The Mundanity Defense Mechanism

People who can’t accept a compliment, or feel a strange badness inside when they receive a compliment. People who feel they “don’t deserve to be happy.” A man I know who feels unworthy of his spouse’s affection. People who feel anxious or depressed when they reach a pinnacle, a success, who feel not pleasure or pride in it but rather a dull bad feeling that leads them to say “no big deal – it’s what a person’s supposed to do.” People, maybe mostly women, who reject a caring, “boring” man and are attracted to the “bad boy.” People who self-sabotage (fail, drop out) right before they would have reached an achievement. They may then condemn themselves for their failure while I’ll tell them “you are actually being good to yourself. Your unconscious is telling you that after all these years you can no longer fake being well. You have always been bleeding and need to collapse, and get help.”

 

Today’s theory says that those of us who experience these perversions have been living in what I will call the Mundanity Defense, the most invisible and pervasive defense. We go about our days with mild or moderately strong satisfactions and frustrations, or with none; with piquant pleasures (a pet’s funny behaviors, a good meal, an exciting movie, sex, ad infinitum), with our thoughts, riding in our adult ocean. Our mental and spiritual life is a cloud that doesn’t touch the ground. But beneath this horizonless fog is our failed childhood where we did not receive love, but aloneness. Everything sits on top of that broken egg.

 

When we are given compliments or care, when we near success and what should be happiness and peace, we feel the past and present loss. Our child feels his home: “I do not get that.” Our adult feels, in a way, much worse: “I didn’t get that when it would have mattered, and it’s too late.” Strangely but naturally, good proves bad, pleasure proves pain.

 

This loss is the underlying problem of human life. We don’t really move on from the child’s broken heart. The rest of our life needs to cover that, and it does, until the truth is revealed by too-late love, by too-late success.

Morality is internal

I was about to ask and write about this question: What happens to a person who never learned morality from a religion or from parents, who never fell in with a group or cohort or gang with their convictions and moods, who grew up with no guidance? I was about to say that was me. At temple and Sunday school, I never listened to lessons or felt anything but a fearful pressure of alienation and overwhelm. My parents neither said nor explicitly showed anything about “good,” decency or kindness. And I had no childhood friends or teenage friends whose closeness imbued me with their philosophy of life. I grew up tabula rasa.

 

Except that I didn’t. At 15, there was a mysterious (psycho-genetic?) pull to have meaning, and I fell – half by chance, half by inevitability – into a gang of consciousness: Ayn Rand’s faux noble and vraie narcissistic emotionalized attitude of Objectivist philosophy. I say inevitable because no other literature would have worked, would have felt right and acceptable. Books on generosity and compassion and service and love and brotherhood would have made me feel ill. After all – temple and Sunday school. Books on spirituality and the great beyond – Alan Watts or Deepak Chopra, for example – made me enraged. Rand’s solipsistic rebels masquerading as individualists articulated my own life of Negative, brought to the surface and gave words and direction to my need for identity and revenge.

 

Was there a need for a personal moral system? Yes, but only to make me feel I was good and right. I, the alone and less-than was now alone and more-than, and it was good.

 

I believe each of us has a need for good-and-evil meanings because we already have a unique internal morality that is not yet judgment – a feeling and sensation continent within – that is its own literature, if we cared to write it down in several dozens of pages. It is what it is because we were loved or we were not. Mine was close enough to Rand’s to be co-opted and converted by her. Eventually, more of my true self emerged to be very different, extremely different from hers. I’ll suggest that no one’s moral system is found outside of oneself. It is only our feeling chemistry that we come to live as good or bad. Believing that we believe a book or Commandment or lesson, or our own thoughts, will only suffocate our true self and lead to some form of violence to break free of the suffocation.

My chemical Jew* (amended)

My heritage is Judaism,** and even though I don’t feel Jewish, I realize I don’t feel not Jewish. The chemistry of feelings must be that complicated. There are different sensations in the mix. When I think of Jews, my knee-jerk association is “good,” as in they are good and moral people, probably superiorly moral. This is doubtless an atavistic feeling from my early childhood where I learned the Jews are the “chosen people.” That’s a notion that is laughable to me, but no more laughable than so many other religious conceits in all the other religions I know something about. There’s an ingredient in this felt goodness that is quite perverse, as so: Just as God can’t be good because “the good” is His own fickle invention and therefore changeable by his edict, not an objective standard in the world, and yet He must be “good,” so my sense is that Jews are axiomatically “good” even when they are completely rotten people with odious personalities and rampaging murder in their hearts.

 

That’s one stubborn chemical.

 

I wouldn’t know why “the world” has enjoyed hating Jews throughout history. I can’t see that experts have actually figured this out, either. But I do think that Jews are unpleasant about their religion in a way that Christians are not. Christians are more likely to be hypocrites; Jews are less likely. This is because Jews are thinkers and self-determiners while Christians are followers and therefore prone to slip and unfollow. Christians have a picture of Jesus on their living room wall and they know His simple rules for life, many of which they will never follow well or consistently (see Bertrand Russell’s lecture, “Why I Am Not a Christian”). Jews don’t have an image of their God – He is almost entirely just an idea. They don’t really endorse some Old Testament view of Him with His anger, jealousy and revenge. They think, they analyze, they parse old parchments, shove microscope at nuance. But dispassionate thinking and complacent belief in one head seem gauchely contradictory – unbecomingly so. Who are these intellectuals who have blind faith and brotherhood in something so abstract and self-construed? If you’re going to be a sheep (goes my thinking), have a shepherd. You can’t be one and the same. 

