Lesson: Changing the past

I’ve written about this teenager before. Her case is one of those where I’d been complacently thrilled to have discovered the cause of a client’s problem, only to find, a little later, that I was wrong. The session that followed that false prize did, in fact, reveal the essential truth. But by that point, my ego had run out. Here was the superseding epiphany:

She was sad, fragile and anxious around all potential friends and enemies at school, for the past nine years. We had settled on the fact of, situation of, her mother’s cancer. I had worked with her father on his distance from his children. She and I traced her life change, from robust to sad and fearful, to her mother’s removing her from her school and friends to a different “preferable” school. That was her tragedy. I finally felt it stunningly. My empathy, my success was the answer!

But it wasn’t. When we returned to her mother’s cancer – after noting that “most problems are multi-determined” – something happened. She cried deeply, the kind of tears that are pain and cleansing. Why hadn’t this happened before? Unknown, but I will attribute it to “time and place” and probably to the obstructing power of my personality, that is, having been too peremptory and knowing in the session. This time, I was small and quiet, maybe nonexistent: We were simply in her pain.

Now, the tears were not this powerful:

Crying is not only an expression of general hurt; it is also a vehicle that carries us back through time to those specific traumas that were buried long ago by the processes of repression. It is tears that break down those barriers and help us on that voyage through time when we were hurt and could not cry. Tears wash away our pain and unmask the unconscious.*

This is because she was a child, meaning that one piece was missing: She needed to finally return to the past with her mother and relive the cancer and her terror and loneliness. She and her mother needed to forget the intervening eight years, go straight to the stillborn trauma, to the loss of her self that comes when you can’t live your feelings. I am saying that literally, they needed to reverse time and sit in that place, maybe she in her mother’s lap, with all the clocks thrown away, and cry and talk and hold.

That was the cause and the cure that we found, so certain it was that I informed her mother, with the young lady’s bright encouragement, of what needed to happen when her daughter was ready.

(For my part, I learned, probably for the fiftieth time, that I seem to be most helpful when I’m least significant.)

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* Arthur Janov, PhD, The New Primal Scream, Ch. 15, “The Role of Weeping in Psychotherapy,” p. 318.

End of January

The world, and our country, are skirting the sewer’s rim at all times, slouching and dancing around it blind, while a middle-aged woman in my office starts to grow an ego. A teenager, though resisting, feels cared about for the first time. A man loses the ability to be a serial killer. A young woman leaves her family and finds herself. A suicidal man holds on, despite himself.

Does this mean we can help the world only by seeing one person at a time in a closed door room? There’ve been billions of lessons created in all our history, relegated to the sky, all old and new racing in the winds forever, out of touch. They’ve never made a transformation. It’s not lessons that help.

Looking at everything, you’d think it was difficult to be moral and to be gracious to oneself. The fact that we have a limited life doesn’t change people. The fact that our life in the universe is simultaneously necessary and impossible doesn’t change people. Just the touch of understanding and of care does. A quiet room.

The Trump fan is still alone

A Trump supporter at a rally or in the voting booth triggers my strong disgust and contempt. Trump supporters on my office couch inspire different feelings: mild distaste, or wonder or weary resignation, or caring acceptance of the person’s complexity. Client status meat-tenderizes the caricature.

I saw one middle-aged man for a little over a year. He had survived more traumas – quantity-wise and often quality-wise – than any ten clients I’d known, and this includes those whose daily “prison life” qualified them for the dreadful Complex Post-Traumatic Stress diagnosis. He was the best client I’ve ever had in his ability to heal by outletting pain direct from the depth of its original childhood home, not refined through the here-and-now filter that displaces most people’s feeling expression. He loved me, believing I had opened him up to this deep healing, when in fact I mostly sat mute, stupid and stunned before his devil-given photographic memory of every rape, starvation, pet murder and scum character he had experienced or witnessed daily for fourteen years. So he had me to cling to, but much more than that, his young son, the fiery love of his life. Picture a future shocking newspaper headline of a mass shooter. He was not that, but I assumed he would be if anything were to happen to his boy.

A year into therapy, I was surprised and, admittedly, un-therapeutically-manned when he showed me his new dating profile that included this proviso: The woman “must love Trump.” This much respect for me, who he knew had a different politics? This capacity for gratitude to therapy and God? This beautiful fathering – kind, patient, generous, the opposite of everything he had lived growing up? How could he feel right about the narcissistic, sociopathic, cruel, dogmatic and dim president?

I remembered an earlier client. He, too, manifested something akin to what biologists call “saltation,” a sudden evolution. Both had been raised in war zones by immoral, sociopathic, failed mothers and fathers. Both were forged to be angry and predatory survival machines from their beginning, had lived criminal lives through their teens, twenties and thirties, and then – changed, turned one-hundred-eighty degrees. In session, the one bawled his pain, his regrets, his abject dedication to a cold and cheating wife. The other, who had for a time been wealthy by criminal brilliance and the energy of a thousand swallowed traumas, joined the world of workers and fathers with dreams and futures.

What is deeper inside people? What was deeper in my client who could love, but who appreciated, in this president, character features he had wanted to kill in his father? Therapy with its week after week, month after month of continual white-hot upsurging of devastation, didn’t reach everything. I think I might have needed to hug my client, be a good father. Without that, could he really descend to the infant, the toddler, the little boy melting away his grief in someone’s arms? Without that, did there remain the solitary boy who could never feel healing love?

Therapists – not those who resort to EMDR with its “installation” of nice thoughts – refer to trauma reliving: returning to the original event and this time not freezing but purging everything. But if there’s going to be reliving, maybe it has to go all the way,* not just to the loss but to the need, the one healing environment of the babe-in-arms,** the parent who cares.

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* Bukowski, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6_QUhUPrF4.

** Liedloff, http://www.continuum-concept.org/reading/in-arms.html