Soft landing: An idea about what we should do

We need a better way to think about our psychology. A way that encompasses the oldster like me, who lives on the cosmic and thanatological scales; the twenty- or thirty-something, who is immersed in and on fire with the impacts of her trauma; the forty-year-old or middle-aged person who, like the teenager, is trapped in limbo, between being the helpable person and just moving on; the adolescent who is lost and incompetent and trapped between childhood home and freedom; and the child whose disturbance and misbehavior are right because he is the pin cushion of troubled parents.

I have decried Irvin Yalom’s ignorance in seeing a world of therapy absent of children. Though we should thank goodness he doesn’t apply the “four givens”* to them. I have condemned clinicians who do apply their Cognitive approach to all ages, as if a child were sick because she thinks irrationally. I long ago rejected my original “primal” approach, though its theory is correct that we come from pain and must address that pain. The point being How much pain do we address? We simply cannot be brought to be undefended.

Is there a Unified Field Theory of psychotherapy? Or like physics, will the quantum, quiddity level always seem totally different from the place we live? Is there a common essence of dysfunction that applies throughout the timeline, or that should be manipulated at all?

I’ll think about it for a minute. Aletha Solter said the infant child wildly crying over wrongs big and small needs to be believed and held. A cookie broke and there’s a tantrum? It makes perfect sense in the child’s psyche. Here there is healing: In arms, the distress evaporates. After that age, pain and consequences will have already been imprinted in the body and become character. When too much time passes without rich expression and healing help – and maybe a month could be too much time? – the person will rarely want to go back to that life-changing pain. We are made to not want to dwell in our worst feeling, our worst times. So there, therapy is already facing the locked-down, defended self. That is now who we are! Do we want to, can we, rip down identity to touch our earlier, unsustainable meaning?

Here: The client determines, unconsciously or by intent, how much agony to unearth. We have to be prepared and waiting for all of it. And judiciously, encouraging of it. Without that push, she might as well stay home with her self-medications. A 16-year-old sat on the couch in her stiff armor. I suggested (mostly as humor) that she “lie on the couch, curl up in a fetal position and hug a pillow.” She did this (without the fetal position) and seemed to immediately fall into a deep place. I would be certain it was deeper than she’d be able to go if alone, because aloneness is terrible, and grows a numbing barrier that changes the chemistry of tears. After ten minutes of silence, she named it: “I don’t know who I am.” That was enough, though another teen might have shown anger at her parents.

In summary, we are working with the determinism of the person, where she wants to open her eyes, but only so wide. And what she wants is what she is.

- - - - - - - - - - -

* Yalom’s Love’s Executioner. “I have found that four givens are particularly relevant to psychotherapy: the inevitability of death for each of us and for those we love; the freedom to make our lives as we will; our ultimate aloneness; and, finally, the absence of any obvious meaning or sense to life” (p. xiii).