In-house #11: Young at heart

It’s not every day that we see so blatant a manifestation of a regressive self, the so-named “inner child” having hegemony over its adult self, persona, construct – whatever you wish to call our 18^th birthday-and-later existence. Here it was: a 31-year-old sagger, ripped sweat pants riding a foot below his waist; the sports logo t-shirt; the backwards baseball cap. Most conspicuous was his innocence: he had no sense that this was inappropriate for his age. Because his real age was youth.

My client’s crushed self-esteem, childhood origin, had driven him at age fourteen to hang out with the loser druggies, “because partyers don’t care what you look like.” From then to now he had survived, psychically, on street medicine. All the way through, drugs, short-lived jobs, masturbation marathons on meth, gallons of booze, some crime, prison, another interview, another three-week job. What brought him to therapy? His father, whose cop brutality and indifference, strangely enough, to seeing a bleary and bloodshot teen walking around had originally launched the problem.

Of course, we see regression all the time. A Borderline who can’t accept that her repetitively suicidal feelings aren’t the primary concern in her boyfriend’s and parents’ lives. A mother of three who feels wounded all day and the next by her 11-year-old daughter’s angry rejection. The computer programmer who wants to be “cool.” The mother who “throws herself” at her boyfriend and feels her sole value is her looks. The raging, intolerant father with the glum little boy face, who feels too weak and defeated to defend himself in the custody-child support case.

We take these paying clients in stride, concernedly seeing the predominant adult in the chair, and helping him or her “process” feelings and thoughts. But what if the balance has bent too far, and we can’t avoid knowing we’re looking at someone who is really still a child, whose mind is back there and then despite his mesmerizing glibness and sparks of insight? Not bluntly confrontational “to a fault,” I must and do gently point out to him that I’ve never seen this sagging pants business on someone after age 15. Saying it, I feel like Roark confronting Peter Keating’s failure:

He handed to Roark six of his canvases.

Roark looked at them, one after another. He took a longer time than he needed. When he could trust himself to lift his eyes, he shook his head in silent answer to the word Keating had not pronounced.

“It’s too late, Peter,” he said gently.

Keating nodded. “Guess I . . . knew that.”

When Keating had gone, Roark leaned against the door, closing his eyes. He was sick with pity.

He had never felt this before – not when Henry Cameron collapsed in the office at his feet, not when he saw Steven Mallory sobbing on a bed before him. Those moments had been clean.

But this was pity – this complete awareness of a man without worth or hope, this sense of finality, of the not to be redeemed. There was shame in this feeling – his own shame that he should have to pronounce such judgment upon a man, that he should know an emotion which contained no shred of respect.

This is pity, he thought, and then he lifted his head in wonder. He thought that there must be something terribly wrong with a world in which this monstrous feeling is called a virtue.*

We don’t see our clients the way genius narcissist Rand saw people, as avatars of philosophical and therefore psychological truth and error. How could we? Therapists live on hope, work on hope and with techniques that our tradition has guaranteed. We transfer our assumption that we have grown up to the client, when real growth is much rarer than we think, when childhood abort is truly intransigent.

Plus, if we conceived the deeply lost where it is, we’d put ourselves out of business.

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* Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, on-line (pages not numbered; looks like just before Chapter 9): https://archive.org/stream/TheFountainhead/The-Fountainhead_djvu.txt.