A statement about adultness, part 2

I’m slightly more adult than the miscreants who run the country, run the world, shoot elderly women in church and teens at the theatre, march in free-floating rage carrying placards of insanity.

The essential differences between them and me are that I have some care and decency that are not solipsistic – are actually for the other person, and I am predominately a passive type. That means I keep my damage – the historical, internalized damage we all have – to myself: I don’t throw it at the world. As no one is perfect, I do project childhood pain in one main direction: to authority. Based on overwhelming evidence, I grew up without a molecule of respect for the adults. By virtue of other degenerations in my psyche over time, I came to have what might be called a radical libertarian emotionality: an inability to respect or tolerate anyone who feels he or she should bend my life their way. That would include bosses, managers, directors. My weapons are narcissistic sarcasm, inviting crash-and-burn scenarios, and throwing down the gauntlet. Owing to the passivity and feelings of care, I make an exception for my wife, who does many things to me, from my laundry to choosing some of my counseling CEU’s without asking.

Next to, then, the scant handful of platinum-good people scattered about (and who can really say what their deeper motives are?), I am the best role model to prescribe the minimum essential qualities of adultness to the legion of wayward souls. Listen to my guidance for being a grown-up:

* Question your thoughts and ideas. Be self-scrutinizing. Our thinking is mostly a way we’ve escaped from or soothed our furnace of childhood pain, so it is guaranteed to be fallacious. “I love my old mom to death.” “I want to be a computer programmer. I want to be a writer.” “Jews are poison.” “Blacks are lazy.” “I’d be happy with the right woman.” “I fall in love easily.” “Liberals are virtuous.” “Mental illness is a chemical imbalance.” “Suicidal people are selfish.” “Mother Teresa was truly a saint.” “My religion is right.” “I know who I am.” “I want to be successful.” These and billions of other thoughts are likely to be self-medicatively wrong.

* Don’t do anything violent or hurtful to people who haven’t harmed you, such as those who go to synagogue rather than church; who opt for a less photogenic higher power than Jesus; who speak with an accent or a lisp.

* Those who have harmed you, such as parents, siblings, strangers or bosses: See if you want to have the kind of dignity and life a survivor of childhood deserves. See if you have grown to the developmental stage that enables you to speak forcibly, not just hit forcibly; that enables you to name justice and stand up for yourself, not burn up your gut in rage. See if you have enough self-care to remain living free rather than in prison.

* If you don’t have that dignity, or self-actualization, or self-care, you are a child, and the rest of us will have to watch out for you.

These are the basic infrastructure points of the adult. Notice that they speak to a conception of maturity or arrival that is not what people, in their consensus minds, believe. You don’t have to want to work for a living (though you do). You don’t have to like people, or like children. You don’t have to know what you want to be. You don’t have to smile when people urge you to. You can have childish feelings and fantasies, depression and anxiety, you can mope or wander lost. You only have to be harmless and decently aware of yourself. The rest will be in place: inner child and adult coexisting.

Question about an old future

How does someone with only two interests – psychotherapy and writing – get a “second (or third) wind” at age 68? I am so sensitive to the endorphins of creative feeling and thinking that even asking the question feels buoying for a short moment. Alas: My infrastructure is dysthymic and my bank is empty. Therefore, I will need more than a question.

I used to rest on my laurels, such as I interpreted them. There may, though, be another twenty years in the picture. There should only be future-looking now. Couldn’t it be supernatural?

I think the action question is: Can a person capitalize on the brighter molecules in his historical makeup and decommission or de-emphasize the negative ones? I’d say this is what alcohol and other drugs can do (and probably a lot better than psychiatric meds). I’m thinking in some actual way, though. Other people may have an easier time than I, they who believe in positive thinking or believe they have a default bond with other people. I am too insular for that: After being with a person or two for a little time, I turn around and return to my open-air prison cell.

(That may not be terribly uncommon.)

For now, with no answers materializing, I hope for hope. The therapy I practice says that we must sometimes become hopeless – give up all good feeling that a parent or family member may someday be there for us. But there’s a different kind of hope that we impaired ones should hold onto. It’s triggered by being alive in a universe of total mystery.

Why are they dull?

There once were moments in the dim dark past when I was subversive and immoral, and would read the other clinicians’ client progress notes. This exercise in disrespect for confidentiality would last all of a few hours, to be answered by a year or two’s cleansing abstinence. This was not because I’d come to my senses (I may not have those senses), but because the notes were always so god-awful dry-throated boring. Every single one was a tedious journalistic log of what the client had talked about in the hour (fifty minutes). I need not give you examples from memory: Clients talk about all sorts of things. What never appeared in any note was the slightest hint of actual psychotherapy carried out. The descriptive terminology would often be there (“Shane had a hypomanic episode over the weekend”), but never a strategy to reach something in the person, and even more never the slightest speculation on cause: What was the client’s wound? At most, “encouraged,” “reflected,” “supported.” This sorry state of misery obtained whether the writer was an intern, Master’s level counselor or social worker, or PhD or PsyD psychologist. No one possessed the shadow of Yalom, Janov or Freud, or even of Robin Norwood (Women Who Love Too Much) or Dear Abby or Dr. Phil (“your parents are mentally abusing you!”).

Why were – or let’s go there: are my fellow clinicians so emptied of deep and investigative thought? What happened to my profession when I wasn’t looking (in their files)?

My notes talk cause and healing, pain and regression, meaning and identity and flawed parents. While there may be some airy theory woven through the action that I believe to be relevant, the spirit of tectonic movement is there! I wonder: What is the spirit, the ardor that should stir other therapists’ brains when they’re with the client? What are they doing in their room?

I think the cause of this en-boring is the devolution of psychotherapy to the ubiquitous Cognitive paradigm, similar to the simplemind-ification of classical music from the abyssal Baroque to the thin-souled Classical aesthetic of Stamitz and Mozart and Haydn. A therapist could be as profound a wight as Kierkegaard, but if she misunderstands people to be in the here-and-now rather than peeping up from the past, to be alpha-and-omega the adult whose thoughts are the engine and steering wheel of their lives, then all will be the moment and its feelings, actions and events. All will be the surface of the pond. We can blame Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck for the atrophy of my art, as we can blame Donald Trump for the reduction to nausea of the social contract.

This sickens me, and I’m glad my office has a door that I can close on that world.