Real men and women don't believe

Here's a playbook for radical living.

I believe that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen because the consensus of scientists who have no agenda but clear perception has found it to be true. It's not something I personally know, as I don't have the skill to have such a perception.

I know I love my wife because that's the word – "love" – that I care to apply to a complexity of feelings that include oceanically deep warmth, utter need, attraction, sadness, anger. It would be more accurate simply to list the different feelings, but the shorthand term is useful.

I sometimes enjoy feeling that the universe is mysterious not simply because human knowledge – perception, logic and reason – cannot grasp the why but only something of the what, but because there might actually be something magical, childlike and awesome about its nature. The shorthand for that is God. As often, though, I am satisfied to lie in the fact of mystery.

I accept that people must form agreements having to do with self-preservation. I've accepted that something in human nature has urged people to build wide associations, even an entire nation of basic agreements. I've resigned myself to the fact that this manifest urge has enabled powerful people to gain the upper hand time and again. While I value some aspects of radical liberty and autonomy, and some aspects of social sacrifice, I find that I feel most strongly against people whose sickness leads them to hate and who want power over others. My feelings are too varied, too shaded, to be simplified as a "belief system."

There is nothing I "believe" without the evidence of my own perception or the answers of science, or in some circumstances the word of a trusted friend. This rules out deity, broad political affiliation, conspiracy theories, the basic good or evil of humanity.

Belief is for children who do not have the felt knowledge that their parents are good. A child will internalize the parent's badness ("daddy wouldn't have to yell at me if I behaved") to keep the parent good in her mind, and will then live on the delusion of a belief. Call it a dream. Or the escape from a nightmare.

I don't think anyone else needs belief. We would be able to live in the molecular mess of our feeling, if we could heal or accept the child within us.

A new era of sickness

With Trump, half the country became psychiatric diagnosticians and the other half proved diagnosable. With him, people discovered the term "solipsist": someone who is utterly incapable of seeing, thinking, feeling and understanding beyond his own self-soothing prison, someone for whom the entire universe is mirrors. With him, we learned that a person can be a narcissist and a sociopath in one and that the border between sociopathy and psychopathy is blurry. With Trump, we heard the term "man-baby" and instinctively knew it described the disintegrative and fearful child within a power-hungry, self-glorious man. And we learned that "mental illness" is not strange and not in the comfortable minority. It is pedestrian and it is easy for millions of people to be so wounded and angry that they require canned delusions to hold themselves together.

It's suddenly difficult not to be philosophers, those of us who know the lies for what they are. The world feels as if it has awakened to a different theme, like the nineteenth century fin de siecle ennui and social degeneracy. But unlike then, we cannot presently picture a moving on. We see that wide populations and movements are lost and corrupt and possibly evil. We see that these millions don't use reason but their pain, their moods, to run their lives. We see that the men and women holding the most significant posts in government don't care about wasting their lives, their one show on this earth, on revenge, petulance and childishness.

Our world feels different now. Without drama, we wonder if our country can remain a decent place to live, rather than a land of ignorant armies clashing by night,* if the Republicans win again: The botched wardens, guards and prisoners will have commandeered the terrain. It now takes brute force, our eyes averted, to live our own lives peaceably, knowing of this sea change: The sea is pressing at the levee.

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* Matthew Arnold's poem, Dover Beach.

Guest speaker: Valedictory address, medical massage therapy school

My wife has been a psychotherapist, a Child Protective Services investigator for six years, a medical massage therapist for ten years, and has now been a nurse for ten years. This was her Valedictory address at the Commencement ceremony for The American Institute of Alternative Medicine, Columbus, Ohio, March 1997. I thought I'd share this speech in case anyone out there believes massage therapists only think skin deep.

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There are certain schools of psychotherapy that have grown from our understanding of child development. Unlike the cognitive therapies, such as Reality and Existential Therapy, whose premise is that individuals should march into life as rational and responsible adults, developmental theory recognizes that we all have deep roots in our earliest days, that we are historical beings. And that a painful or abused or deprived history (sometimes called our "inner child") permeates the whole self, and makes us who we are – which is more than just "rational" and "grown-up."

