Your body wants you to be real

 

One of the “blessings” I can cite, if I were that kind of person, is that at age seventy, I have no physical aches or pains. It’s been nearly twenty years since I briefly exper­ienced lower back pain. If, experimentally or accidentally, I void my mind of all my life burdens, I can take a walk and feel as light (and oblivious) as I did at twenty in col­lege. One problem, though, which I, and I suspect all of us have, is that our burdens infest our minds and our feeling states and emotions much of the time. For me, there’s old age, dread thoughts of older age, unpaid taxes, extremely deferred student loans, little savings, failing teeth, some guardedness still with my wife that I suspect will never be breached until the death bed. I consider myself a perversely self- and world-realistic person (see TPS bio). While I typically don’t force the energy to do anything about most of these problems (see blog post “Dysthymia”), I stare at them as at the sun and plumb their depths.

But this morning, Saturday, in a moment of desperation and heady hypocrisy, I conjured the lamest form of Cognitive Therapy. Up late and leisurely, I gave myself an unaccustomed mantra: “All is fine.” I said it with rich meaning several times. I smiled inwardly and determined it was true. Standing in the bathroom, brushing my teeth and ignoring my face in the mirror, I said it again silently. Suddenly, with no warning and at the speed of electricity, I was felled by excruciating branch lightning pain over my entire back. There was only time to fear the state of being crippled permanently, then it was gone, with some mild echo-like soreness that faded within an hour.

I knew immediately what I must do. I killed the mantra and returned to myself. “Life is not fine. I do have all these concerns and they will probably afflict me ’til the end of my days.” Some­how, I was sure the lightning would not return. I moved around, finished brush­ing my teeth, felt deep and confident, got ready to go to work to see my one or two weekend clients. And indeed, the pain did not return.

I believe I know what happened. While I was intoning the positive mantra to myself, I noticed that my bearing, exterior and interior, even while standing still, was micro-subtly different. As I didn’t feel like myself (“fine? No!”), I wasn’t myself. I was faking all of my systems, arresting the natural flow of energy, suppressing chest feeling, tincturing my breathing, inflicting on myself the burden of what I was not. The warpage was ten times lighter than a feather, but it was enough. That was the essence of pain which found its most vulnerable target: my back.

Let this be a warning to false-happy people. Psychosomatic process is real. We can feel anger pouring into our shoulders and fists and vocal cords. It wants out. We can feel the denial of depression poisoning our gut, weakening our core. Let your truth be known and accepted. Don’t run from your life to dreamy, cotton candy positive thinking. Yes, that may serve in a pinch, like Xanax or Prozac, beer or marijuana. But it will really be a barricade to your soul.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzoFKG7ITRg

 

Pocket holy grail

 

When I was eight years old, 1959, I secretly kept a table knife in my right pants pocket. It was just a generic table knife with a blunt end, from a set of silverware that a lower middle-class home would have. It could cut a cold stick of butter with slight effort, but not a steak. It was a talis­man for me, a feeling of mean­ing. Because at that age I already had lost touch with my feelings and needed mean­ing, which is always a poor substitute for feeling.

And you can see, I was already not good at finding a feeling of substance, worth, iden­tity. A table knife, not even a fancy knife or later a switchblade. Depression and immaturity, even for my age, caused that effete choice.

There is no substitute for a child’s being one with his feelings. That’s to be human, and alive. It pretty much requires a good birth and deeply accepting and loving parents. No one who comes to therapy, or needs therapy, had those gifts. Their feelings were buried by depres­sion, replaced by anxiety. So their curiosities die. That cuts them off from the world. They have to become self-pleas­uring. That will be mastur­bation, video games, manu­fac­tured excite­ment. Some chil­dren will rebel against this loss of the world, others will give in. Some will just be unhappy; others will be angry. Some will be galvan­ized by their birth to do what­ever stim­u­lating thing. Others will sit in their room, like me, folding paper.

This is psychology beneath the labels and the wishful thinking. When my teenage absurdly intel­ligent client tells me she isn’t able to be happy, this is why. In her case and so many others, therapy is the rela­tion­ship, and the relationship is the too-late parent. But some­times not quite too late.