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.