My book, dedicated to Karen and Vanessa

Many of my bad habits are still in place from around age seven and later. I can’t justify foisting the mature discipline on myself that would stifle these self-soothing behaviors. I do mean “can’t justify.” I don’t believe the imperatives of adulthood – earning a living, not hitting people, not making excuses for everything – include being in unnecessary pain. Eliminating my tics, my sweets, my curmudgeonly attitudes, would cause pain. I could say that it would also cause me to be not-me: My sense of self requires self-medication to exist. Without it, I’d quickly regress to the flaming baby in the incubator and crib whose parents were nowhere to be seen.

I am like most people, possibly like everyone but the few entirely healthy souls that developed by the luck of the generations. We are all injured child and coping adult blended in one body and one psyche. We are that for two main reasons: Help did not come during our childhood, and adults resist returning to the “scene of the crime,” which is the only place where healing can happen.

All of our psychological problems come from having moved on, during critical times, without healing. One definition of childhood could be having to move on without a voice and without empathy. I know thirteen-, fourteen-, fifteen-year-olds who remain frozen in depression and anxiety and time from some life-changing loss – call it trauma – that happened years earlier. All of my adult clients are people who are frozen, deep under their multifarious surface, in losses that couldn’t psychically be survived.

We cope, we forget, we explain away reminders that appear in our disorders and rage and relationships and self-sabotage and dreams and success. Adults are the most delusional people on earth, because they believe they are essentially OK and they believe they are adult.

There is no root-level healing of psychological disease. That would require a time machine into the past. The notion is as absurd as spending time wondering how we would have turned out had we been born to different parents. We wouldn’t exist. What we can do is get a caring bond where we never had one, with a loved one at the best, with a therapist at much less than the best. We can have the despairing blindness fall from our eyes: What seemed like our defect, our self, is just injury. We can “grieve like a child,” meaning with someone who truly sees us. Grieving critical losses in solitary fails. With good grieving, we find that we change: Our birthright of love and purpose and empathy, to the extent that it existed at our birth, returns.

I live a certain irony where I had been ill for my first four decades and was not good for anyone. I then grasped myself, did brutal work, and changed deeply and widely, a new continent for myself. But this hasn’t helped – can’t help – the two young people I co-raised. I can’t expect them to appreciate my improvement, despite my sincere (and educated) apologies. In fact, I believe they despise it. And I can’t respect their comprehensive rejection: I couldn’t heal quite that much. And I need my curmudgeonly attitude. It’s medicine.