What you do doesn't seem to work. And that may be the world's problem.

 

So much for that. I believe that anyone, unimpaired by childhood indoctrination or the neurotic need for a beatific feeling or to be a permanent child of a perfect Father, can be as good and decent as a person can be. I regret that people have needed to fall into belief camps, helping them remain children and giving them a main source of prosthetic self-esteem and fields of victims for their projected anger. As a therapist treating adults, I’ve seen very few adults – individuals with clear eyes and present needs, not past needs that they can’t quit.

 

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* Alternate title: The self-chosen people: How much humble narcissism has this created?

** I have a fancy Jewish great-grandfather. See https://www.academia.edu/36419048/David_Lubin_and_the_International_Institute_of_Agriculture and the Wikipedia article.

The disappointment

If there is to be a Volume II of my book, “I Forgive” and Other Delusions (at Amazon Kindle and soon to be in paperback), it may be comprised of my most unpleasant, dismal and hopeless articles. The following mini-piece is a sneak preview of that sort of content.

 

Innumerable adults remain emotionally dependent on their poisonous parents. “Emotional dependency” means, in these cases, that the parent, by abuse and neglect, did not cultivate the psycho-developmental growth of their child, so the child-now-adult remains in a permanent state of neediness and partial state of regression. Ask a healthy adult if he still “needs” his good parents and he may say (if he were poetical): “Yes, I cherish their love and my loving them, because I need love and beauty in my life.” Ask an emotionally damaged adult if he still needs his toxic parents and he may say “not really, but I indulge them or I feel an obligation to maintain a relationship.” But it is the person with love who will survive on his own, and the deprived one who will be needy, as needy as a four-year-old is for his mommy and daddy.

 

Some clients care to consider “autonomy” and self-esteem as values in their life and goals in their therapy. To these clients I may propagandize about “cutting the toxic umbilical cord” or, less ultimate, reconfiguring the cord to where it’s they who now set the terms. “Yes, mother, you were quite the dud. Thanks to the environment you and father created, I grew up to have no desire to live, no sense of the value of life, a feeling of cradle-to-grave torturous tedium. I won’t cut you out. But if we talk, it will be when I’m up to it. I won’t be picking up the phone when you call: It’s not enjoyable. We won’t be coming to each other’s place for dinner, for Christmas, or for family conversations. You can see your grandchildren under supervision.”

 

Even this rewriting of the relationship will be too much for most clients, which I understand. The idea – or the feeling – of taking a position that says “it’s over” in a complete way will feel like death, a new kind of death never before considered. I then point out that there are no happy choices. Staying tied to a starving and destructive parent will be to remain enslaved and to never grow. Seeing the parent through different eyes, termination resolution, will feel like a kind of suicide. But if the goal is to be more of a person, no longer a baby in a cold crib, then there is only one choice.

 

A client said that she dearly wants a hug from her solipsistic mother. We’ve talked about the parent’s universe-deep imprisonment inside her repression of her own childhood disaster, six walls that keep her safe from pain and don’t allow empathy or love out. But what if . . . what if the mother could crack open the wall and feel the truth, her childhood losses, ignite her self-protected frozen heart? Wouldn’t that rebirth their bond, enable her to finally see her daughter as a separate loved person? Wouldn’t that "automatically,"* as Alice Miller said in The Body Never Lies, produce empathy to others?

 

It would not. Emotional reliving would only shrink her to her bereft and needy child. It could not turn her into an adult, least of all a wise, strong and compassionate one. The daughter, my client, would not be receiving the hug she craves but would be giving one, to her little mother in shambles.

 

Best to walk away or stand apart, best to try to be a free adult, as awful as that may seem.

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* "Anxious to stay in line with the system of moral values I had accepted, I did my best to imagine good feelings I did not possess while ignoring the bad feelings I did have. My aim was to be loved as a daughter. But the effort was all in vain. In the end I had to realize that I cannot force love to come if it is not there in the first place. On the other hand, I learned that a feeling of love will establish itself automatically (for example, love for my children or love for my friends) once I stop demanding that I feel such love and stop obeying the moral injunctions imposed on me. But such a sensation can happen only when I feel free and remain open and receptive to all my feelings, including the negative ones." Alice Miller, The Body Never Lies, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2004, page 20.

We ninety-percent (or less) wraiths

People believe they are living in the “here-and-now.” Or they are told that their not being in the here-and-now is a factor in their psychological problems and that mindfulness is the technique that will bring them into it. The facts are: We are not in the here-and-now, and mindfulness has no capacity to send us there. The only technique that could remove the past as our first and abiding nature – the legs on which we stand – is the fire of radical feeling-centered depth therapy: Only that could burn away our past and leave us gutted and in the emptier present.

