Clients who did things

Only late in my career did I start to dedicate deliberate focus to clients’ doing things in the real world as a result of their depth therapy. I supposed I had always just assumed the magic of regressive process to change lives. Taking productive action is obviously not an original idea, as it’s the sine qua non of any behavioral therapy and to a great degree, cognitive therapy. (I remain amazed by Albert Ellis’s recommendation that persons with social phobia should break the fever of their inhibition by farting in a crowded restaurant. As it went, the result of this strategy was that nothing ever healed Albert’s wholesale idiocy. Rest in peas, corn and lima beans, Smile-Without-A-Man!)

Basically, the core tenets of feeling-centered regressive therapy are that deep feeling-expression is healing, and that people change organically (not transiently as they might by cognitive brute force) when they feel different. In this approach, then, behavioral change happens because the client actually becomes a different person: Her chemistry – the feeling through which she sees and knows the world – changes. The euthymic (fake happy) individual has lifelong laughed and smiled away his true feelings, his autonomy, his emotional backbone. He remained imprisoned: the family goofball, the family inferior, the codependent server of others, the complaisant employee. Question that smile each moment it tries to happen, squelch that bubbly self-effacing laugh completely to feel what’s underneath, and he instantly gains psychological weight. He is grounded, no longer a leaf without roots. “Smile!” urge his prison guard parents and siblings. “Screw yourselves,” he now replies, stern. Or if he maintains politeness: “Considering this crappy family, which my eyes have only recently opened to, there is nothing to smile about.”

Here are some changes recent clients have made because of their greater gravity, less-polluted spirit, sharper eyes:

* S.L. will attend some Meetup activities, against the proscriptions of her boyfriend living in Belgium, who checks in with her every half-hour to make sure she is safe at home.

* E.T., 16 years old, has required her mother to keep her father at a distance, possibly forever.

* S.W. has closed the door to his boyfriend, has begun to move on.

* K.R., 15 years old, has understood that her Reactive-Attachment Disorder-based lying and clandestine antisocial behaviors come from her killed-at-birth self-esteem, requiring her to do and say anything to avoid feeling her bleak truth. She is now open, much less deceptive in therapy.

* A.C., 22, Asperger’s, is branching out. Flashy pepper spray necklace, fending off a dirty old man by means of a curt and grammatically punctilious epistle, attending events relatively far from home, even considering wearing something somewhat feminine and revealing.

* “Focus was on client’s disclosure that following previous session, she talked to her mother about the complete absence of mother’s empathy throughout her formative years.” While I “warned” the 17-year-old that this renaissance relationship will not in itself heal the past, and she will continue to have some oscillatory dark and puzzling moods, this development will strengthen her here-and-now and her future. (More work to be done.)

* J.W. has almost written off her father and has come close to dropping the ax on her mother-in-law. Terribly enmeshed and cut-off at the neck by her vicious father and obsequious mother, she is at the stormy vacillation stage.

* D.B. has almost ceased excoriating his wife and ruining their children. Still, it remains very hard to fall into the utter starvation and contempt of his childhood. And so he projects.

* K.L., 28, Filipino, has decided to move out of his family-of-origin home. He is the youngest of several siblings, and the first to do it.

* V.A., incipiently healed by emotional insight (needy inner child; “splitting off and projection”; “moral defense against bad objects”), he no longer idealizes his mother, doesn’t call her; doesn’t neurotically pamper his adult son.

* G.P. – I am waiting to see if the attenuation of his depression, over the course of seventeen sessions, has led to change. He has changed – “unfriended” his Trump-loving family, finally asked his mother painfully difficult questions about his father. But I cannot yet determine if this is related to his therapy.

I have not, obviously, named any of the clients whom I cannot move or have not moved. There is no doubt, though, that we must go to where we are wounded to change. Dragging someone along by their thinking head cannot be kosher.