Phenomena

I am remembering two men who came to therapy under wifely duress and who completely wasted our time. One of them offered “worried well” problems that had nothing to do with his family's dysfunction or his majority share in it. The other couldn’t conceive of any problems at all, and left it to me to discern something between the lines of his euthymic denial. How did I know the fact of this hidden material? By snooping on family members’ progress notes. (See https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2019/09/i-dont-like-you-either.html.) Their children were depressed, anxious, cutting, delinquent, defiant, small lost souls. The wife would be – you name it. And yet the men would smell like a rose, or at worst, like an Adjustment Disorder rose. All of one man’s four children were sick, but he said nothing. The other just talked about his job stress and his wife’s complaint that he would tell long stories at inopportune times.

I could not, of course, reveal my secret knowledge. I could not say, “Yes, you’re worried about your company’s investments, but are you sure there isn’t something nefarious that you’re failing to disclose?” I would be impotent, but in a way that would bring out some of my most devious spy craft, typically in the form of psychoeducation. “For many men, this kind of dedication to work and achievement can have suspect causes and problematic effects. If it’s the substitute for self-esteem, then what was your self-value before it, and eventually, after it?” “Many children look at their father’s workaholism and – believe it or not – they don’t feel admiration. They feel, ‘I don’t have a dad around, a dad who wants to be with me.’” If such generalities make them feel a little bad, then I’ve scored three points: They should feel bad; maybe now they’re educated; and maybe they’ll squeal.

This problem of willful nondisclosure can be extrapolated to the wide field of all clients who share their world of hurt but not the world of harm they cause. We see traumatized children and adult-children and we know their parent was evil or botched. But what if we only see that parent? Wouldn’t he or she seem a sympathetic character, or at least a burdened one? Very likely. We would not know she had soul-murdered her child and continued to press down on the coffin lid. And even if, in therapy, he did admit some of his parenting problems, we would be educators, mono-focused on his own pain, would see his children obliquely, as two-dimensional characters.

What can we say about this ignorance we’re capable of? We may not know the person at all. We might do deep and enlightened cave diving into the shallowest or most illusory part of his life, seeing only half his psyche. When it comes down to it, we are phenomenologists, the philosophers and scientists who only see surfaces.