 

The present is our illusion, a good illusion, but nevertheless an illusion. I am in the illusory present when I do therapy with clients and when I am with my wife. “Somehow” (which could be explored), being in their presence brings enough of the right chemistry that doesn’t merely hide the past, but obliterates it seemingly. Casual glance says this is because the past is immanent in these rich present moments and transcended in their richness.

 

But all other moments of my life, I am a ninety-percent wraith floating in my childhood. When I’m petting one of my cats, a different, older cat is in my lap. When I exit my car and walk to the staff entrance of my counseling center, I am a six-year-old acting big. When I take a walk at night, I am really my unfulfilled youth.

 

When I write an article – that’s slightly different, a nontranscendent fusion of past and present. Same when I listen to Chopin or Rachmaninoff or Bach or Percy Grainger. Trying to fall asleep? I’m trying to put the past to sleep.

 

I am absolutely certain that this is the state of most people, but that they don’t think about it, or if they do, they don’t dwell on it.

 

My clients are – with no words spoken about it ever – helped to be more strongly here-and-now than they have ever been, and less bogged down in their past. This is because we aim hot flames at their inner baby and inner child, at their childhood parents. We’re burning away some parts of their past (maybe even more than the ten percent that I've burned away).

Asperger smarts

Life is looser at TPS blog these days. Here is an observation based on three clients, ages 23, 21 and 21. All are male, bi- and hetero-, all qualify for Asperger’s Syndrome (or “high-functioning autism spectrum” or whatever is the delicately correct term today). Two of them have a strong intellectual bent, naming highfalutin solid and abstract ideas. The other one produces endless thoughts about his personhood and history but no worldly wisdom. Perfunctorily humble, he says “I don’t know” a lot and shows no interest in challenging that status quo.

 

All three are minute variations of what is called the “know-it-all.” They either know everything, or they know all they need to know. They are complacent, wise, glib speech-giving. They all pause zero milliseconds before rejoindering to me with their concurrence, the truth or a truer truth.

 

One would think they are Narcissists. One might fantasize: Are all young twenty-something Asperger’s men serene, bloviating, full-of-themselves, omniscient? Of course not – and neither are these three clients. Their fragile identity is clear to see. Unlike Narcissistic Personality-disordered men, whose disintegrative lost-little-boy interiors are deeply hidden, these three old boys are somewhat more inner child than surface lie. The Narcissist’s shell is seamless, polished, hard and brittle. The young men’s have hairline cracks, are smooth and slippery like thin ice.

 

Yet the surface lie is quite jazzed.

 

Here is today’s casual theory: They have to “know” – that is, to be buoyed by their head – in order not to feel. Feeling dire historical pain is anathema to most people. But to someone with Asperger’s, dire historical pain is their bedrock of lava. Bettelheim need not be right about “refrigerator mothers” to see that autism spectrum individuals were repressed from feeling at the earliest stage of their lives. This concept is evidenced by the minutely gradated continuum of out-of-syncness with self and world on which countless repressed people lie. I, for one, am far from autistic, but when I’m not knowing and talking and delivering therapy, I feel a recondite disturbance among people. As do many of my clients outside of their own medium.

 

Asperger’s is like the big personality disorders – Narcissism, Borderline, Antisocial, Schizoid, Dependent, Schizotypal – in one main way. James Masterson discovered the infant stage – separation-individuation – origin of Borderline Personality, its cause in “maternal unavailability” and the “abandonment depression.” The infant, avoiding rejection pain, must adapt to the immature mother’s extreme oscillations. For that adult, years and decades later, to re-experience that pain – by therapy or abandonment – would be, essentially, to be killed again. A similar consequence would happen were someone with Asperger’s to be thrown into his abyss of infantile buried feeling. The cause of early pain need not be an analytical or neurotic mother. It might be any birth or pre-birth force that led to pain and its chemical repression. Janov wrote extensively on birth trauma and the nine months predisposing the fetus to it. There’s some interesting (if overly creative) information at the defunct Primal Psychotherapy Page regarding birth trauma (http://primal-page.com/birthart.htm).

 

My Asperger’s young men found necessary refuge in their heads, in knowledge. Doubt and openness mean feeling, which they must avoid.

"I Forgive" and Other Delusions

This is to announce that Kindle (Amazon) is now carrying my ebook (and soon in paperback) selection of blog articles. I’ve titled it “I Forgive” and Other Delusions – feeling-centered depth therapy and psychology for adults and their inner baby. The book is significantly easier to read and search than ten years of links (in addition to having a table of contents). I’ve also “adultified” much of the content, mostly to embarrass me less. Writing in the pregnant atmosphere of active therapy tends to feature a bit too much adjectival and acid attitude. The ebook strips most of the purple icing from the cake.

