The mystical adult

 

It’s worth describing two paradoxes of the human psyche that are anti-intuitive but which might help us all be wiser and less shallow people.

These are: (1) We feel real when we are fake, and we feel fake when our deeper, base reality emerges and momentarily surpasses our persona. And (2) It’s almost impossible for parents to grow up.* A third paradox is a variant of the first: The mature, smoothly-constructed, high-functioning person is the most unreal, as he is living on a surface of defenses.

Sub-part two of number one is a phenomenon seen only in depth therapy. A recent example was my young man with a thought disorder – he who described a boulder blocking his thoughts. His life of twenty-two years had become overwhelmingly cerebral. He spoke like a friendly auto­mated voice and invar­iably voiced fine-tuned insights. Therapy had, time to time, been helping him get in touch with the crazymaking illogic his father had forced into his brain. This process brought up real feelings buried in his childhood. These made him feel strange, not himself. And yet they were his true self.

As to paradox 2, well, it’s only a thousand therapy sessions followed by a thousand more that show the inability of parents to see their own flaws that destroyed their offspring’s self-esteem and caused her depression and lostness in life. Some of these elders are completely solipsistic: They cannot leave their self-soothed selves and everything is a projection. None can become self-aware when they have a child they must feel superior to. And most assuredly they can never feel their own young self that never lived its life. So they remain the blind child causing anguish and a need for therapy in their son or daughter.

Bonus: Our intentional paradox

My forty-four-year-old client and I noticed that she can travel countless miles over her recent life and therapy, away from her predatory and soul-murdering** mother, and at the end of her journey cannot push through the final paper-thin doorway. It is a wall the other side of which is abandonment. She can’t rip apart that sheet of paper, crossing to the non-mother zone, or write a letter on it that would say “goodbye.” So far she has come! And yet essentially, still at the beginning.

- - - - - - - - - - -

* CNN headline, 6/6/2021: "A Florida dad threw his infant at a deputy after a high-speed chase, sheriff's office says." Did this mean he threw his inner child at the officer? You decide.

** Soul Murder, the Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation, by Leonard Shengold.