Two sessions

 

I have discovered what may be my most sabotaging trigger to therapy impotence. A twenty-something client felt it important, during the diagnostic session, to describe her upset at being denied privileged status during an out-of-state work trip. She had worked at a name-brand com­pany as an entry level “ambassador.” The crime was that she expected to have a single room at the hotel, but discovered she’d be sharing the room with a coworker. It was obvious that this indignity chafed to such a degree that two years later, she was still in a state of sim­mer­ing dudgeon.

I instantly learned that I could not swallow this sense of entitlement. I was capsized, thrown, punched in the sternum, contemptuous, nearly angry. Now, I have worked with Narcissists before and have found the chal­lenge a masticatory delight. But this pom­posity from a youngster was too much for me. Though I couched my following inquiry in speciously therapeutic terms (and doubtless with a poorly garbled tone of offense), there was no doubt that my meaning was: “How did you become such a princess?”

Of course, I feel bad. Her presenting problem was not Pampered Poodleitis, but depres­sion, lack of motivation. I care about clients, and people in general, with these afflic­tions. Why could I not get past this quality of hers?

The answer, in part, is that there were other supporting facets to her presentation that bespoke con­trar­iness. The knee-jerk “yes” that immediately jumped on the last word of all of my sen­tences. Her mili­tantly surfacy pres­en­ta­tion. Her strange declaration that she could never reach a spontaneous feeling place in my pres­ence. The presence of floaty, and the absence of con­tent-based, responses to everything I’d observed and described. The perky manner with which she said goodbye at the end of the session, clearly exag­gerated and signaling her rejec­tion of therapy (and me).

How did I kill it? By naming what appeared to me to be undeserved pretension. Why this was so deadly to me, I am still trying to discover. My hypotheses are porous and de­grad­ing. I could stand a teenager with such an elite attitude. It would be adorable. A forty- or fifty-year-old Narcissist, I’d see sickness to be pitied and worked into. But a twenty-some­thing-year-old? There is some special odor to that. Though probably crip­pled, a young adult should just be more tentative about life, not Midas-like. Her manner was so polished and all-knowing that it seemed to belie her stated depression and “numb­ness.” I could not conceive an “in.”

I know I ruined a chance to help.

💀

I have worked with many young adult women, and some men, who remain psycho-umbilically attached to loveless parents. They cannot stand tall before their mother or father, whose only remaining powers are the traumatic memory they planted in child­hood and the brake on development they caused.

In my first few years of therapy, I expected clients to borrow my own home-born con­tempt and dismiss their offending parent, to be “strong” because there was no rational alter­na­tive. Later I realized how unrealistic this conceit was. And then, I grasped the necessity of the inner child, that the person cannot really grow outside of her roots, her identity. Still, some strength must be chanced, or the person may never grow at all.

Today, I found a new slant which seemed as clear as an axiom. Two clients same day who had not grown past their mother inspired this simplistic idea, which I offered to the second client. Most people have formed a generally solid adult persona, the constel­lation of defenses, résumé and assumptions that makes them feel, or believe they feel, sturdy and competent in the world. They still have the “inner child” – the ungrown, deeper reality of their identity – but they have buried it, wished it into the cornfield.* These are the people who can set decent boundaries with intrusive and solipsistic parents, based on the illusion of their adult self.

Others never grow substantively beyond their infant or child. They live in dread of the parent, remain cocooned by the thought of her. Their adult dimension is phantom and transient. This was the young woman I saw end-of-day. My lesson was: “You have two choices. Grow, by a combination of desire and artificial means, the adult character, or stay the child. It will never be easy to leave the parent, to create your own separate life, but only the adult persona can do it.” I believe this was the first time I conceived that the person could have a binary choice, that one could decide one’s preferred identity. Look­ing again, it seems neces­sary. Primal therapy is wrong here, assuming that the prepo­tent, dependent child-self can under­mine itself through radical grief process (“primal scream”) and somehow awaken into what it never became, the mature adult. As Sartre** might have said, though standing on his head: We are not “condemned to be free. We are free to be condemned.”

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* The Twilight Zone – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxTMbIxEj-E.

** https://yourstory.com/2017/06/jean-paul-sartre-philosophy-existentialism-freedom.