 

The older I get and the more I watch, hear and read, the more I see that almost every form of psychological healing today is thought- and hope-based, shallow manipulations of mind, brute-force “intention,” one-a-week techniques, and the hell too much Carl Rogers’ passive-unaggressive approach. I am not unique in pointing out (with a flaming sword) that healing has to address deep wounds by staying with them and leading pain out. Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy has done this with wisdom, widespread success and popularity since 1970 (until all the alarmed, upstaged psychotherapists trolled it back to Santa Monica, France, England and South Africa). My approach has always been more down-to-earth than radical Primal as it is based in the realities of the human persona – the adult that must remain itself despite deep, sometimes epiphanic work. This may be less obvious in the book’s articles than it has always been in my therapy sessions. There, profound empathy for the invisible child runs the show while birth trauma may be given just a passing nod. Articles present more of the oceanic idea behind the fluid act.

 

While not everyone (I can’t believe I’m saying this) will want to own a copy of the book, I invite you to look at the Kindle page and “read a sample.” Preface, Introduction and a few articles (including the eponymous “forgive” one) will be informative of this radical but all-natural approach. I say “all natural” because real therapy, healing therapy, is simply the caring and human acts that our child self needed when it was first hurt. We therapists are just a bit late.

 

https://www.amazon.com/Forgive-Other-Delusions-Therapeutic-feeling-centered-ebook/dp/B0CM82WK28/ref=sr_1_1?crid=CYFC26VCAX9U&keywords=%22I+forgive%22+and+other+delusions&qid=1699145060&sprefix=i+forgive+and+other+delusions%2Caps%2C125&sr=8-1

There is no equivalence

[Note that this article ends with a longish link. I've published a Kindle Reader collection of those blog posts that I consider most impactful and useful. The link leads to my "author's page" and to the book, a sample read, and other information. While it may seem a bit silly, redundant, narcissistic – whatever – to put a price ($9.99) on blog articles that have always been and remain free to read, I think a more easily accessible grouping has some value. The day may come when I can afford to make a paperback version, which will be even more "user friendly."

Professors of clinical counseling and psychotherapy: Get your students to acquire this collection. You know their thinking is generic and safe. Give them some real food for thought!]

My family is Jewish, or was Jewish, as the only ones left are my sister and I. I attended Sunday school obliviously from first grade through 10^th grade Confirmation but didn’t learn a damned thing other than that the Jews are the “chosen people,” they don’t eat ham, and there are a lot of holidays. I was bar mitzvah’d and mouthed the haftorah Hebrew passage without understanding a word of it and never asking the meaning. My ceremony-culminating speech (in English) was so clichéd and fake-intent that it must have embarrassed the temple audience. In my Confirmation paper I declared my atheism and floaty ideas for my future.

 

I haven’t been to synagogue since around 1982 when my first wife dragged me there three or four times after she converted from Baptist to Jew. She was fanatical; I was an empty head floating in a pool of rancid memory-sensations.

 

I don’t have any beliefs that could be called “religious.” None, nada, nix, nihil, zero. I don’t favor Jewish people over others, though I have nothing against them. But there are millions of people – Muslims, Arabs, Palestinians, neo-Nazis and probably some Christians – who think I should be dead or killed because I didn’t convert out of my family heritage.

 

Let us judge these pathetics in a different way than we would judge bad Israeli settlers and those wreaking over-wide retribution for Hamas’s terror attack. We are judging them for a specific psychological problem: the ego-syntonic ("I'm dysfunctional and proud of it") fusion of projection (of their individual childhood-based pain, debility and misery), delusion and destruction.

 

It’s not hard to be delusional. Self-esteem deficit (which is nearly ubiquitous) can require people to believe nonsense in order to maintain a feeling of identity. A person may absolutely need to believe he is smarter than he really is or that his parents had positive intent despite all the harm they did to him. A Narcissist must believe he is perfect. It is too easy to project, blaming other people, the other political party, God and “life” for our failures (when we should be assigning first cause to our parents). It may even be a second-nature state in the human psyche, based in birth trauma or an instantly repressed infliction of soul murder in childhood,* to transiently wish the extremity of death on an animal or a person. It’s when that anti-life spasm becomes ratified as a conviction, religion or policy that we should call “evil.” It’s the converting of a mental negative – a feeling – to a mental positive – a willful delusion – that best defines evil.

 

I doubt that more than the number of Jewish people one could see under a microscope think ordinary Palestinians and Muslims should be dead or killed on “principle.” Only the minority of a species of fanatical Jews – that’s to say, the psychological complement to Jew-haters – might wish mass death on a culture. The majority are average people with a normal conscience, many of them stoked to fury, now, by instances and centuries of crimes against their name.

 

Condemn them and you have the disorder of laziness and thoughtlessness. Hate them and you may have the problem of evil. There is no equivalence between normal human rage and destructive, willful delusion.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/f.html?C=Z9SQXHR9LXA4&K=MLVRPRBZYQUM&M=urn:rtn:msg:202311010610006f590050ba27469f80c775960cf0p0na&R=1WCE5XI0R5TG0&T=C&U=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fauthor%2Flubin.the.pessimistic.optimist%3Fref_%3Dpe_1724030_132998060&H=DUO7FMZAMGSLUFMDNABUYPRDQE4A&ref_=pe_1724030_132998060

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* Leonard Shengold, M.D., Soul Murder.

