Slomo started a joke*

 

“Everybody has the capacity to dream up and believe anything he wants to. The shrinks, or the psychoanalysts, would call it a ‘personal delusional system.’ And you believe it because you choose to. When I skate, I try to regress down to what I think is about age eleven-and-a-half, which is the last of the idealistic years, before the testosterone and all the other stuff takes off and then before you know it, you’re in the middle third of life.” – John Kitchin, known as “Slomo”

Many people have seen or heard of Slomo, or have watched the New York Times video op-ed about him. Dr. John Kitchin, happy local legend, quit his medical practice of twenty years to “do what he wants to,” which is to skate the boardwalk of Pacific Beach, San Diego. When the video appeared in March 2014, he had been a’rolling for sixteen years. Now, well into his seventies, he may still be at it.

I’ve shown the video to different clients over the years, from an admitted place of near-sighted­ness. I imagined there was a lesson in it, something that could help fearful eighteen-year-olds and older lost souls see that we should own our life completely, not have to glue ourselves to a Procrust­ean bed of false meaning and purpose.

Those shows are over. John: I am not a psychoanalyst. But Google can’t find a single word about your “personal delusional system,”** and I have never heard the term in my twenty-five years of immersion in psycho­therapy. Is your belief in the idea your own delusional system?

Just as the emotional melody and harmonies of a song can transform simpleminded lyrics into art, so the free-spirited video vibe and the metaphysical candy (being “in the zone”) handed out by Mr. Kitchin can mask the absurdity of his meaning. Should people, who have one life to live, take a neurotically wishful need to exit the world and let themselves believe it is valid? Is Bert­rand Russell on target where he says

“We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages.”***

or should we regress to age 11½ and imagine we’re rollerblading toward Indians in a forest?

I would not begrudge Kitchin his quarter-of-a-life’s pleasure in lateral escapism, but for the fact that his belief in personal dream realities has, over the past several years, been replicated across the land as a poison absorbed and projected by millions: those fifty-three percent of all Republicans who believe that Donald Trump is still the presi­dent, who believe that white people own the country, who are methodically killing our democ­racy by trying to own elections. They all have their personal delusional system, a way to deny the real world while turning it to garbage because they want to.

Whenever I see the evil banality of these fools, I am reminded of those “crazy­making” parents who can grow emotional anguish**** and schizophrenia in their chil­dren***** by perpetrating their own psy­chosis culture at home. And I think of Slomo, who acts and thinks like a child, believing it’s absolutely, perfectly fine to hide your mind in a wish.

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* The Bee Gees, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3kBDtjRtB0.

** “A Personal Delusional System” is instrumental music by Nit Grit.

*** Lord Bertrand Russell’s 1927 lecture, “Why I Am Not a Christian.”

**** Peter Breggin, Toxic Psychiatry, p. 34.

***** John Modrow, How To Become a Schizophrenic

 

Anti-hypnosis #1: What do mothers want?

 

This post is about one parent-client exchange, the therapist response to it, and the spirit or principle at their base.

My client has a toxic mother. Maternal toxicity often features: unconscious solipsism and deliberate entitled selfishness. There is usually projected poison – directed devastation of the child’s heart – which may look like psychopathy but could be “Medea”* Borderline. These problems manifest in a wholesale lack of care for her adult-child’s feelings and needs, despite what the daughter may believe and the mother will insist.

From the progress note:

We did a little micro-dissection of the subtle manipulation. Example: “Rona’s” mother, feeling insufficiently embedded in her daughter’s life, said “I don’t feel I’m in the loop.” I asked my client not to be “sublim­inally” persuaded that her mother should, in fact, be in “the loop.” She might reply, as a quick example: “You’re my parent. You are not in my friend group.”

