Rough guess #1: Commitment to a person

Let’s take a break from the heavy, obscure stuff today and go Dear Abby. Setting aside the old cliché’s countless exceptions, we ask: Why can’t men “commit”? And why can young women, even in their late teens, stick with a guy who may not be stable or of sterling character, may not have a whole lot going for him? He is her man! I guarantee you that under the surface there is more symbiosis than love. And what is it with the young men who are still in fraternity mode, stray, look at porn, remain preternaturally affiliated with their high school guy friends?

Or we could vastly generalize and ask: What is “committing” in a relationship, and why does it feel wrong or impossible when it does?

I believe one answer is found in the phenomenon’s similarity to the urge many people feel to stay up late every night, not go to bed at a normal hour. They aren’t simply feeling they’d be cutting short the potential of the day. They are feeling, or sensing, rather, that they have never grasped their life, become a person yet, and to go to sleep early would kill their chance to find some truth.

Young men are not ready to commit because in the childhood restriction of emotions under the weight of paternal culture, they could never just be children. They could never just be loved for their protean selves. To expect them at the doorway of chronological adulthood, at 18 or 25, to give up any chance to be that child, to give up that life-and-death need to be, to now kill that need and become a woman’s needs, is to kill and bury themselves.

I have seen it often. I had been it when I was 24 and wouldn’t, over summer break from grad school, bring my girlfriend to my parents’ home. And I have had female clients who are so troubled – emotional kaleidoscopes on steroids – that they should want to figure themselves out and become an autonomous person before they dedicate themselves to a marijuana boy or construction worker, yet they cling to the world of two people now and forever. How can they do this? What is wrong, or right, with them?

If there is a cardinal truth about this, it seems to be confounded by the facts that countless men, including myself and stalkers, are the most dependent shell-less eggs possible, and that probably as many women are intrepid soloists. My character of independence, pre-marriage, was a cover of numbness and cultural expectation. I sometimes wonder if my wife, despite her apparent solid and seamless dedication for twenty-five years, could take this institution of marriage or leave it. Intrapsychically, she seems to be her own person or island.

Still, I see these clients who have never found themselves, yet unlike men, they are not antsy about settling down. I do not think it is maturity. I believe it is the girl in the woman, true to the dependent child, unlike the false macho little boy, yet confused by her societal imprint as the nurturer. We are so mixed up, or as I’ve said in previous posts, we are the molecular mess.

What is commitment to a person? I have committed to my wife for all these years and will continue to ’til my end, but there is still something deeply buried inside me that doesn’t feel good about it. I long ago overpowered that bit of indigestion. I think the abyssal bottom line is: Don’t most of us still have a primordial need – our earliest uncooked seeds – to be a complete person before we can give ourselves to anything else? (Even those who cling passionately to another person or project or crusade to replace that seed). Aren’t we still in the crib waiting to be picked up and soothed for all time, so we finally feel OK, a calm and serene statement not a question? Needing what Dr. Janov noted: “There is nothing that calms a child more than being loved”?*

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* I don’t know which Janov book contains this quote, or if I got it perfectly right. He might have said: “There is nothing that calms a child more than feeling loved.”

Depressed Trumper*

I was surprised that this many New York Times op-ed commenters, so genteel and worldly astute, could appreciate this psych-drenched statement. My primary purpose was my appreciating the fact that a Trump adherent may not be only the rabid rally-marching stereotype, but could be just a depressed person with a sad sense of life. One looks upon her with sympathy, and assumes she may be receptive to contemplation, feeling deeply and finally crying for her childhood. That would be the doorway to therapy. But as said, she has escaped into projected pain and probably contempt, leaped into the steep-walled pool of attitudinal convictions, never to climb out and back to her real life.

One of the great delusions in human psychology is that our thinking is primary reality. It is usually an escape from reality, from our true, deeper feeling self.

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* https://nyti.ms/361Ttfu#permid=103279284

Manifesto: Agnostics are the best

I try occasionally to be spiritual, but it never stays for more than a few seconds. I look up at the stars and the black between them a lot. This is because I’m feeling a baseline serenity now, and because I am approaching seventy. Looking at the stupefying nonsense, the desire to feel magical is sweet. But as said, it quickly fades. What of the mystery? What could this all be? But for me it stops at a question mark. How spiritual and glorious is that?