"Afterword" of an unpublished book

Contemporary therapy is one of the greatest escapes and illusions available to the masses. If medical doctors were to say: “Our job is to make you believe that optimal health is but a logical, posi­tive, rational thought away,” or “We won’t operate on your damaged heart because it might hurt,” they would be like the majority of today’s therapists who believe our pain and disorder come from thinking or can be healed by thinking.

 

In a terrible daydream, I imagine the most destructive yet hidden conspir­a­torial movement, where demonic cogno­scenti have con­vinced the world that depression and mental agony and rage, existen­tial empti­ness and anxiety and trauma are dark matter that can be made light by thoughts and facts and yoga and a thousand behaviors that do not touch the source of disability: injury and pain. A tidal wave comes and we, surfers, smile as it drives us into the rocks. See what happens when we ig­nore early pain: We “forgive” parents who caused it and we perpetuate the damage into the future. We see the adult world as separate, an alien plateau above children. Children become minimized and invisible. We fail to know the source of crime. We live on momentary feel-good puffs of air.

 

See what happens when we understand that pain and injury built and bent us. We treat children with respect and they grow up to respect us. We improve our mar­riages as partners come to know each other’s fundamental needs. We may be cleared enough of our own pain that we see sociopaths for what they are, and don’t allow them to become our leaders. Empathy and care become the medium of exchange.

 

We become a place of living and feeling, not escaping.

Disconcerting tidbit #1: Do no good

This is a comment to a Washington Post article, “Helping others could be a cure to post-grad loneliness” by Renee Yaseen, September 14, 2023:

 

Helping others is a fine palliative in some cases. But it can have a psychological rebound effect. If a person was deprived of critical needs (love, empathy, respect) in childhood, needs which the present day can never adequately redress, it can feel strangely wrong to “be there” for others: The altruistic act will resonate inward and “remind” the person that no one was ever there for him or her.

 

This “reminder” is to return – like a time machine that has kidnapped you – to childhood pain that, were it to be read, would reveal impossible loss and would create the sudden awareness of an empty and never-had life.

Be careful.

Good enough

In the introduction to his book, Why You Get Sick and How You Get Well, Arthur Janov, author of the famous The Primal Scream, distilled decades of research and clinical practice: “Over the last thirty years I have learned a great deal about humans and what drives them. As trite as it may seem, what I have found is a single yet complex emotion called love. Not the romantic love of novels, but a funda­mental love – the love of a parent for a child.” I’ve seen this, too, all along, and still the fact struck me in a new way recently in a morning session with a 44-year-old client.

He was an extreme workaholic, over-achieving and over-perfecting at all moments yet never feeling he was good enough, never respecting himself as much as other people did. In his memory, his father was his hero. But after a few months, we discovered the opposite. Nostalgic love and pain turned to anger. From our observation that “not good enough” is not an emotion or a fact but rather a mental attribution formed by his specific pain, we realized that his father had made him “not good enough” by defining “good” as hard work and assiduous struggle. I had him imagine that he was at the absolute pinnacle of expertise, wisdom and conscientiousness in his job and career. What, in that place, did he feel? “I’m not good enough! Daddy, can’t I be good enough? For you?” Following, he said: “Maybe I was never shown love in the way I needed it.”

 

We may “believe” we’re good, that we have value, but we will never feel right without that earliest love, which must be “the way I needed it.” When a parent ordains a stan­dard of performance, he is saying “You are not enough.” He is severing the bond that should be there at the beginning, the loving bond that says “You are good just to be.” He, a heroic father, has cast away his child, and has no idea of what he has done.

The impossibility of respect

Adult clients, talking about their childhood, sometimes say that they were expected or required to “respect” their parent. This is typically described as an assumed feature of their punitive or unloving home. One “respects” one’s parents because . . . simply “because” the parent, or parenthood, merits it. This notion is almost universally internalized by the young innocent and carried into adulthood, where even middle-aged clients assume their parents deserve respect.

 

Heretofore, there’s been occasion to state the unpleasant obvious: Authoritarian parents may believe they deserve their child’s admiration or even hero-worship, but that would be a delusional belief in many circumstances: You can’t possess the chemical feeling of admiration for someone who hurts, disrespects or intimidates you. I will say that these parents conflate respect with “fear,” that it’s their child’s fear and awe they require.

 

As true as this is, a significant, outlier point is missed, a point I have missed until this week. It’s that “respect” is not a feeling a young child is capable of experiencing. It is a sophisticated feeling based on years of life experience, some depth knowledge of the proposed recipient of it, and a sense of moral value. It is a feeling about someone’s moral action or attitude or philosophy – something well beyond the ken of a child. A child doesn’t respect his friend for his football skills: He likes or admires him or envies the skills. A man respects (or envies) another’s integrity or courage. We don’t “respect” someone for winning at arm-wrestling or for finishing a crossword puzzle. We respect his losing with grace, his humble acceptance of his ignorance. By this understanding, we see that pathological parents are not just requiring something they don’t deserve: They are requiring the non-existent.