Let’s torture this mini-Eureka moment a little more. My client, hearing her mother’s simple plaint that, deceptively, is undergirded by an ocean of historical voodoo and submission, felt one little whisker’s weight of annoyance at her mother’s peremptory push while fully swal­low­ing the assumption that the loop – natural enmeshment in her daughter’s life – was right. There might be three whiskers of feeling sadly touched: “Aww. My mom is the outcast child who fears she won’t be picked by either team.”

Step back forcefully and burn both assumption and maudlin pity with your hard eyes.

“You are not in the loop, Mom. My circle is for people who are sympathetic to me. My children are in my loop, and I hope to rejoin theirs if they accept that I now will listen to them, respect them and not demand or order them. Look closely and you will see what I am saying about our relationship. It is not what you think it is or want it to be. It is painful and formal, not sweet, not obligated, and not owned by you. I am a survivor.”

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, probably unto my deathbed: Parents are children. They have power simply because they kept you from growing when it was easy to hold you down. Don’t let that be possible now.

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* From Christine Ann Lawson’s Understanding the Borderline Mother.

 

I'm willing to entertain other views

 

Steven Levenkron, New York therapist, claims a ninety percent success rate healing his anorexic clients (mostly teen and pre-teen girls). A local (Las Vegas) marital therapist claims a ninety percent success rate transforming troubled couples into happy ones. Inspired by these folks (and by those stupid Lysol and other disinfectant cans that tout a ninety-nine percent germ killing rate and never any more), I’ve decided that I have a one-hundred percent success rate with all of my clients. This includes (obviously) those who left me not just early but quickly, and those whose mothers (it’s never the fathers) have texted me acerbic, rejecting messages after I’ve refused to reschedule their teen owing to their no-show irresponsibility or too many shoddy excuses.

How have I helped them all? In a hierarchy of ways. Some, very substantially re: depres­sion, anxiety, self-esteem, autonomy, facing the truth about their botchy parents and setting limits on them, self-affirmation of anger, the quiet capacity of mastery that comes from insight, etc., etc. But those that look like complete failures? They came to therapy with a great deal of ignorance, and left with less, though they may feel worse for a while. Take “Sylvia,” who departed in a huff after I gave a half-hour psychoeducational lecture. She had wanted that particular half-hour to blab her crap, was not in the market to learn anything. Yes, she was Borderline. Yet even she would be incensed by true facts about emotional pain and what moves it out of the system. I believe that anyone, short of the deep psychotic, whose delusion bounces against reality is the better for having suffered that bruise. They are now slightly different. And in their case, different is better because everything else is the same.

When I learned, twenty-eight years ago, that I was an ungrown child in a lost head and aged body, the pain was so excruciating that I laughed, sincerely. I sat down and wrote my story, my pen as microscope. I would not be a therapist, and would have no capacity for happiness, had that not happened.

I realize this is projection, but as a person who lived in sickness and ignorance for most of my life, I cannot help but see that anything is better than essential ignorance. Is it better for a 17-year-old to live a nameless dread as he has to travel to the adult, non-child world, or to know what burden he is carrying? Maybe that is debatable, but I know that my obliviousness at that age didn’t leave for another twenty-some years, deceiving every decision I made and thought I had. People have asked me if I inform a client that she has Borderline* personality. I do. And that means to describe the earliest factors – mother-and-infant factors – that caused the global problem. She learns that she is not a born-, God- or genetics-defective person, but an injured one. And I’ve never known any­one who, upon learning that, “blamed” their mother.

What I’m saying, at the worst, is that facts even without compassion (as some people are not receptive to it) are improvements even if delusions feel better. I am one-hundred percent sure that I have never thought I was causing anyone any harm by disrupting his equilib­rium with the realities of his childhood. I believe my heart is accu­rate enough to know what “causing harm” would feel like.

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* “Borderline,” the word that “strikes terror in the heart of the middle-aged comfort-seeking psychiatrist.” From Irvin Yalom, MD’s Love’s Executioner, chapter: “Therapeutic Monogamy.”