream. It is this state that will lead to her panic attacks: She becomes afraid that she is not real or will never become real.”

An agency email informed me that the mother of my 17-year-old client felt I should have made greater inroads into her daughter’s problems in five (Intake plus four) sessions, and that she would be quitting me. I admit I am wondering what the next therapist will do to throttle the teen’s hours-a-day magical compulsions, and what will be used to dissolve the intrinsic-seeming cellular numbness of Depersonalization. I had my ideas, which I was already giving her. There was some Peter Levine’s “somatic experiencing,” which tries to break a trauma victim’s sensory anesthesia by interesting body-based techniques. I also know that Depersonalization is one of many possible results of the perfect deflection of the Real Self’s feeling, and that recalling of pain and deep bawling or other radical expressions of loss and need might break through it. Add, though, the constant safe-making escapes of obsessive-compulsive urges to the agenda of the day, and you have a person who is quite inaccessible, effectively doing tight somersaults in a thick-walled bunker buried just beneath the surface.

I have never studied the behavioral techniques against OCD such as the panacea of CBT and Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP). I don’t care about them. For one, ERP sounds absurdly oppressive for a teenager, especially one with a dozen discrete obsessions and compulsions. That’s a ton of brute-force to push on someone who isn’t at a life stage to be an ascetic. I feel the same about a cognitive approach – trying to swamp old thoughts with new ones. Exhausting and dreadful!

I will miss the young lady, but not – I'll admit – for her personality. Pardon the terrible humor, but with her depersonalization, she didn’t have one! I will miss the sense of possible breakthrough to the feeling person beneath her zombieness and her rituals. In fact, I see all my clients from this perch: When is the deeper, original person going to come out?

Let us end belief

Our feelings can be impossible to identify, that is, label precisely or even accurately. They are admixtures of chemicals, created by the infinite shades and varieties of human experience, that cannot be given an infinity of names. Though we give them simple, inaccurate names such as love, pride, wistfulness, hatred (which, for example, we can easily see is built from hurt). These sensations are the body: They are what they are, what we are. Yet we can’t grasp them, we simplify them, dumb them down, misread them. If, then, we can’t know what we are, how can we know what we believe, or what “to believe” means? How can we claim to actually know what inscrutably emotionally laden ideas we believe?

Differentiate believing from accepting. I may say that I accept the “humanly proven” (that is, the best that science can do) ideas about nature. I can accept that the tectonic plates are moving, that Mars has water. Though if science some day has greater evidence that the universe is merely a locked door to something else, or that each quark is an entire universe, I’d accept that. Science accepts dispassionately rather than believes. When people claim to believe an unproven as knowledge, they are naming something impossible. A man “believes” that blacks are inferior and Jews are malevolent and conspiratorial. No, he doesn’t. What he does is feel some chemical complexity, attach some thought that he probably didn’t originate to it, feel some emotional relief or resolution, then proceed from there. If he could be induced to sit still and look inward blandly, he could be broken down, deconstructed. His belief would detach from the feeling and he would believe and know nothing about Jews, or brown people, or women.

There might be other psychological benefits. He could lose his belief that he is a suicidal person by realizing he is depressed, doesn’t love life, but likes it enough to stay in it. He could believe that his marriage is unsatisfactory, estranged, then realize the two are soulmates in love and immaturity. He, a narcissist, may believe he is perfect, then realize that’s only a needful feeling and see that he is only human. It would hurt, but also be quietly freeing. She may realize she doesn’t believe in a God as much as she would like to believe – and find her mind and eyes open to the universe in a new way.

My main point is that the idea of belief is inherently flawed, is not as strong as we’ve always thought, withers in the parsing of it, and may need to be discarded. I recall reading (and memorizing), decades ago, Nathaniel Branden’s definition of faith: “Faith is the commitment of one’s consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof.” Can anyone see any sense in the idea of “committing” one’s consciousness to the impossible or unknowable? What is the nature of this duct-taping or brute-forcing of allegiance?

I know a couple Jews who are obnoxious (I am Jewish by heritage). But I believe nothing about Jews, or any other population.

Vaporous Conjecture #1: Could a sociopath be a good president?

Did Sam Vaknin, at some point, stop identifying himself as a narcissistic personality? (He shouldn’t have.) I got that impression from a quick read several years ago, but haven’t had the slightest motivation to check on his later plethora of marketplace youtube videos. I mention him because he has opined that Barack Obama was a narcissistically disordered president. I don’t think that’s true, but the point I’ll draw from our lack of agreement is that one might be a narcissist and still commit some consensus positive acts, and still project an air of benevolence, conscience and class.

Is this true of a sociopath on the world stage? Normal and normatively neurotic people know that Trump is sociopathic, and is a toxically botched president. But could some other sociopath be different and better than him? A “pure” narcissist would have no conscience, no bond-warmth for a human being or humanity but – possibly – for a primordial shard embedded in his prodromal infancy. (That might manifest in moments of maudlinity, which some mobster-types have shown, at least in old movies.) Narcissism exists on a continuum, however. A man might be faux-warm and generous to people solely to magnify his glory, never in a selflessly caring way. He would be a solipsist, meaning that the universe is just a mirror around him and he is trapped in self-reference. But feelings are absurdly complex, and he may have an expansive feeling and interpret it to himself as love. And he might live for years on that interpretation and therefore act it in a convincing way.

I have never found a reason to differentiate sociopath from psychopath. We’re looking at a “lizard brain” in either case, the bond-burned never-born soul. Whether he is a serial killer or a quiet and relatively harmless hater of humankind is just a factor of life’s colorations in early childhood. I would speculate that a sociopathic president, in his urge for predatory power (like Trump), could never emotionally justify a widely acceptable policy unless its purpose was to harm an even wider population. (Such as pleasing a large swath of our country by rejecting the entire world of potential immigrants.) While a sociopath will con an innocent, goodhearted elderly person, a president sociopath couldn’t ally with any world leader who was possessed of a basic moral sense. He would (barring anvil-to-the-head idiocy) know his con wouldn’t work with an independent actor in the presence of a wide audience, and would feel fatally “allergic” to the heart in the person. Psychopaths feel dead inside and therefore want to destroy the living.* Sociopaths survived the death of love in their moments of creation and now must hate love and compassion. This president would propagate cruel acts in alliance with other miscreants.

So I’d say that no sociopath could be a good president. (Unfortunately, “good” – in a world plagued by so much micro-sociopathy in the form of absence of empathy – is not a universally agreed-on quality.)

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* See James Gilligan, M.D.’s book, Violence.