 

We also see that adults often live on illusory or brand-name concepts to which we attach misinterpreted and tendentious feelings. It would serve people well to drop some acid on certain well-worn assumptions.

I suspect this is the last post -- but for little dribs and drabs occasionally

I don’t know how many times I have prophesied (moped) in these pages that TPS blog was “winding down,” each death knell followed by second, third, and fourth winds. This time it is true. I have not had any new ideas in a long while, and by age or experience or fatigue, I find that I don’t care to. It is true that I have wondered why so few people want to honor, or cherish, their history by knowing it deeply. If one’s life “flashes before one’s eyes” on the death bed, that seems to suggest that a deep feeling about one’s unique history is important. Yet many people don’t want to “go there.” They would rather be a newspaper than a history book.

 

Another piece of shrapnel hit me recently: the notion of being a “disappointment” to one’s parent. I’ve heard this a fair number of times in twenty-four years of therapy. While we can see the direct problem inherent in this shaming – given to feel your soul is inadequate and can never be right or good enough – we may miss the other side of that coin. A parent who sees his child as a disappointment is saying that he owns the child, that he has a right to feel let down by her. Imagine going up to your neighbor six houses down, whom you have never met, and saying: “I am disappointed in you for failing to mow your lawn every Sunday. I am disappointed in your son for growing his hair long. You are disappointments.” You would, doubtless as the sun is big, either be insane or so copious of personality disorder as to overflow the banks of the Nile. Parents do not own their children, do not have a right to assume the child has an obligation to live their life according to the parent. To assume such a right is to be sick.

 

What I have been doing is compiling approximately a hundred of these blog posts into what may become a self-published book. I know that sounds egotistical. But from my angle, in the process I’ve perused the six-hundred other ones and decided they are not worthy. At their writing, though, I sure liked them! And there’s the fact that the four or five people who would buy my iconoclastic and rancid (clear-thinking and benevolent) thinking are those to whom I’d give a free copy anyway.

The working title is: The Pessimistic Shrink, selected blog posts. Acid and delusion. Which one are you?

Sad when you should be angry, angry when you should be sad

There are many clients whose ground is anger and cynical negativity. While they seem natural, their dark side is their only side, they are actually holding their breath ‘til they turned red. They won’t even allow themselves to feel bitter, because bitter is woundedness and hurt sitting beneath the anger. In this anger identity, nothing can change, nothing can get better.

 

There are many clients whose ground is sadness, hurt and weepiness. This may seem childish, but it is the deeper truth: Hurt is indeed what they were. And yet it can’t be enough if they intend to change, to get better. Some anger and indignation, conjured up from the Virtual or the Potential, will have to exist.

 

Don’t be deceived to think the angry person is an adult and the weepy one is a child. They are both children.

 

A man was terminated from his job by a boss out for revenge and, angry as hell, he believes his life is ruined. Many people get fired unfairly, it sets them back, but the wound eventually closes and they move on. Why did this injustice unman a forty-year-old’s life, where he feels all his future dominos must fall in the wrong direction? Because beneath his anger there is pain as deep as the boy who “had to raise myself,” whose parents divorced twice, who had no one to listen. That buried background, awakened unconsciously when he was fired, revived the fundamental wrongness of his life which, of course, was always there. We are what we were. Psychological time is a dimensionless point that looks like a line.

 

We can help an angry man to stop holding his breath. A batterer, a Vietnam vet in group therapy, wept as he recalled his father’s brutality. I never knew if he wept enough. But if he did, he would no longer be capable of hurting his wife.

 

Can we give someone who was always the family victim, and later its selfless helper, the anger to free herself? She always rushes forward to slide under their feet, and they – études in mass solipsism – accept this implicitly and forever. Maybe, at least, she can grow the idea of anger, the preferability of self-care and dignity. Though there are many self-medicative attitudes people find (people-pleasing, mild-mannered, macho, cynical, euthymic false-happy), productive anger seems impossible to form in a defeated child.

Here's a new client for you

I recently suggested to my 16-year-old client’s mother, via text-message, that her son may not be ready for therapy. I had seen him for six sessions following Intake. I offered to transfer him to a younger therapist, if she thought that might help. First and second appearances, he had needed his mother present. She provided most of the information. The next four sessions were “teen shallow.” Just what one might expect, and perfectly acceptable. In fact, the teenagers who are voluble and deep and psych-minded should be freaks of nature. They know too much and are thereby blocked to feel “below” what they already know. Knowing is their security blanket, and it better not come off.

 

So the young man was a plausible one, until he gave strong evidence that he wasn’t. Sessions were question and answer. He was bland and genially distant, a spaced smile, dissociated. I provided information, serious stuff, along with fun diversions, including music he would be bound to roll his eyes at. (He is in marching band. I played Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk.”)

 

Then came the session where I could no longer justify providing psychoeducation and doing – I didn’t mention this before – ninety percent of the work. I allowed silence. And there came thirty-five minutes of it. He looked forward, then at me, forward, at me, moving only eyeball muscles. And I waited, took notes, and I confess, jotted some ideas about this blog post.

