“Do you want him distanced, or do you want him around so you can keep telling him to go away?”

 

Forty-year-old client and her boyfriend are two Borderline personalities ramming up against and angrily bouncing off each other. And this question, that seems like pure Cosmo pop psychology, exactly hit the feeling and meaning of her dilemma. It gave her deep pause as she realized that to the neediest of people, rejection is connection.

This relationship has joined and disjoined nearly half-a-dozen times in six months. Each time has felt right and final. For many people without this personality disorder, there would be a three-pronged choice, as would exist for adult children of toxic parents: sever the umbilical cord and end it (but for the eternal molecules of child nostalgia); remain enslaved; or effect bound­aries. “Mother, I will call you at my own discretion, if I do.” But for the neediest person, there can be no boundaries: They are live walls that allow hope to seep through.

If she finally ends the relationship, that would torture her inner child, her little girl who never had the slightest bit of love. And that would create a felt impossibility, as the Border­line is all child but for the window dressing.

Psychotherapy rarely acknowledges that some people are doomed. And of course, that’s good, because the mind then finds alternatives.

It can only help

 

Your 16-year-old client has a body chemical feeling (sensation, emotion) that, when exposed to thought and to the world, espe­cially the world of same-age peers, is trans­lated as “infer­ior,” “less than,” “not as compe­tent as.” You know this is being unfair to herself, invalid. You want her to feel better quickly, or at least to feel better when she goes home and logs in to the dreaded social media.

But she won’t feel better, quickly or for a while or maybe a long time. The feeling is many chem­icals, each attached to a facet of her history. It’s the chemi­cals of five years of age, with mother locked away in her room, with cancer, ignoring her daugh­ter. The chem­icals of six-year-old sister being misjudged and condemned as aloof by mother. The chem­icals of being removed from her beloved school, age seven, for no understandable reason, then placed in a new strange school and bullied by most of the boys in her class. The chem­icals of father who lives at work, the gym and in the garage and who has no ability to relate to human beings. The chem­icals of time going by without im­prove­ment. It’s the brain chem­istry of being lost in her head, an infer­ior refuge from lonely reality.

The chemistry stops time because it doesn’t change, keeping her young, a pain­ful body.

We will not change the way she feels by our affec­tion, our encour­age­ments, or by cogni­tive ther­apy’s logic and reason. At age 16, she shouldn’t be so impres­sion­able that we can con­vince her to think “posi­tive”: arti­ficial chem­icals sup­press­ing natural, injur­ious ones that need to be expelled. “Sophia” has been talking, week after week, driven by con­fu­sion and knowl­edge about her father’s absurd unflap­pa­bility, her mother’s impo­tent rage against him, their poison­ous insults to each other in front of the children. She’s not doing this to hate her parents, which she doesn’t. She’s just natur­ally good at the truth.

Does the truth heal?

It can only help. Three months ago she was in a state of deperson­al­ization, feeling drug-like unreal. But with time, even in the boring imprison­ment of covid, she’s returned to Planet Earth,* less craving of friends, able to make her alone time more inter­esting.  But real healing? That won’t happen while she is a child umbilic­ally connected to her par­ents. That would require deep griev­ing, tears that would dissolve that cord before it’s safe, before it’s possible.

 

Pessimistic Therapy Law:** “First, heal the parents. When that fails . . .”

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* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSRm_X3BLPU.

** https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2014/04/pessimistic-therapy-laws.html.

 

This end-of-year's statement

 

I enjoy doing therapy, probably always will, but I have lost interest in psychol­ogy. Psychol­ogy is dis­order labels and theories, experiments without science, poll-taking (“Six months or a year on, do you, still-dys­func­tional person, feel better or want to believe you feel better, some­times or for the most part?”), masses of YouTube videos, incompetent psy­cho­thera­pist movies* and daytime celebrities who make their money drama­tizing personal pain. Ther­apy is inti­macy without orgasm, the camp­fire with a friend at the end of the world, a second-birth quality of aware­ness. Very differ­ent from Pavlov, the “learned helplessness experiment,” and Albert “Let a Smile Be Your Umbrella”** Ellis.

For the many of us who lost the outside world through our childhood into adolescence, and came to live mostly in our head, therapy can be a main sus­tenance. Those who remain primar­ily in the world are rare.

One of my goals is to give people some little energy where they can feel good about their present and positive about their future (and often bad about their past!). I, on the other hand, look forward to nothing. Fortu­nately, this is acceptable and shouldn’t be perceived as depress­ing. After all, look at the clown limousine of gurus who adjure us to be in the mo­ment, live in the here-and-now. I think they’re abys­mally igno­rant: Our lives are mostly under the sur­face, in the here-and-then.*** I mean some­thing differ­ent. I live partly in the pres­ent, am deep­ened by my past, am regularly trans­ported to the cosmic unan­swer­able, and have no future plans other than to look at my wife. But that’s three minutes from now.

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* Exception: Good Will Hunting.

** Bing Crosby.

*** https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-here-and-then.html.