A delusion is a feeling

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/10/29/david-depape-blog-pelosi-fairies/?commentID=e6db2f43-1ebb-422f-a6be-6e1fd896f730. Before the time of Trump, "delusional" meant you believed someone else's internal organs had been transplanted, without scarring, into your body, or that every car, bus, bicycle, helicopter, pedestrian in the environment was surveilling you. The word had a poignant, red-blooded meaning. Now, "delusional" means you think Donald Trump is a good person. (Comment to a Washington Post article.)

I wish people would understand this, vastly undermining though it would be: To believe in the goodness of a bad person, someone who thrives on dehumanization not benevolence, is to have walled-off the most human part of your heart. This is something that I think even many MAGA-blind people could see about themselves, because their heart was once whole, in early childhood. They would be able to see the difference between love and revenge.

I've known grandparents who "love" their four-year-old grandson but ignore their five-year-old granddaughter. This is one of the most brutal facts that human beings will remain blind to: Much professed love isn't love, it isn't a different "language." There is just the one feeling, the one fact.

To feel affection for Donald Trump is to feel pain, but to rename it.

The Mask of Sanity* (elaboration of a late-night, late comment to a slate.com article)

Maybe the greatest weapon the MAGA deranged wield against the rest of us, but are unaware of because they cannot suffer it themselves, is that they have forced us to live with their hegemonic insanity every day, and every hour of every day if we're especially tuned in. We cannot avoid observing that a toxic juggernaut of willful delusion and sociopathic agenda is moving through the country with few obstacles in its path. To normal individuals, this is as hallucinogenic-like surreal and nightmarish as if we woke up one morning to find that nearly half the country were cannibals who eat their neighbors as a matter of course, without the pang of compunction. In the early-mid twentieth-century schizophrenia literature – before the psychopharmaceutical industry tried to convince us that emotional problems are simply "chemical imbalances" – researchers were aware that parents' contradictory messages and injunctions – called "crazymaking" and "double-bind" – could over time drive their children insane. Young minds would slowly turn from reality to escape the psychic pain of their parents' nonsense. I hope something similar is not happening to us who know that the smaller inaugural crowd is not the bigger, that election results are not deniable because you want to deny them, that an insurrection is not a walk in the park.

I suspect this is what happens in any totalitarian country before the people have become lobotomized to be shells of themselves, laboratory animals with no dignity. They may wonder, How is it possible that hatred and insanity can take over, that masses of people can love a blundering psychopath, that the air can become poisoned and we're supposed to think it's clean?

As a therapist, I can see that one child whose life is undermined may grow up to swallow errant, ego-syntonic ideas, like my middle-aged client whose rage never diminished over two years, who talked about his fantasy to kill random women walking on the street. He had a kind of insanity, twisted away from love and reality in his childhood and teens, that unfortunately didn't feature florid hallucinations, command voices, bizarre delusions of aliens, body organs and impossible surveillance. Had those been his problem, we could all identify his sickness and see how abnormal it is. But there are different kinds of insanity, as Hervey Cleckley understood in his study of psychopathy. We are faced with the fact that half our population had a different life than we had, maybe only slightly different, leading them to trap helpless – unhelped – pain in their bodies, pain that must be impacted then projected into the world because they won't believe in help. They are children who continue to be undermined by their past, and the nation is their poison container.**

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* Hervey Cleckley, The Mask of Sanity -- https://www.amazon.com/Attempt-Clarify-So-Called-Psychopathic-Personality/dp/B000WTUKP4/ref=sr_1_7?qid=1666667455&refinements=p_27%3AHervey+M.+Cleckley&s=books&sr=1-7&text=Hervey+M.+Cleckley&asin=B01BPMZTTI&revisionId=f4ecc417&format=1&depth=1