 

My first post-Diagnostic progress note had this “SOAP” assessment: "He has 'covered' his pain of mother's emotional abandonment, bullying and persecuting by his siblings, (divorced) father's abuse, shaming and rejection, under a kind of euthymic glazed-over mentality. At 16, he feels too insecure to have a solo counseling session." A later note, saying much the same: "Impression is that client has suppressed and 'repressed away' his true feelings about his earlier childhood and has adopted a mild-mannered character. He has not thoroughly dealt with his father's abandonment of him, his mother's helplessness, the years of mental and physical bullying by his sibs, the loss of one brother to drugs. This fact indicates there is a subdued but substantial depression which he pushes aside by means of school and extracurricular activities."

This is a young client who needs help. But I remember myself at 16. By that age, I had gone through years of anxiety, a pathologically passive and repressed character, trichotillomania, probably psychosomatic tumor growth,* and cosmos-wide alienation from every member of my nuclear family. Had I been ushered into a therapist’s office, I would have found my mouth moving and saying nothing that had to do with me, because there was no “me.” And by the fourth or fifth session, the pull of reality would have won and I would have sat staring silently into a void, hoping that my invisibility would mercifully, kindly be respected. Not “understood,” because there was no person that I could have tolerated being understood. That would have been a horror for both me and the therapist.

 

I don’t know how common this character is, and I can only guess that my client was in this place. What I do know is that many people’s core was deactivated at the earliest points of their life, maybe even in the pre-verbal years. They go through the motions that inner urges and parents’ wills dictate, and they end up at age 16, but still at the beginning. Therapy is not the answer for them.

 

What is?

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* https://news.yale.edu/2010/01/13/stress-triggers-tumor-formation-yale-researchers-find#:~:text=The%20research%20describes%20a%20novel,to%20attack%20the%20deadly%20disease.&text=Stress%20induces%20signals%20that%20cause,tumors%2C%20Yale%20researchers%20have%20discovered.

There's another truth that's very hidden

I’m a little worried about me on my deathbed. I’ll have accumulated many regrets by then, as they’re already here (sorry, emotional correctness!). But I’ll be able to massage those. What I’m concerned about is a piece of my unconscious that has appeared in several dreams spaced out over a few decades. We’ve all heard of the unconscious. The basic idea is that it’s composed of lost memories and repressed childhood, infancy, babyhood and prenatal emotional pain. I have no issue with this. The part that I'm worried about is not a surfaced memory or a splinter of pain but an identity-feeling that exists only in my dream world and which is nowhere – nowhere at all, ever – present in my memory or here-and-now conscious life.

 

I’m terrified that during my last moments, when my brain is falling into the final zone – the place where others have experienced “near-death” phenomena like Jesus, angels, wingèd horses and rainbows – I will become my poor sad self wandering an indifferent world, in the most gutted terror of being an unemployed typesetter searching for a job that cannot be found. I fear that I will die a failed state.

 

I can’t explain why this dream scenario exists. I had never been in that position, as my old work was successful and often enjoyable at a shallow conscious level. My typesetting and "literary services" career (I was an employee then owned a company), fourteen years with hiatuses, ended thirty-six years ago. I later became immersed in psychology: student, crisis worker, counselor. There have now been thirty years of my evolution adult life.

 

Clearly there is something “in” me that feels I have never left my lost self, the boy who could type fast and nothing else. Never in any of my dreams have I been a therapist. Besides my stuckness in the pedestrian work, there is, in the dreams, the sense of complete, let’s call it cosmic, failure, the failure to ever be a real man, a real adult. I never have my good wife. I am completely alone among strangers who have no ability to help, or even the concept of helping.

 

I’m not going to try to unearth this: I've done enough of my own therapy, though the day may come again. Suffice it to say that I am probably not unlike other people, maybe most other people, whose childhood sense-of-self has never really been surpassed. Just that one fact is enough to show us the weakness of this serious pursuit, psychotherapy. It probably shows us the folly of Adult Life itself, which seems so high-altitude or so primitive but still has its own place. It may not really have a place. The dream may be its reality.

Why parents are blind

This is a question that I regret having to present; I always want to question its legitimacy. But it has always proved valid: Why do so many parents of therapy clients fail to pay patient attention to their children’s feelings? It’s knee-jerk easy to answer: because their own parents didn’t care about their feelings. No one had empathy for them. That would be true, but it doesn’t explain the process of the passing on of this deficit.

 

Their son is angry with them and they aren’t solicitous of the reasons. They respond to it with greater anger and superiority. They don’t care why he wants to smoke pot or play video games for five hours a day. They reject that he wants to hang out with his “loser” friends. They don’t notice, or they prematurely soothe, their daughter’s vexation. They require their son to at least get C’s when he is getting D’s: They’re not interested in the reasons. They blame the pandemic shutting-in and school shootings and social media or another student's suicide for her suicide attempt, and they remove her bed­room door to “make sure she’s safe.” They are incensed about his aloof­ness and sarcasm toward them, his brooding silence. They don’t spend two minutes thinking about what their 15-year-old daughter feels when she’s conscripted to care­take her younger siblings. They will find their chil­dren’s emotional demands an imperti­nence rather than a world of passion or tragedy to explore.

