Rebel without a shrink

 

My client has a very recalcitrant 17-year-old daughter who, among other rebellions, refuses to consider therapy. I offered to write a letter whose purpose would be to assuage the young lady’s fear and hatred of the process, of the mere idea of therapy. When I later learned that she refused to read my product, in fact “took the print-out and tore it up defiantly,” I received mom’s permission to reprint it here.

Dear Unnamed Sally –

This is TPS, your mother’s counselor. (That’s my professional designation, but I actually prefer the title “therapist.” When people ask me what kind – physical therapist, massage thera­pist, etc. – I say “the psycho kind.”) It was entirely my idea, not your mother’s, to write to you with a beautiful and lovely description of psychotherapy. This is my favorite subject because I have a one-track mind. (See my “purple prose” at –

https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2020/12/a-rough-diatribe-on-yousick.html)

I don’t remember if your mother told me (a) you dislike therapy or (b) you dislike male thera­pists or (c) you don’t like your mother even talking to you about therapy or (d) other. I can understand this, at least from my own perspective. When I was 17, I would rather have jumped naked off the Empire State Building into a bucket of pee than go to therapy. I guarantee you that had I sat before a therapist, I would have spaced out beyond belief. My brain would have turned into used toilet paper, my nerves to oatmeal. Nevertheless . . . I do want to put you on the spot by pointing out that in general, females have more balls to face their real feelings than males do.

And you are not a male.

There are many arcane terms and complex concepts in psychology and therapy. Try this one: “Withdrawing Object Relations Part Unit,” otherwise known as WORU. That has to do with Borderline Personality Disorder. But the fact is that therapy is a totally natural process. What does a child need (and seldom get) when she is emotionally hurt (sad, afraid, rageful, bewildered, etc.)? Someone who (a) listens deeply without shoving their own agenda down her throat; (b) who believes her; (c) who respects her feelings and thoughts whatever they are, because they are no less meaningful and important than an adult’s; and (d) who really values her personhood and cares about her. (I tell clients that if most parents were great listeners, without smearing their own crap on the child, then I wouldn’t have any clients!)

This is what (good) therapy does – just usually years after the hurt got imprinted in the person. It is great listening turned into a profession.

When someone is heard with full acceptance and no judgment, they often are even­tually able and willing to share everything, to be totally real, to feel as terrible or lost or pitiful or childish as they do and be completely accepted and respected. I am absolutely serious. Virginia Axline, one of the legendary child therapists of the early-mid part of the 20^th century, made it clear that children as young as four or five deserve to be treated with “dignity and respect.” Why should it be otherwise? (I’ll tell you why: Because adults use the defense mechanism of liking to feel superior to younger people.)

So the hardest part of therapy is not providing it, but receiving it and sticking with it. People don’t want to face their worst feelings and beliefs about themselves. (For example, many late-teenagers don’t feel ready to grow up, don’t know who they are, don’t know what they want to do after high school. I could point you to some of my thick-as-cream blog articles about that.) Pain hurts! I get a little “Zen” sometimes and tell people that therapy requires “the strength to be weak and the courage to be afraid” (and I wish I had made that saying up but it’s out there on the Internet). We have to deal with where we hurt. Arthur Janov, PhD said ‘you have to go to where you’re wounded. If you break your arm, you don’t bandage your leg.’ So it takes real quality, courage and sometimes desperation to delve into the darker places in one’s history and psyche.

I’ve just discovered that this letter is long enough. Please feel invited to ask questions or say anything (text-message: I don’t pick up the phone). I like to talk to clients, past clients, non-clients. They all get my smartphone number – (xyz.123.me-oh-my). If you do write, I wouldn’t tell anyone, including B.M.

-- TPS

A way of living

 

My wife’s sister is the person who needs to be accommodated to, cared for, listened to. She has no concept that my wife has feelings that should be considered. She does not know “thank you” despite all the money, time and service my wife has dedicated to her.

My wife is the person who comes to me for support, for deep and long listening. She is not a good listener, and assumes I am the vessel and the provider.

She knows her sister is a one-sided coin, a taker, and claims she will not put up with it anymore. But that is not true: She will. She will keep giving, and she will keep leaning her emotions on me, as oblivious as her sister is to her.

My defense – and all these dynamics are defenses – is to be the absorbent block of wood, the leaned on not the leaner. This is because I have never been comforted in my entire life by any person. My mother made a perfunctory effort lasting all of one minute, when I was five or six years old. She put me on her lap then removed me when I threw up from too much pent-up needful emotion. There has never been anything since then.

It’s not, though, that simple. I lean on my wife to the depth of my being, but I’ve settled for her somewhat secluded presence. In one particularly destructive way, it seems, I became my father. He would not talk, relate, never knew how to be a dad. He would say, eyes and smile glazed inward, “I feel good just knowing you’re somewhere in the house.”

I brought this up with a client recently, but as “projective psychoeducation” as I knew her child­hood and later situation. “You have never been comforted by a person in your entire life.” One could say we lose everything when this is so. Or, we lose a big part of our humanity, the true joining part. It’s one of the most perverse qualities of my Self that I give every day, six to ten clients a day, and to my wife, and manage forever without ever asking for anything.

At least I’ve not added a link in the chain of taking. Of course, we each perpetuate the other’s dysfunction.

What it means not to hear

 

I’ve gotten somewhat familiar with the parents of several of my teen clients. These parents have attended one or two sessions with their child, or a “parent only” session. I have seen a very interesting phenomenon. These parents can listen, but they cannot hear. This deafness is as powerful and implacable as if a thick steel wall, or actually planetary distances, separated their mind from their ears. They can, I’m sure, hear things that have no content but the concrete. “Don’t step on that broken glass.” “The half-and-half is spoiled.” “The car is out of gas.” But any communication, or anticipated communication with a person raises the wall. They are blocked by the burial of their history.

This is never easy to explain quickly and simply. Our history is of course embedded in us, but more, it is the foundation of our identity. If it has brought us psychic injury that never healed – the kind that damages our young soul and heart – our life following it must be, to a great extent, an escape from that injury. Our adaptive identity is that: escape.

Picture the hurts you simply had to swallow in your childhood. Arthur Janov writes that if a child’s tears are “shushed” away, where do those tears go? Similarly, where do those hurts, those losses of love and security, go? They go nowhere but deeper, and we have to live on top of them.

This is why the parents can’t hear. They have escaped from their truth, the loss of their best, their soul and heart, and now can’t ever let themselves feel it, be reminded of it. Having children is one of their greatest escapes and greatest reminders. Now, as parents, they can believe they feel ascended, arrived, stronger, superior. But when their child has a problem, is sad or angry, their formative failure comes back to them and they have to wall it off. I’ve sometimes been a little silly in sessions by saying that “in your brain, ‘the past’ is half-an-inch to the left of ‘the present’.” It’s right there, but like in a different dimension, a nightmare so buried it might just press upon your eyes ever so slightly, create an unnamed feeling of a timeless pause.

I look at these parents and I talk to them about hearing their child’s feelings, which are her iden­tity and meaning. They listen to me and cannot allow themselves to grasp what I mean.

They literally cannot allow themselves to grasp what I mean. And so their child remains unheard and invisible. Invisible children grow up escaping from their past.