The invisible #3: They call it empathy

 

In my understanding, here is a description of the subtlest cause and effect in psycho­pathology. First though, some of the more obvious equations. We assume that a par­ent’s rage and contempt for a child will damage his self-esteem, as will physical and sexual abuse. We can intuit, by honest introspection, how a relative’s sarcasm can be a covert insult, also doing damage. Then there are standards of performance or perfec­tion, which will pull a child out of his feeling body and into his anxious, anticipatory head. Absence of love, hidden or blatant, will wound his heart.

Then there is the invisible equation. This is a double-entendre, sort of. Because the problem is invisible and the child is invisible.* The parent never sees and knows her child’s feelings, can never get outside of her own mirrored bubble which is her repressed past. She may have the most vivacious and warm conversations with her little boy or girl or teenager. They can spend a lot of time together. Mother or father listens with bona fide parental concern, responds to his problem with raised eyebrows, questions, advice, encouragements, personal anecdotes, lectures. But she never actu­ally hears the feeling, feels it herself. She never sees her child.

This causes an invisible kind of death.

I can only ask you to go back to your own childhood and remember being talked to and improved by your parent’s words. You will notice that you had feelings – which are your life – that could never quite come out and live because there was no receiver of them. The question:

What happens to those feelings?

They disappear. You stop feeling yourself and you disappear. Little by little with each parent’s blind eye, each wise saying or wish for you to be happy.

See how invisible this is. You are replaced by an alter-, under-self and never know it. You had spirit but then later, defiance. You had certainty but then later, confusion. What do I want? You had a chemical bond (oxytocin, the “love chemical”?) with your parent then later, cordial­ity and repressed need. You become a wraith, as substantial physi­cally but a head floating in the water with no direction. Later, in the whole ocean.

It’s known in some psychotherapy quarters that “this failure of empathy can leave, in the end, as much pain and disability as actual physical harm.”** Carry it forward, though, to where life goes on and you continue to be invisible because you disappeared in your youth in your parent’s gaze. Can you tell that this is what Thoreau saw when he wrote: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”? We become thought and wonder, neurotic convictions*** and arbitrary directions. We feel out of touch but we don’t know with what.

I would think that anyone who can see this will endorse one kind of therapy: a feeling kind. A time machine that goes back and revisits moments of invisibility, finds that life and lets it out. And the pain that replaced it.

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* https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-invisible.html. Many other TPS blog posts address this invisibility from parent’s and child’s perspective. See Solipsism, Eyes that don’t see, The invisible #2.

** http://www.paulvereshack.com/helpme/chapt2.html.

*** https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/29/briefing/new-york-mayors-race-ranked-choice-democrats.html – “Nine Political Classifications”.

Anxiety – scary!

 

Arthur Janov, author of the classic The Primal Scream and a dozen or so other books on depth psychology and therapy, sponsored decades of research on the body’s and brain’s reactions to radical expulsion of emotional pain. This is why a Psy­chology Today article calls Primal Therapy “scientific.”* While many of Janov’s claims and testimonials of improvement are credible, some seem grandiose, where even birth trauma pain can be relived and shot out of “the system” so deeply and widely that the person becomes entirely “real” and no longer neurotic, cleansed of pain but for the residue of memory.

Janov held that anxiety is based in terror resulting from life-or-death experiences during the first nine months of life, in utero. Birth and pre-birth trauma. Later, here-and-now circumstances such as apprehension about a final exam resonate with this unreached and unre­solved terror, causing anxiety and panic.

There is much you can read in Janov’s books and blog (http://cigognenews.blogspot.com/) about anxiety. And there is little you may believe, owing to its exotica and esoterica (“The brainstem imprints the deepest levels of pain because it is developed during gestation and handles life-and-death matters before we see the light of day. Almost every trauma experienced during womb-life is a life-and-death matter.”) What may be more acceptable is a giving of the benefit of the doubt, inspired by the bleak fact that no psychotherapeutic techniques developed from Freud to TED** have made solid inroads into ending or even enduringly mitigating anxiety. Everything proposed – but for the Primal Therapy approach of expelling pain at the root – has been a palliative, a soothing, a desensitizing, a drug, a self-talking, a deep breathing: a numbing methodology.