One of the crucial discoveries of the developmental psychologists – going back to the days when Rene Spitz studied and filmed the shocking deterioration of neglected, institutionalized babies, is that touch saves lives and forestalls the degeneration of body and spirit. Holding a child in warmth and care, not just talking to her – or at her – or mechanically servicing her needs – or feeding her by the clock – fosters life and healing and breaks down the walls of silent anger and sadness that many children have built up. Caring touch – or the lack of it – is one of the prime energies that help to write our history.

Today, knowing this truth, even the many humanistic child-centered therapies must neglect the importance of therapeutic touch in the clinical setting. The historical prestige of insight and catharsis – added to the ethical strictures placed upon counselors, psychologists and social workers – continues to keep the client's body-self out of bounds.

There is much to be said for empathic, insightful work that can hold a client's hand with words, and open up deep caverns of pain and tension through verbal techniques such as potency, disclosure, empathy and immediacy. But any healing process that does not embrace the holistic being – mind and body, feeling and spirit – can only be a partial good. And it is true that most if not all talk therapies have disowned the word "cure," and look only to "improvement."

We, as medical massage graduates, are in that right place, and that right moment, to join the unfinished circle of human healing and make it more complete. Beyond the worthy goals of somatic healing and relief and nurturance, we may help memories and feelings stored in the body be released, to be understood and healed with therapeutic dialogue. Tensions, whether they're circumstantial or lifelong, can be sensitively guided out of the system, bringing relief from pain, and opening up great energies for other kinds of healing. Massage, when it is imbued with the knowledge that we've acquired, and the power of our own wisdom and experience, is the touch that's worth a thousand words.

As we enjoy and reflect on this Commencement, it may be a good time for us to clarify – each for him- or herself – the personal meaning we bring to this healing profession. Are we here because – after our own struggles and experiments in living – we have found ourselves? . . . or because we haven't, and this seems like the right path to walk on our journey. Are we here primarily to give care and attention to our clients, or to receive care and attention from them? So much of what we will do comes from the internal us – the fulfilled or the needy, the confused or the serene, the angry or the joyful – manifest in our touch and in our words. We should know  – first – about ourselves what our clients will come to know about us through the language of our work.

This graduation is an important moment for me. Like all of us, I've worked hard to learn about the human body and the healing skills of massage. I value that this knowledge will flow outward to those we help and educate, and inward, as a source of self-knowledge, self-improvement, and especially, self-healing. For it is the health of the healer that is one of the most reverberant and curative forces in the therapeutic relationship. Health inside and out, from our selves, to those who come to us in need. With our hands, we join the circle of healing, and it joins us. Good luck to everyone.

To prospective clients

Many clients come to therapy to feel better, not to get better (from the Masterson Approach). That this is NOT a truism is one of the big problems in psychotherapy today. Many clients and therapists confuse the two goals – palliative versus enduring change – or more accurately, they do not know the difference. Of course we should listen to the client. If we over-talk or inappropriately disclose, we should be told. But if a client fears "facing painful experiences," while these experiences are intrinsic to the effective approach to their problem, then he or she should be told this. The customer is not always right in therapy.

This was my comment (https://nyti.ms/3HbUyUQ#permid=118767653) to an NYT article, "How To Give Your Therapist Feedback," subtitled: We often think of psychotherapists as "all-knowing," which can make patients feel that complaining about the therapy or the therapist is not allowed.

I would recommend to all prospective clients who are not in crisis – that is, those who have time to do some self-searching – that they try to answer this question for themselves: What is therapy? This may seem like a strange assignment. You already assume you know what therapy is. Or you assume it's whatever you're about to get. Or you assume the clinician will tell you what it is. But the new clients to whom I've asked this question almost always have no answer, or an incorrect answer, or a valid but too vague answer. Some say it's to gain "coping" skills. Some say it's to talk about their childhood: They assume that that is an end in itself. Some who've bought into the Cognitive Therapy idea believe it's to be helped to think in a healthier way. More in-touch clients say it's to deal with their childhood abuse or other trauma.

But what is "coping"? I can't say what it means. Can you? Does it mean to learn to be serene about suffering, or to straitjacket your anger? Could it possibly mean to get out of your marriage or to move a thousand miles away from your parents? Or let us say therapy is to mitigate childhood trauma. What does that mean? To steep in the memories and feelings until they are numb? To magically "get it out"?

