Since I’ve last written, an 18-year-old girl seems to be falling into schizophrenia; a 39-year-old woman’s destructive feelings continually sabotage her relationships – with her fiancé and her children; a 43-year-old man ambivalently seeks to sacrifice his dignity to accommodate his Borderline Personality-disordered princess wife; a 48-year-old man, volcanically discharging childhood trauma rage weekly for two entire years, is finally letting the boy’s hurt, not rage now, come out; a 16-year-old girl towers over all people and situations with her doggedly polemical Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder, riding on the sheen of her perfectionistic and ordered thinking; a 17-year-old brilliant girl falls toboggan-like into deeper alienated depression, detached from parents who have always felt they are the most important person in the room; a 45-year-old woman obtusely considers, a slow stubborn dawning that will probably peter out, that her “brain fog” and POTS symptoms may be psychological in origin, based in her plywood-like repression of trauma pain from childhood through adolescence.
As Freud would say, this is a lot of poop, slop and crap to deal with. Right now, I am especially concerned about the blossoming schizophrenic. I believe her parents have so fucked her mind with their Mormon religion imperatives, their fingers in her young soul, that when she was recently sent to a Utah therapist – the most toxic goddamned quack I can imagine – she could not maintain her dwindling hold on reality. That blithe, sleepwalking smile, lost inside her, was so chilling that I wanted to rip, like a man with a voodoo doll, the people in her life who have done this to her.
This weekend, I am about to talk to the mother of the depressed girl. This email, in response to her sudden interest, hadn’t scared or offended her away:
“Your daughter’s problems have deepened in some ways as time has gone on. The most powerful long-term factor is her relationship with you and her father. The most powerful new and worsening factor is that she is transitioning into adulthood feeling lost and unsupported. She is an extremely bright, mature and sincere young person, and I believe her description of her life. In psychotherapy we’d put it this way: She is being forced to leave a childhood that she never got to live as she should have been able to. That is a dire plight that can lead to crisis for many teens as they move through age 16, 17 and 18. But each child is different, and there are unique, serious reasons to worry about her.
“At this point, as a sort of ‘preview,’ I’ll just say that her problems are by no means a failure to get good grades or do chores in a timely manner.”
A Saturday rendezvous with a parent who thinks yelling, chores, grades are the meaning of life. I keep getting older and lately have been in a covidy mood. If the mother insists on remaining superior, I may say that I hope her daughter can soon move far away to college and never look back.
I am therapist. Hear me roar.
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Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.