A little sniper shot to the soul: Variation

I think it's interesting to picture nearly every adult as a person who is "whistling past the graveyard," whose life is a dream dimension, an alternate reality that keeps him away from and largely oblivious to his true self. Several clients today, too, to whom I'd mentioned this notion, also thought it felicitous. What's not pleasant is the awareness of the reality, of what we left behind and beneath us: a child, aflame, falling down an endless black abyss, ungrounded as the universe is large, nothing to cling to in his heart or in his hands. Time does not move on in this real place. A young client knew this was his identity beneath his character of obsessive-compulsive behaviors, all of his sanitary occupations. To stop all the actions would be to immediately be falling and wailing in that black abyss. Nobody wants to picture a child so helpless, ungrounded, no love, no help. But I told him that if he were that boy in this room, on the couch, I would keep my hand on his shoulder until he finally landed, because he would finally land. My hand would be ground, would be the love.

I believe that nobody "copes" with any loss without present love. What we call coping is just stepping into that dream dimension, imagining strength invoked from old storybooks, whistling past the world.

Underneath it is that fragile, two-dimensional plane of the child, always falling.

Real and unreal

A paradox of the human species is that the most immature, grizzly, raging, constant-victim, sulky, Trump-delusional, histrionic and angsty people have more mental health going for them than those of us who live the Functional Adult life. We could add to the Reality List individuals who are inner-driven to power, riches and success. It's the irritant of their childhood, ever poking them, that inspires the building of the pearl (whose value to the oyster is very different from its value to outsiders).

How is this so? The answer is: injury's pain versus the covering of it versus the healing of it. See the child who cries over his dead pet, and the other child who swallows his tears, acts tough. See the seven-year-old boy who is outraged at his father's drunken loutishness and the same boy who, two years later, shows no feeling, has a straight calm face. We know which one is real, which is fake. But as adults, we value the calm face. We value the repression and the soldiering on. The buried person is safe. We value it so much that ninety-nine percent of all therapy and social information exists to keep the pain buried, the person living in his think bubble.

Bleeding is real. Pretending you're not bleeding is unreal. The confoundment is this: When cancer cells are discovered, they are surgically excised. When a person has "malignant despair" (A. Janov) or the "cancer personality" (D. Brodie), she is advised to adulterate it with self-help literature pearls of wisdom and talk with a twenty-eight-year-old social worker who presses her to think different.

More and more, I see my clients' need to reach the core, epiphanic, disastrous feeling that altered their lives, and pour it out. Most of them probably couldn't go there, but then the healing waits. The closer the person gets to that dark place, the more she is herself. She is a healthy person who is injured, not a sick person who is disordered. Because she approaches the fire, she is ugly, she is out of control. Pain and destruction in childhood are messy. Therapy should not be neat.

Intervention tidbit #11: Compliments

What would cause someone to feel bad, in a most inscrutable way, upon receiving a compliment? A lot of people get a strange negative sensation when they are complimented or appreciated. In fact, I do. And I believe the reason is always the same. The reason is not a thought, such as "I don't deserve it." "Don't deserve" is the mental misattribution to a feeling, not a belief or a fact, and is born in each individual's life history. What is the feeling behind "don't deserve"?

We are one with our childhood heart injuries, which in some way could be considered fatal, the end of something precious and essential. (I cannot find the quote, but I believe Alice Miller wrote that a therapist ‘needs to know what it is like to have been killed in child­hood.’) But many layers of time have grown over these injuries. Thought and distance have covered our irre­coverable losses. The pain that is revisited, that our present resonates with when we are complimented, could be described: "It's too late. I was not appre­ciated, loved, when I needed it, and I've been floating above grief since then. And now in your words you've shown me the intolerable “what should have been.” The fundamental expla­nation is that the deprived “inner” child is still present and needs her mother or father to appreciate her, not you.

Almost all of us could fall a thousand miles inside ourselves if we allowed that negative feeling to be there, to engulf us. But then we'd need our parent there, the perfect mother, and we'd need all the time in the world to weep in her arms. The feeling would be the utterly unique fusion of bereavement and hope, and we wouldn't know which would be present at the end of it. We wouldn't know until it happened.

(This is why therapy is so "cognitive" today.)