Nursing students take a course in Critical Thinking. A college philosophy course teaches Logic and logical fallacies. These are not therapy. Can a therapist help you think better, more rationally? I believe the answer is "no," even if you are shown that you have exaggerated the badness of a situation, or have adopted an unrealistic "I must be" or "I must do" that will only exacerbate your insecurities. Once you are aware of the exaggeration or the false imperative, you are still left with the residue, or the full monty, of feeling that made you think so darkly. You will find that replacing one thought with another does not change your feeling. Not really. Then look: Thinking "right" while feeling wrong in your gut – is that actual improvement?

I have clients whose parents are so ignorant and wrong about their child and about themselves that some schizophrenics on psychiatric units are more in tune with the world, with clearer perception, than they are. Narcissistic, Borderline and solipsistic parents are blind to the truth. And they are in therapy, too. I guarantee you that the therapist often does not see their global dysfunction. Most of them won't know, acknowledge or reveal that they have mentally tortured their children for years, or that they feel in their bones that they own their child or that their child owes them self-sacrificial allegiance. Will any therapy help them? Even if they come in to deal with other issues?

There is legitimate relativity in the cosmos of therapy. On the one hand, I asked a kind of trick question. I believe that if prospective clients are about to think deeply and ruthlessly about the nature of therapy, they will discover at the bottom of their investigative labyrinth that it has one basic meaning: to be relieved of much of the pain that formed our defenses and our character in childhood, to then be a "chemically" different person who feels his or her life for the first time. On the other hand – this is the relativity part – if you just want to vent, get stuff off your chest, or have a nonjudgmental friend or mentor; or if you are incorrigibly blind to yourself, we are here for you, too, at least for awhile.

That's not therapy. But we aim to please.

Two kids

 

In one week, two teenagers, age 15 and 18, said to me, respectively: "I don't think my family cares about me." "I don't think my mother likes me." Of course, these parents would say the opposite. They would insist on it. Imagine a surrealistic movie where the contesting parties were in a formal debate before an audience. The child, who has never felt any love in her neurotic and personality-disordered home, citing a vast litany of evidence of mistreatment, indifference, callousness. The parents citing all they've done for their teen through the years, topping it off with the magical argument: "I love you." There will be no such debates, though. The arguments live in the home where there are no rules against saying: "I don't believe you feel that way," as there would be in a debate. And in the home or at the podium, the child will always be the loser, even if she scores the most points.

I believe both of these teens. They are not dramatic, they are not lying. Their life has stripped them of artifice. Their descriptions of their parents' chronic indifference and self-centeredness leave no appeal. "Ask your father" for money for college. "Ask your mother." Mother and stepfather frequently go out to dinner, always leaving her home to scrounge through the refrigerator. The younger one's mother generating insanely twisted arguments: "I left (home, abandoned the family) because you're angry at me and might get suicidal if I was here." "My mom won't talk to me, because she thinks I'm upset." A mother's silent streak. Can you feel the ocean-deep sick emotion creating its own otherworldly logic?

I once thought there would be a certain state of being "home free" once the child left for out-of-state college. Certainly, better than being stuck in the prison for three more years, saddled with depression that makes any form of escape – friends, extracurricular activities, books – too difficult, too heavy to manage. But my college student, in California, is still lost, and during summer still comes home where she's treated to blithe indifference and thrown between bickering parents, neither of whom wants to help her have enough money to pay her bills.

I do reach out to the parents. Like guest stars, they make the rare appearance for a parents-only session. Six months later they return, showing me they have learned nothing. But – they are willing to hear the same lessons again. About empathy, about not being a solipsist, about "the power of the language of acceptance" (Gordon). Sometimes this second dose makes a little difference. But remember: The real problem is the parent's character, which will not change though this or that tidbit of a behavior may change.

Depth therapy says – knows – that people are deep. Their history-formed roots don't heal with bright thoughts, advice and humor. Children change when their parents change.

 

Child suicide

This morning, my Apple newsfeed included a Washington Post story about child suicide, centered on a ten-year-old girl who was happy and "dancing" the evening before the self-inflicted gunshot. A couple hours later when I looked for the article again, it was gone. Nor could I find it by google search. Apple or WaPo had disappeared it. This seems understandable to me: What could be as grotesque as ten-year-olds and younger killing themselves, or as helpless as adults' response to it? To me, the matter is so calamitously insane that I can't not think about it, even though I have never worked with or personally known a pre-teen who attempted or completed suicide.

