We are layers

 

A simple way to describe the depth and difficulty of a person is to see that we are layers. We are layers of feeling that comes from the natural self, from pain, and from developmental failure. Many of us did not mature, to be in sync with our age and with our peers. Being the past in a present body and life brings its own recondite and unidentified feelings.

I am slightly in touch with my original failure to bond at birth and in infancy. Its own feelings are truly alpha-and-omega in devastation. They are largely hidden, an old invisible anchor. There is a later – childhood – layer that includes anxiety along with what might be called fearful wonder: organic pleasure mixed with global anxiety and depression and a feeling, not of inferiority, but an emotionalized sense of being “less than.” In adolescence, there came the layer of narcissism, sitting atop the earlier layers. From the beginning, there was the abyss of need, the never-met need for bond. This was the abject dependent person, always immanent in a character that may seem independent. Eventually, decades later, I came to detect my complete inability to move in the absence of a semblance of bond.

Now, there is the inscrutable feeling of being a helpful therapist (when I am). This layer is mostly melancholic. Can I call it a good melancholy?

And today there is going out on a blue and bright late Sunday morning, feeling the sun seeping in like mental health. It’s a good feeling. Which I know is riding precariously on the other layers.

We are all our layers at all times. It’s when the ones below are heavier, more steadfast than the surface that we come to therapy. Here, we’re facing a semi-impossible task: fiddle magically with our past existences, the anchors, while making much more of the sunny busy surface than it warrants. I do that a lot when I send my clients cartoons or engage with them in “problem solving.”