Pelosophy 101

Maybe we liberal folks need to rethink sociopathy, the lack of conscience and the crude humor of the overgrown "callous and unemotional child." There are so many of these people now, and they are out-winning us. We could determine that there's best human nature (kindness, dignity, future-thought) and there's actual human nature -- spontaneity, frustration, id-thinking, pain and its projection. Maybe the Republicans are simply being the base and basic truth of humankind, our prepotent nature. Which would explain why they are legion. It would be more difficult, more fragile, to be decent. https://nyti.ms/3UoL520#permid=121334505

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Image from a Trump rally.

A little sniper shot to the soul

You're lucky I'm writing this in a casual, low-intensity mood. I have had many clients whose life ended in childhood, but that their body went on, numbed by sudden pain-killing anesthesia – a "defense mechanism" – and pushed forward by the expectations and demands of their parents and by futile but necessary hope.

That statement is not dramatic or exaggerative. It would be obvious truth if you (many therapists, many clients) cast your eyes back on a moment when love from your parent burned up, when the feeling was only: security turned naked, connection disappeared, implicit assumption of love became a cold place in your brain and you now were heavy with emptiness and distress. In my case, I was around five years old when my mother, in immature pique, rejected me because I was angry with her. In clients' cases, it was when father said to them: "You'll never amount to anything," or mother said: "You were supposed to be an abortion," or when mother missed their birthday two years in a row (and then ever after) because she was a tax preparer, had finished her work by the April deadline, then took her well-deserved vacation with her boyfriend.

Cutting to the chase, if life ended then, if the impossible happened, and that impossibility is the reality behind our hologram adult identity, how can therapy ask us to do any childhood grief and loss work? To sink into the feelings of abuse or neglect? Aren't we likely to feel that old obliteration of our self?

Clients cry often. But I've noticed that those who grieve the most drastic, who "primal scream," are pulled away near the bottommost rung by anger or by thought. They cannot collapse in their total tragedy. To do that would be the final dimension of psychotherapy and healing: the child in mother's arms, going back to the beginning, redoing time.

They resist that eventual calm.

No diagnosis

I am sure I have seen many clients whose diagnosis I could never discern, who I'd say in an "official" way had no diagnosis. Some I worked with for months, some for years. These clients fit no categories except for a baseline of depression, which I believe exists in practically every human being on earth. Here are some recent examples:

Is Mack, the CPA, depressed or is he alexithymic? He knows he has no empathy (except maybe "crisis empathy") for human beings but gets very sad if an animal is hurt or abandoned. Does Allen, the young adult I've worked with for three years, have Asperger's, birth trauma, dysthymia or catastrophic depression buoyed by intellect? Is Maverick's nearly-invisible autism embedded with Antisocial Personality? Should there be a name for autism fused with Complacent Personality Disorder and somatic anxiety, all grounded in childhood serial trauma perped by a Witch Borderline mother? Is Dar, sales executive, an Antisocial Personality or a complex trauma victim with a "deformation of character" that resembles sociopathy? She steals and cries, cares and lies. Wealthy Julia is a Sphinx. Highest functioning, a Martha Stewart-quality bountiful and involved mother, enmeshed and selfless, regressed and terraformed by her solipsistic mother's pure entitlement. Does teen Julio, fey and wan as a leaf skeleton in the breeze, have anxiety, or has his parents' indifference made his gayness so passive? Elderly bodyworker Staci dims and tints all of her feelings and emotions with self-help literature platitudes that layered upon the normative insanity of her childhood escapism, to where she may never fully land on reality. Each session, she unleashes one flowing hour-long paragraph with no awareness of Prolix. Diagnosis: Blind child in a woman's body? Lamar, 16, has a global cynical view of "all friendships" except the girls whose affection he craves like cocaine and a teddy bear. He is as rich and wry as an adult, vastly overestimates his talents, acts unruly and explains it like a pundit. Personality disordered already? Or just realistically reactive to his mother's poisonous immaturity and contempt? Is Daniel a selectively Avoidant Personality, or is he socially anxious, or developmentally out-of-sync and thereby uncomfortable with human beings?

The point is that these people are welcome, rich fields of exploration because we are not limited to "disorders." They don't conform to them because they are too complex and hidden, because their true diagnosis, Enigma, has hegemony over any label. We may listen to their stories for weeks or months while each session ends with another question mark. We come to know in time, possibly, the main qualities of their nature. There is one fact that joins them all: They need to know their origins and weep out their pain.