In addition to the happiness and angelic generosity these children are usually reported to show prior to their death, there is the ubiquitous meme of the parents' cluelessness up until the final moment. A secondary meme is the parents' ex post facto crusade to research child (and adolescent) suicide, to join in tragedy and furrowed brow with other suicide parents, and to write big articles which are nothing but empty, ingenuous question marks.

But we should be able to imagine what is going on in a little child who cannot stand life. She is hiding a terrible secret, a terrible feeling, from her parents. She cannot lean on them. Nothing has mitigated her trauma horizon. This is similar, or identical, to the "foreshortened sense of one's future," a symptom of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder where after a life-changing trauma, the person cannot even picture a future for herself. How could that happen, where child abuse or parents' mutual enmity or bullying or ostracism at school could be the final factor, or the eternal factor, in her psyche? It is assumed that babies exist timeless: A feeling of joy or rage or fear contains no awareness of difference, of moderation or ending, of "this too shall pass." (This is understood to also be a quality of Borderline Personality Disorder: the infant's ego states in the adult.) But what could keep a child in second or third or fourth grade in that infant blindness of timelessness, of endlessness? What was happening, or not happening, all through her years that kept her locked in the starting gate?

There is, possibly, the "known unknown" of birth and pre-birth trauma. I vaguely remember old literature that tried to relate a twin's death in utero to the surviving neonate's baseline depression. And there was the Lancet (British medical journal) study (which I've referenced several times in this blog) causally relating respiratory trauma at birth to successful adolescent suicide. Maybe these exotic circumstances take care of all later suicide -- child to geriatric. But this is doubtful. The Washington Post article mentioned, as a given, child abuse and parents' fighting among obvious factors of a child's depression.

I believe the most realistic and fair assessment is that parents are responsible but not always blameworthy. There is no moral law that says parents should be able to, and therefore be required to, see beyond their own pain and rage that came from their childhood. There may be nothing in their psyche or in the outer world that can break through their self-enclosure, their solipsism that blinds them to their child's existence. This would be where the "village" comes in, where someone -- a teacher or aunt or neighbor -- looks in her eyes and asks about her feeling. Asks so well and listens so well that she may break down her shell.

Pessimistic therapy laws (possibly final)

Why have I lost interest in writing blog articles? I don't know. But within a few minutes I will have figured it out, because the answer is a feeling and I can read feelings for their meaning. My interest in psychology has faded mostly. It has now reduced to the moment with the client. The moment is a spark of human intimate contact, which rushes me to life, deep life. I see that at age seventy, I have lost ninety-five percent of my illusory meaning, which has gone through probably a hundred incarnations since college. I see clients with false meaning all the time. We discuss that sometimes, but just as part of their therapy. For me -- I am at a place of finally relaxing without identity energy, no longer working or pushing my wishful thinking to be. I find I don't need to know all of the latest psychology, or even to know enough. I rest on my laurels as they slip away, gradually, from under me.

People need meaning. But I'm questioning that. I'm not the powerful breadwinner anymore. Psychological determinism is not acceptable to the great majority, who live in their head and positive delusions. I finally look old. There's an odd Twilight Zone symbolism going on: When I look in the office restroom mirror, my face is smooth and aesthetic, my neck is firm. But when I am doing teletherapy and flip the camera to see myself, I look old and unattractive and have neck wattle. There are two different people: the image I like of myself, and the me that others see.

Children's meaning fades when their feelings are buried within them, their fire is lost because of lack of empathy from their parents. This begins the travels of false meanings: career power, career prestige, narcissism, looks, talent, dependency, music, intellect, good provider, good husband or wife, parent. If we finally drop them we are left with a body and with eyes that see all of our time in every moment, not our time colored by our identity. We're aware of very little of all of this, but it's there. Now we're susceptible to, victims of, whatever is stirred and no longer stirred within us. I don't tell myself, anymore, that I have this or that feeling. I don't say how I feel about life. I don't have to say (to myself) I love my wife. It's always more complicated, more unknowable than that.

I no longer feel I have anyone to write to, and hardly a new problem to write about. Ideas of radical depth psychology are a fusion of poignant and fulsome. They are nothing one would write on a banner and lift high on a crusade, on the adventure of life. The magic that people believe is always preferable.