I don’t do Primal Therapy, or rather, I did it one time many years ago in Ohio, in a rela­tively soundproofed office with a client who knew of and admired the extreme theory. Nowadays I go “where the light is.” (The old children’s joke, where a boy is asked why he searches for his quarter under a street lamp after acknowledging that he lost it somewhere else. “The light’s better here,” he replies.) The light I follow is still under­ground, beneath the terrain of Cognitive Therapy. I tell clients that anxiety is present smoke from the historical fire of “fear” – the past where frightening things happened. I look to the convenient light of childhood, not pre-birth. And we would know there is plenty in childhood that can cause apprehension, shyness, insecurity, distress, worry, fear, terror, if we’d only look back, look within.

A problem, however, intrudes: There is something about anxiety that keeps what underlies it inaccessible. This is reflected in the title of Lenore Terr’s book, Too Scared to Cry – Psychic Trauma in Child­hood. An anxious person, walking on eggshells and landmines, is unable to calm enough to sink down to earlier feelings. Anxiety resembles a present crisis, and during a crisis one doesn’t reminisce. My work often becomes a hodgepodge of lessons – which both numb and enlighten – and catharsis. Clients cry about five years of Mengele-style abuse by their ex-husband, but rarely about their parents’ screaming and domestic violence when they were children. They are frozen on the surface of themselves.

Possibly, though, I’m talking sour grapes, if that’s the right term. I recently lost a teenage client whom I’d seen weekly for a year, then “as needed.” My full armamen­tarium of techniques and humanism did not lower her anxiety to something manage­able. She’ll be seeing someone else, who I assume will fail (I readily apply my human­ism to myself). She lives with a needy mother and a father who does not talk to his children. I would say she has “double anxiety” at the least: this unacceptable home environment sitting on top of earlier childhood fears. Is there a third level, “brainstem” (Janov) trauma, too? Let’s not make matters worse, by going where there’s no light.

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* “A common misnomer: it is not Primal ‘Scream’ Therapy, but Primal Therapy, and rather than saying it is ‘cool’, I would rather say that it is scientific. It is one of the most heavily researched private psychotherapies extant in the world. . . .” at https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-therapy/201002/cool-intervention-3-primal-therapy.

** https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2019/05/anxiety-help-for-some.html.

 

Dry humor, or wet seriousness #5: It's for your own good

 

I’ve grown a couple degrees less humble in my old age and old therapy practice. Add to that some deliberate cynicism – I don’t believe any of the explanations clients give when they cancel last-minute – to turn me into a torturer. Lamely coy, they apologize then ask: “Can I reschedule next week?”, while knowing they have a standing weekly appointment. So I suggest they take a different hour that day, or something the following day. There are two reasons for this approach, vindictive and legitimate, the latter being less obvious.

It seems like common sense: People get in a “mood” and don’t want to come in. They are tired or mundanely depressed, or especially unmotivated, or some psychosomatic symptom has flared up. They need a break. My view is that is exactly when they should come in. Vulnerable from sick­ness or lethargy or anomie, clients should drag them­selves to an hour session. That is when they have the best potential to be deep – pre-conscious and unconscious – to cut loose primitive-wise, to get into the inner workings of their miser­ableness and emptiness and fear.

Permit me a little sarcasm: “Oh, I see. You want to have a session when you’re feeling OK, and you want to avoid it when you’re not. Do you set up your surgery appointments that way? ‘Burst appendix! Man, I’m feeling bad! I better stay home today!’”

As to the vindictive part: I know I am annoying them as it’s a given that they aren’t going to come in. Guilt-giving: the job of the therapist, who can determine that it’s for a good reason.