The here-and-then, part 2*

 

When the two people – client and therapist – in the room realize, during the session, that they still live psychically in their past at all times, it’s bound to be more than a coincidence. It’s probably a sign that this isn’t an unusual situation. The 21-year-old brought it pellucidly into the present:

“Rona said that the word ‘alien’ (which I had offered in a slightly different context) ‘describes my feelings.’ She gave an example of her alienated feeling: ‘I look at my house – it’s clean. My childhood house was unclean. So this feels wrong.’ We soon under­stood that the ‘wrong’ feeling came from the deep-seated, imprinted sense that her childhood house ‘is my real house.’” The background she painted, quite seren­dipi­tously, for this reveal was her earlier description of herself as a “little.” That’s an adult who is in a purposely regressed state, preferring to feel and act like a child. I’ve worked with one “little” before, around five years ago. This was a 20-year-old female who regressed to age four. She showed me a picture of her bedroom. Though she was 5’6” tall or there­abouts, she slept in a bed made to look like a crib. Her room was filled with toys and Disney stuffed animals and the like, and the wallpaper was of a pink fantasy world. My present client thought of herself as ten years old. At that age, she said, feelings are simple: happy or sad. You don’t have to think about your feelings, you just have them. I asked: Do you get angry? No, she said, just “upset.”

But now, our present age (so to speak), we looked at the phenomenon of not really being here-and-now. I’ve known for a long time that this is my silent core. I told her about a moment, seventeen years ago, when my wife and I had a house in Upper Arlington, Ohio. I was standing at the window, looking out at the front lawn, the street, the house across the street with its trees and shrubbery. That was not, though, what I saw. I was fifty-two years old but really six years old, looking out the living room window of our ranch house, 6700 Chis­holm Drive. It was a viscerally melancholy feeling, depressing, because I didn’t belong there. But I couldn’t escape.

I believe that if domestic violence abusers developed a deep introspective ability, they would realize they are not in the present. I used to tell court-ordered groups that “the present is your unconscious revenge for the past.” These are aborted boys, alone, disintegrative, angry, who cling to a woman they must own because their dependency needs were starved and punched out of them. They demand to be the center of her uni­verse. They stalk. What could be more childlike than that? If they looked inward, they would see they are still that boy, and they are in an alien world.

We don’t have to be violent or “little” to be that person who is not here. We simply have to be anybody whose needs for love and security were not met in his or her childhood. We grow on a “secure base.” We don’t move on when we’re ungrounded.

I guarantee, with no evidence, that if any of us could turn our passive feeling antennae inward while in a quiet, existential mode, we could catch that feeling of temporal discon­nect. Purpose to doing that? Maybe not much. But since people who believe they are living “mindfully in the present moment” are not, as they are blocked to their underground sources by virtue of believing they are present and screwing their awareness to the present, it stands to reason that knowing about this quirky past part of us can encourage (maybe from a place of anxiety) our solidest presence in the now.

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* See also “The radical grain” – https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-radical-grain.html.