Molecular mess #6: A little more anarchy than usual

When I was little, before the anxiety and depression grew from seed to entity, I would slightly enjoy myself outdoors. I trooped down to the creek with my friend, caught bees in a glass jar solo, rode my bike, made a name for myself by insinuating my hand into sticker bushes to retrieve baseballs. These were excitement- and emotion-propelled pursuits, not tedious make-do ones. In the house, however – which was the prime engine of the depression – I was as bored as a prisoner in years of solitary confinement. It makes me feel pathetic, now, just to remember how, quietly desperate, I would fold, cut and tape sheets of white paper, in the hope of ending up with some product, stretching minutes to hours, while my parents did adult things in their own life-distracted states of being.

There was that small window during which I was driven by ardor, real curiosity, before feelings sank beneath the waves and I came to rely on my head, its thoughts and attitudes and ideas, its soft-shelled beliefs, its produced personality.

I see this is what happens in most people, though I should probably say: those who are therapy clients. We lose the primary, natural engine of feeling, and without that ballast must hold ourselves up by our mind.  What would we be if we suspended all our thinking, put our ideas and beliefs on a far shelf, sat in the quiet of no attitude? I am certain we would be like a marionette whose strings are cut: immediately collapsible. I propose that experiment. Try it. See what you are under the surface of your adult identity.

What could this do for you, for us? We would see what identity is: a small pond of abyssal depth, colors that can’t be named, patches of incomplete feelings, a roar with no words, silence. Paul Vereshack noted that each of us is ‘all things’ – good and bad, mature and immature, wise and naïve, loving and hating, kind and cruel. But that’s because our emotional ingredients were suppressed in childhood, aborted, and never formed a straight onward-and-upward path like a road or a tree, but rather became random crystals growing outward and inward erratically, stuck deep in the pond.

We would see that our head is an attempt to become a thing, a person whose name is meaning. We would see that our ideas, though they become our replacement foundation and our engine, are actually hollow, caused by impulses of sensation, shoved forward by feeling, basically insubstantial. We can’t really explain why we own this or that belief or prejudice. We have innumerable or racing thoughts that are worthless as bad air. We present one identity to our partner in the romancing phase, another after the commitment.

Doing therapy, we are interacting with this complex. Our hope is that in it, we are working with an identity, or scaring one up, when in fact we are applying intervention to a whitecap pushed up by the waves. It is gone the next moment, blended into its ocean, but we don’t see that. The results are known. Some clients are helped by us, maybe long after we’ve seen them. Many others, they can change only by death. Some, their voice says one thing, their body and life another. We’re joining in the building of sandcastles; treating inner children like adults; questioning the precarious belief that alone holds them together.

Therapy becomes, then, almost any stick we poke and swirl in the pond. Anything can have an effect, a little, and any effect can feel meaningful. If you promote positive thinking, there will be a feeling of relief. If I ask a client to wonder about the validity of forgiving her parents, her new fear and strength will be good. All nudges the molecular question mark in some way.