It can only help

 

Your 16-year-old client has a body chemical feeling (sensation, emotion) that, when exposed to thought and to the world, espe­cially the world of same-age peers, is trans­lated as “infer­ior,” “less than,” “not as compe­tent as.” You know this is being unfair to herself, invalid. You want her to feel better quickly, or at least to feel better when she goes home and logs in to the dreaded social media.

But she won’t feel better, quickly or for a while or maybe a long time. The feeling is many chem­icals, each attached to a facet of her history. It’s the chemi­cals of five years of age, with mother locked away in her room, with cancer, ignoring her daugh­ter. The chem­icals of six-year-old sister being misjudged and condemned as aloof by mother. The chem­icals of being removed from her beloved school, age seven, for no understandable reason, then placed in a new strange school and bullied by most of the boys in her class. The chem­icals of father who lives at work, the gym and in the garage and who has no ability to relate to human beings. The chem­icals of time going by without im­prove­ment. It’s the brain chem­istry of being lost in her head, an infer­ior refuge from lonely reality.

The chemistry stops time because it doesn’t change, keeping her young, a pain­ful body.

We will not change the way she feels by our affec­tion, our encour­age­ments, or by cogni­tive ther­apy’s logic and reason. At age 16, she shouldn’t be so impres­sion­able that we can con­vince her to think “posi­tive”: arti­ficial chem­icals sup­press­ing natural, injur­ious ones that need to be expelled. “Sophia” has been talking, week after week, driven by con­fu­sion and knowl­edge about her father’s absurd unflap­pa­bility, her mother’s impo­tent rage against him, their poison­ous insults to each other in front of the children. She’s not doing this to hate her parents, which she doesn’t. She’s just natur­ally good at the truth.

Does the truth heal?

It can only help. Three months ago she was in a state of deperson­al­ization, feeling drug-like unreal. But with time, even in the boring imprison­ment of covid, she’s returned to Planet Earth,* less craving of friends, able to make her alone time more inter­esting.  But real healing? That won’t happen while she is a child umbilic­ally connected to her par­ents. That would require deep griev­ing, tears that would dissolve that cord before it’s safe, before it’s possible.

 

Pessimistic Therapy Law:** “First, heal the parents. When that fails . . .”

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* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSRm_X3BLPU.

** https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2014/04/pessimistic-therapy-laws.html.