** Lloyd de Mause, "The History of Child Abuse" -- https://psychohistory.com/articles/the-history-of-child-abuse/

I announce my idiocy*

I walk down the hall of our group practice office and occasionally peek in other counselors' rooms (when their doors are open and they are not present), and notice bookshelves holding counseling and self-help books. Most often there will be the contemporary ones on the latest memes, like "gaslighting" and "trauma bonding." One must, after all, keep up with what money-seeking experts think of these phenomena. Quite by contrast, my bookshelf looks like a sad street gang of consumptive urchins out of Dickens' novels. The two dozen or fewer are all in pieces, so I may cite a passage to my client by extracting the one needed page. They are old – hardly any new purchases since the early 2000's – and their subjects are old, musty fogies that would embarrass the "with it" culture of TikTok and Instagram. So today's question is: How can someone do twenty years of five-day-a-week therapy, seven to ten clients a day, having never read another book (and only a smattering of articles)?

Since I obviously do a lot of therapy, maybe the better question is: What do we learn from psychology books after we've absorbed the basic known principles and behaviors of human dysfunction? My first scandalous response is that I have never found a therapy technique that is useful outside of the feeling- and memory-evocative ones, the Gestalt and Primal ones. This rejects all Cognitive and Silly processes such as RET, DBT, ACT, NLP, tapping, eye wobbling, mindfulness, which just tease-and-feather the topmost thought-neurons or, Lord help me, brainwash "new cognitions" into the person. The books of yore taught me about radical feeling-is-healing work, the regressive identity of domestic violence perpetrators, emotional incest, causes of OCD and anorexia in "underparenting," infant-stage origin of Borderline Personality, the almost natural incompatibility of couples, "bad objects," children's attachment needs, the "as-if personality," soul murder, brilliant and not-brilliant ideas about the "real self," solid parenting principles that also apply to marriages, the psychopath. After those, which traveled with me through some years of hard-trekking and sometimes wayward adventures in different offices in different states, I tried to find new ideas, new principles, new insights. But the later books didn't have them. They often had errant and superficial claims. Instead, I found that clients' own descriptions of their distress, their memories, their assumptions, sparked in my mind new questions and understandings and possible solutions. It seemed that at a certain point, old and new facts fighting among themselves and fusing together – like couples arguing then having sex – begat newer ones. So far, they've begotten quite a few children, as seven-hundred blog articles will attest.

I am describing, I don't mind admitting, a perspective rooted to a theory: what could be called holistic depth psychology. It assumes that people are dysfunctional because they have been hurt, and they must be freed of pain which may be buried fifty years, five years or five minutes deep. This foundation will look at almost every concept of psychology and psychotherapy and see hidden notions. "Codependency" proves to come from the child's lack of self and self-esteem, her depression, and will need to be addressed at the "inner child" level. The same with angry and power-hungry men, who are such dependent little boys that they disintegrate without their mommy-wife. "Trauma" loses its billboard-type identity and is seen in the child's eyes when his father spends too much time at work. Depression is loss of the child's true self in benign or abusive homes. Anxiety is the later smoke from earlier fires of fear and apprehension. And the past proves not to be the past at all, but the poison which remains locked inside and which changes the nature – every molecule – of the person.

I noticed, at the very beginning of my work, another problem with the books. When I read into a good one, my therapy the next day would be inferior. A good book would give me ideas which would replace my feelings, my own eyes. I use that phenomenon as a lesson now to clients. If I suggest a powerful book such as Alice Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child or The Body Never Lies, or Arthur Janov's The Primal Scream or Steven Levenkron's first book on anorexia, I say: If something epiphanic hits you, put the book down. Don't continue reading: It will keep you in your head and out of your body, your life. Do what I do when I read a client or myself: Let the shock open doors within you, showing you molecular truths that had been buried by time and adult escapes. Anyone can be the best therapist, because all the answers are within.