It is actually worse. I try to imagine a creator and I have to picture him as the son of something prior. Additionally, there can’t be a first particle or a first cause that knows. The first is the most ignorant. It’s the last and oldest that knows most.

I wrote in a NYT reply to a comment that agnosticism is assuredly the most courageous position to have. A believer wants to have magic. Atheists often relish a superior certainty in the universe’s emptiness. The agnostic doesn’t know, and doesn’t believe. If he’s a more rigorous thinker, he’ll see that knowledge is a conceit, atoms bouncing off atoms. It’s not that he is ready to believe in the unnatural if something happens to change his mind. He just can’t endorse any knowledge at all. That is the absence of all dessert and pretty much of all ego. It is the most courageous.

What does the brutal agnostic, yours truly, think about the human psyche? Meaning is feeling and nothing more, but feeling evaporates when we picture a universe without a creator. So let us pull the circle in closer and feel about real things, small precious things: the pieces of nature. That’s what healthy children do. And they have no mean bones in them.

Ye who dare to late-cancel !

I’ve never used this blog as a pure “ventilation” medium before, but this may be a good time to do it. I think the most powerful self-restraint I’ve had to exercise – other than suppressing confrontations with my wife over years of nightly piles of dirty dishes – has targeted clients who late-cancel their appointment. I feel more chest-constricting rage over them than I typically do over no-shows. Those reprobates will do it once then disappear – quit or fired – as their faith was always bad; or I’ll text them ten minutes into their hour and will receive a startled apology – “I goofed!” But these previous-night same-morning blandly delivered cancellations, generally by relatively new or regular clients, vitiate my days and my income time and again, over and over. They may be people who think I’m on salary, don’t realize that a wasted hour is poverty. Monday, nine clients in succession kept their appointments. Tuesday, five cancelled, leaving me a very pathetic lazy day. My love for Monday does absolutely nothing to balance my hate for Tuesday.

Part of my frustration is that any given individual may adopt the tradition of canceling, though will space out the deed just widely enough to soften the blow. But not really. Another part is that I perceive these individuals as disrespectful, even as degrading me. I know that is my “inner child” feeling. Unfortunately, it’s the only one I have. The Wise Mind knows they weren’t thinking of me at all, so how could they have been purposely disrespectful? These fair-weather clients are just living their own lives. Result is: It’s enraging to have nothing legitimate to rage about.

Plus – and here is the insane part: One client cancelling is no big deal. He or she doesn’t know that another, or two more, or three or four others may have delivered their Ne Pas RSVP for the same day. My fury is based on the impression of singularity, of a gang assault, when there was merely an adventitious accumulation!

I do engineer some revenge as often as possible. Clients will no longer be permitted to schedule through the front office: I have prevented it! They must text me personally. Now, this only works as revenge if they feel the burn, if they feel the contempt of my demeaning assumption that they are likely to try to sneak in behind my back and mess up again. No, smirking punk, you must go through The Man.

A more severe response is this text message: “Suggesting you call on the day and time you want to come in, when you know there is (transportation available, no conflicting appointment, etc.), and I will see if that hour is available. Will no longer be able to schedule in advance.” Notice my strategic cowardice, where I don’t say “I will no longer be able” or “You will no longer be able to schedule in advance.” It’s just that it will no longer be!

It has been written that therapists as a group are squeamish to talk about money. It’s a fault, and it is true of me. I practically blush to hand someone a payment voucher after front desk staff has gone home. But I am not squeamish to grow righteously apoplectic in my chair and send you vibes of misery for rejecting my help. “May your diagnosis never abate!” “May you feel like a regretful idiot without your therapist!” “May you be lost and lonely without . . . me!” This is my strength and my self-esteem.

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Addendum: Do you really have a good reason to cancel here and there, today, two weeks from now? Or do you live in a cloud of defiance or resistance to obligation, to yourself, humming along the outskirts of seriousness for the remainder of your days? Poop!