Small talk #3: The slightly bereft man

Depth therapy can give us disarming insights about ourselves. And the process can reveal that there may be a stratum of truth one micron below, hidden below, what we have known about ourselves for many years or even a lifetime. A client told me about his discoveries:

He feels deeply for people when they are in distress, and tries to help. People are precious in those moments. Also, he cannot hurt anyone’s feelings, but if a person were to insult him, he would strike back with poisonous words meant to shame or kill. He’s known he’s had rare dreams, a handful across the four decades of his adult life, perme­ated with magically wonderful feelings of affection for a person. But he wakes up and it is all gone.

One night – this was the prime insight – he realized that he has never liked anyone. “After a short time in my early childhood, I have never liked any human being, have never had any affection. My few little friends drifted away, depression added to the atmosphere, and I have never felt any warm feeling since. The absence is so complete that I didn’t notice its truth until a few nights ago. That is, I hadn’t realized for forty years that I didn’t like anyone. It occurred to me on a walk.” He added that he’d always sensed that he had never needed a friend. But he had never looked one micron deeper to see why.

So he wondered how he could feel care for someone else’s pain but have not the slightest, not even an atom’s weight of positive feeling for the person, for any person. I suggested that it makes sense if you look at various factors. (a) You had the right human bond in your early childhood. (b) It got deeply buried by time and depression. (c) It comes out in your dreams. (d) Distress and crisis are the chemical, adult reincarnation of the craving good feelings that make a child’s friendship bond. Your humanity returns in those moments. (b) But affection – liking – is too related to love, a need that you buried before you starved from lack of it in your earliest years. You live in your adult life. You can’t afford to undermine yourself by crashing back into that unmet need. You can’t afford to touch it. So how could you like anybody?

It’s OK, I said, moving to sit closer to him. It’s OK.