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* The original title of this article was “Books, shnooks.” I decided to change it after reading a July 23rd article in The Guardian: “Want to quickly spot idiots? Here are five foolproof red flags." Red flag number one is: “Beware of anyone who describes themselves as a ‘proud non-reader of books.’” While there are likely many bright people who don’t read new or old books, and who don't say "describes themselves," the flag of idiocy is raised when one admits to being a non-reader. To save myself from stigma, then, I promise to pick up a Colleen Hoover. Or maybe Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life, (though at age 72, it's probably too late).

I found a penny / on the ground (Peter, Paul and Mary: "Rocky Road")

At 71 (in a month), I'm seeing more clients than ever before: usually forty or more per week. But I've captured very few new insights (blog material) lately, and when I find one, I don't write it down. It just passes quietly into the time flow. I do remember an interesting one. A client told me that when he recently experienced joy – a once-in-decades rare mood that followed his reunion and weekend with an old girlfriend – he became scared to feel so happy, and "in that rare state, found himself 'wondering if I have a sense of self.'" Hearing this, I remembered once experiencing an incandescent lightning-shock emotion and finding that I'd lost my self. I discovered this explanation: Essentially, most of us lose our true, organic self – feeling – in childhood, from gradual repression, and then make an identity from our head. I am the strong one. I am the coin collector. I am the piano player. I am the smartest. My father is a policeman and can beat up your father. I am an attorney. We become a thought which we bend a positive feeling to, to feel solid, meaningful, "good," to be something. But when some time has passed and this new Self has become burnished and universal, then, if a child-rooted raw feeling floods us, it dissolves that thought-identity. In becoming solely body feeling for that moment, we become disembodied: light without its candle. We become for a moment what we should have been had our childhood survived. Loose in old age, I lobbed this personal tidbit to my client. And guess what? "Yes, that's me," he said.

There will be a few other insights, I'll wager, and yes, they are important to me. Knowing the self more is to, in some way, become the self which was, as I said, lost long ago.

I write the contradiction

My entire weekend was ruined – not a smile and only a frown on my old face – because one of the major insurance companies, Anthem Blue Cross / Blue Shield, has decided to establish the jackass, cringey pseudo-scientific documentation requirements that Medicaid has always specialized in. The client feels bad. Why? Her entire life was bent and broken from as earlier as age six, and nothing since then feels right, secure, happy. And it won't, there, at the very bottom. As soon as – age six, age ten, age three, age birth – we have to repress our pain, we lose touch with our self, and we never get it back. It's water under the bridge. We start living from our underground crushed pain and in our disembodied head, but never again from our one human energy source: our body and its feelings. The phrase "too late" identifies both the dysfunction and the nature of its therapy. I've said it before: Good therapy is too-late love.

So insurance companies pay for our efforts to return innocent feeling (along with its children: promise, curiosity, love) to the client. But we can't return her childhood and all the missed, unfelt experiences. So people, after a hundred years of substantial failure of therapy, reconceive the problem. We are sick because we think the wrong thoughts. Here are the right ones. Or because "trauma" dented the brain and we have to undent it by . . . TED Talks and EMDR voodoo. The problem is that we became a different person. Healing our soul ache would be like performing surgery on Jill when Jack had the heart attack, or like retouching childhood photos to make us happy.

Poor insurance companies. They don't want us to spend time trying to find the apocryphal time machine. So they need us to soothe our client: to be a friend, a parent, a teacher, a guru. They want us to convince our client that thinking different in the here-and-now can change our life. Some of us, though, know about changing the past a little. It involves Candace Pert's "molecules of emotion." It has to do with tears that, when they fall from our adult promontory to deep beneath the earth to the earliest pain in childhood, "dissolve the walls of the unconscious"* and enable life-grieving, grieving of our earliest losses. It can happen, sometimes, in a few sessions.

But 100% of the time, 7 days a week, 24 hours a day for the next 100 years, and at 10 on the Subjective Units of Distress (SUDS) scale, that's not what the insurance companies mean by "brief, solution-focused therapy." To them, the client is: "I can't drive on the Interstate."

