Is your personality valid?

 

To answer this obnoxious question, we have to first eschew the concept, and its historical and societal resonance, of “respect.” How many people actually feel that for their fellow men and women? With few exceptions, I may only feel it for my teenage clients who are oppressed by their parents. You will see why in a moment.

The idea here is to differentiate the truism of everyone’s basic autonomy and “right” to be themselves from the fact that we are messed up and could be doing something about it. We are walking around with knives and swords sticking out of us and with absorbed and circulating poisons, and we stamp the whole mess as our badge of honor, our compla­cent being, as “what you see is what you get.” This absurdity is most appar­ent when we look, for example, at crimi­nals in real life or in the movies. They are presented as masterminds, or organ­ically defective, or troubled men or women with a giant chip – not to be questioned – on their shoulders. But this is erroneous. They are treatable errors who could be confronted instead of feared. I picture Heath Ledger’s Joker in the Batman movie. Strap him to a chair and tell him he is the pitiable little botched boy who should be getting help not neurotic or psychotic venge­ance. He is bleed­ing all the time and is too frightened to feel his true self, to lean on someone, to get therapy.

He is a flux construct, a lifelong running away from oneself. So how can we see him as a person in his own right? He is a deliberate failure in progress.

I’m only making one point: Don’t assume that we are acceptable and should be accepted. Don’t assume we should sit pretty on our personality. Don’t assume that there’s a molecule of legiti­macy in the escapist character of Donald Trump or in any of the walking failures of integrity in the Republican Party. I don’t think my forty-year-old Borderline Personality-disordered client is greater than her multi-colored splash­ing blood that I keep hoping to stanch. Yes: As a therapist I commend her “strengths.” And as a therapist I know they are calluses.

In my post*, “Treatment points for ‘delinquent’ boys,” I said that an abused boy will tend to make his jail into his haven: He will convert pain and loss to bravado in order to be­lieve he feels better about himself. We do the same and become our adult person­ality. It’s not valid. It needs to be questioned with a scalpel.

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* https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2016/06/treatment-points-for-delinquent-boys.html.