There is nothing left to say

There is nothing left to say, new to say, useful to say, about police killing blacks, about the terrible president, about the sociopathic Republican party. See the obvious truth of that – everything’s been said billions of times – then apply logic. Countless serious thinkers talking and writing fail. Protests fail. Riots fail. Laws fail. Remedial education fails. Mass enlightenment fails. Decent individuals’ caring hearts fail. Adults fail. The logic says there is nothing that the big world can do, or all the little worlds. Nothing. What is left? The individual. The individual at the beginning. Children. Children who don’t grow up starved and bent, angry and lost, who aren’t robbed of their childhood, becoming empty adults who cover up their past then live from their buried self. There is no other answer. You can’t train adults to care when young they were invisible. You can’t inspire their anger away when anger is the only force that makes them feel alive, feel like a person. The world of people thinks big books, big ideas, art, wide culture, beautiful speeches have meaning. They have none. They move no one beyond a moment or two of inspired sensation. Meaning comes from one’s internal engine, formed in the past. It is feeling that lived, or suffocated.

Clients who can't be helped #2

🔆  I learned that when Muzak died, it replaced its elevator music with subliminal lectures on proctology, economics and psychology. This makes sense because people want to avoid important truths, want to just live, believe the surface is the content, and not have to worry about the underpinnings of their lives. Psychotherapy, when it’s done right, brings the scum and magma to the surface, and encourages you to invite them to dinner.

🔆  I had on schedule today three nineteen-to-twenty-two-year-old sociopaths. Two of them no-showed. The third hung up on me (teletherapy) at the fifty-ninth minute of the session. Troubled and Aspergery though she was, I could not let pass – “everything is an excuse” – the personality disorder that bathed in immaturity and justified all failure to try anything.

🔆  I am considering writing a “Teams” message request to the Director, not to send me any more early-twenties amoral autists and psychotics who cannot possibly profit from therapy now, and possibly later.

🔆  I am clearly a weather vane, no rock. As a principle, I will find sly ways to encourage dependent women to question their ties to toxic parents. Today I saw a transfer client who said her counselor had pushed her too hard to separate from her mother. Goodness! I said. That’s not right! While I did suggest that my job is, as I see it, to help people grow stronger not weaker, I would not push any agenda. Saved by my appeasement and hypocrisy!

🔆  The old and behind-closed-doors wisdom in our field is that many clients do not change, do not get better with therapy. A collateral insight is that in success, “the relationship” matters most while the particular therapy paradigm matters not at all: No approach is better than another. I guarantee you that is ridiculous. The relationship and a depth approach are what bring improvement. However, I do agree with the observation that many clients do not change, though from a different angle: Many cannot be helped at all. We can imagine the personality with its roots as spiritual strings anchored in the core of the person, extending outward to all the points of the universe. It is our life, and our meaning. To think we facilely change meaning by techniques is as presumptuous as President Trump is delusional. Only those who want progress, almost as a religious holy grail, as a crusade of self care, will profit from our special offerings.

Dear Diary

I am softly certain that the strong majority of my clients appreciate my offerings. They tell me so, are invariably friendly, though maybe some are just courteous. One would think that the general tone of my work – drastic, history-focused and feeling-centered – would create a serious and sober therapy culture. But this is rarely the case. The reason is that from the beginning, I establish with everyone a casually intimate friendship-type relationship. It often starts off with an invitation to contact me, text or email, about “anything” of concern. I will then respond to the questions, requests, observations, complaints or even cartoons in a concerned, warm, sometimes humorous and re-inviting way. And from there on, I am underwater. My clients now see me through their slightly compartmentalized mind: serious therapist, spontaneous and easygoing confidant.

Why is this a self-screwing? Because the clients will inevitably produce a reason, possibly legitimate, to miss that day’s session, then “ask” if they can “reschedule” for the following week.

Why “ask” is in quotation marks. When a client asks, like a friend, if it’s all right to cancel and pick up next week, what can I possibly say but “It’s all right”? Can I reply, “No, it’s not OK. I am an Independent Contractor, not on salary, and this is my sole income.”? Can I say – “Wouldn’t you want to reschedule for later in the day, or tomorrow?”? No, as that would be begging, and worse, it would be begging them to be what they are apparently not: needing therapy that critically. I have to assume that their decision, frivolous as it may be, is where they are at the time, and therefore valid.

 

Why “reschedule” is in quotation marks. This one is easy. To “reschedule” for the following week is simply to miss a week. Please: Don’t euphemize with me.

I am left with this thought assumption: Being casual and more giving, I lose profes­sional respect that I would naturally have had by virtue of the work. Clients blandly squish me. Being less intimate, more boundaried and formal, I maintain their respect. Is this true? Should I distance myself from my clients, be more coat-and-tie 9 to 5? Would that make them less likely to hand themselves walking papers?

What I will do is cut back. Fewer offers to “be there” as late as 11 p.m. or Sundays. No more clever jokes. No more psychoeducational email essays or twenty-line text-message empathy and suggestions. No more responding to free-floating head-pat-seeking plaints like: “I’m getting tired of going to doctors.” No more.

Addendum, next day. Then again, maybe nothing will change.