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* Arthur Janov, The New Primal Scream, Chapter 15, "The Role of Weeping in Psychotherapy"

Yours truly

How should a therapist work with a client who is floating in life and in his life, who feels bad or just not good, who has forever ignored all matters of his personal psychology, who may have never thought there may be "causes" of his plight – "it's just who I am" – and who comes to therapy as if to a witch doctor, hoping not for "answers" necessarily, but for a magical fix?

It is probably hard to believe there are people this cosmically obtuse. But that was exactly me in my twenty-eighth year when I visited a psychiatrist-therapist, feeling something that I could not understand. And a new client, 23, presented to teletherapy with such stark opacity that I was reminded of myself of forty-three years ago. This led me to think, for the first time in my career, about how a therapist should approach someone so blind that he does not know the unknown exists.

When, however, I picture my own abjectly living-dead persona in therapy, I have to wonder if that may not be so different from other people, people who know the labels of psychology, and that they have "symptoms," but don't know they were made this way, that their childhood was wrong, so wrong that it made them to be wrong. I wonder if being told that "you were not always like this" or "no, your depression started much earlier than ten years ago" might be awe-fully disturbing: the knowledge that they are not an entity, not an identity but a disease process.

If I had been my therapist those many years ago, knowing what I have learned since, I would have been extremely careful, exquisitely dainty in approaching the subject of existential disease. I would start by addressing the now:

Can you think of anything in your life right now that may be contributing to your bad feeling? I would not ask for a "cause" as that would send him into thinking not feeling.

Young me: I don't know. A woman – my girlfriend and her two daughters moved into my apartment. I moved to Roanoke a month ago. I wouldn't have said "girlfriend" first, as that would have had the feel of commitment, and I was a man in space.

Therapist me: How long have you known each other?

Y.M.: Three weeks. I would have felt nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing amiss about this.

Th.M.: (Very polite pause.) Did you feel ready to move in, to live together, after three weeks? I would have been pretty sure that this would be a shocking question, as the client didn't blush or look confused when he said it.

Y.M.: (Stirred quietly, like the butterfly's beating wings that cause reverberations reaching to the antipodes of the world.) I don't know. (Trying to be dryly humorous, not to drown): I don't think I registered a feeling. I'm sure I was a contributing part of the decision.

Th.M.: (Realizing that this client may not have a Self and therefore no capacity for decisional feeling, but that his desiccated persona of cleverness may be what speaks to me.) We may have reached something useful already. What do you feel about your girlfriend?

Y.M.: (Very troubled, somewhat out-of-body trying to find my way in.) She's vivacious, and quite a beauty.

Th.M.: Do you know what you feel about her?

Y.M.: (A pause in which I try to look deep.) That's a difficult question. Should it be?

Th.M.: (Realizing that this wasn't mere "alexithymia," an inability to recognize one's feelings or to have them. This was a lost person, one of those who was a child lost in an adult body. Knowing that to say, "You don't know who you are," or even "You are not in touch with your feelings," would likely cause him to not return for another session, that it would be best to meet him where he was.) I've noticed that some people are very thinking-oriented. They may try to understand things by analyzing them. Do you think that's you?

Y.M.: Well, I thought that was everybody.

The great challenge that would strike the therapist: Introduce the client to the world of feelings and to his felt history. This couldn't be talked about. It would have to be experienced. A person blind from birth couldn't be told about sight. He would have to open his eyes to a world he'd never known. The young man would have to feel the meaning of his life in an epiphany. This would return his heart to him and cause it overwhelming pain at the same time. This did not happen to me in my sessions, as there were only three, and the therapist was as blind to my need for reincarnation as I was. It happened fourteen years later, now alone, as I took a walk in a strange town.

Th.M.: Talk about your childhood. And as you do, try to remember how you felt. Sit back, or even better, lie down on the sofa and just talk. Remember. Remember.