 

The answer to this question can seem terribly difficult to find when we picture an adult who should know something about contemporary psychology (like their kids do), who isn’t a sociopath, who should be equipped with basic parental common sense, who can’t be as ignorant as “they didn’t know any better, that was what they experienced in their childhood.” But the answer is terribly easy to find when you consider the parents are still carrying the wounds of their own childhood. They are still suffering the loss of love, a loss that isn’t recoverable. They are carrying the burden of an adult body and life on top of a child’s waiting heart.

 

Why do parents not see their child? Because they are still children, and to care would be to feel, and to feel what's still burning inside them.

Our lost brothers and sisters

https://nyti.ms/3K7ybDh#permid=124017155

The greatest weakness in dealing with Trump and MAGA, the weakness that undermines our efforts, is the psychology of injury, pain and projection. There’s little that can feel more right and powerful than revenge against injustice. But the MAGA people have no idea what they seek vengeance for. The answer is: their past, their impotence in childhood. We can’t fight that, because it’s unseen and no one wants to see it. Even people who come to therapy don’t want to dwell in their parents’ failures, in their feeling of invisibility, in the fact that no adult in their life ever came to their aid. It’s much easier to be angry and to form cynical beliefs. It’s the undesirable suppressed that may do us in.

Deadpan-theism*

It occurred to me that if God existed, he would have to be the smallest possible thing rather than the largest. The next logical belief would be that he had made not "man" but everything in his image, creating a universe of like pieces that joining, would form derivative objects, morphed and diluted gods.

 

I shouldn’t have to explain this, but his being the largest would make no sense. He’d either be comprised of everything he had made – ridiculously ass-backwards. Or he’d be “outside” of everything – ridiculous by definition. Or the universe would be a prison the exact size of himself and he would be frozen and unmoving through eternity. Bye, Spinoza.

 

So the quest is to find him and get the goods. Information, the thrill of discovery, maybe power and immortality, or a pat on the back. For me, or for a different explorer, or possibly the whole world would win a prize:

 

A toaster oven.

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* Yes, I'm aware this piece should have been titled: God For Goods: Find Me, Win a Toaster Oven. Though when I first conceived the idea, in a psychology paper ca. 1996, I called it: "Watch out for Peewee!"

DSM-5, F??.?: Voluntary Delusional Disorder

Should there be a new DSM diagnosis: Voluntary Delusional Disorder? A delusion is generally defined as a false belief (a “commitment of one’s consciousness”*) that a person is critically invested in. The person is so one with the belief because doubt would cause his entire sense – his feeling – of self to be enveloped in painful blackness and nonexistence. We can see this in non-psychotic delusions: A Narcissistic Personality must believe he is perfect and uniquely special. That belief covers and suppresses deep, childhood-based feelings of failure, inchoateness, nihilism, because his identity never formed in the crucible of a flawed mother-child father-child bond.

 

While delusions are understood to traffic in untruth, there is the possibility of accepting a true fact in a delusional way. If Albert Einstein had had such a precarious sense of self-esteem that he needed to rate himself the greatest genius of physics, this could be seen as a delusion even though it may have been accepted as a given in the scientific community. After all, what if an even greater physicist was working in obscurity and never published his theories? Einstein’s belief must then be conceived as delusional.

 

Many people had such a botched development** in separation-individuation infancy and early childhood that later they must perform certain mental or physical acts to suppress the error. If they don’t have a belief of rightness or glory to mask it, they may need alcohol or drugs or prestige or power as suppressive agents. Destroy the prestige, remove the alcohol (and all the collateral or replacement defenses such as A.A. camaraderie, Higher Power, a sponsor to lean on, coffee and cigarettes), and the person’s inner self would implode to childhood rubble. They need a delusional belief or a delusional behavior.

 

The defense mechanism nature of delusion is more difficult to see in the extreme cases – psychotics and those bordering psychosis – and easier to see in neurotics. Why did the man I worked with in Ohio need to believe, “on his mother’s grave,” that the federal income tax is one-hundred-percent illegal and need not be paid? In most areas of his life he was grounded in reality. He knew that the sun rose in the east, that people need to work for a living to earn their bread. He knew that pornography, while legal, shouldn’t be given to five-year-olds. Yet he had to believe that whatever debatable ambiguity in the law or Constitution left room for questions about the federal mandate, that ambiguity amounted to complete proof of its illegality. Could we trace this quasi-psychotic stubbornness to some defeat or devastation in his childhood? I believe we could. I can imagine adopting his conviction, as in my teens I believed every aspect of Libertarian dogma regarding the sacredness of free enterprise and that “taxation is theft.” By 18, that solipsistic ideology had become my identity, replacing an abyssal chaos that had never grown beyond my latency period. To discover a ready-made system of beliefs and, more importantly, a feeling of deep meaning and, more importantly, an attitude of superiority, was to be not reborn, but born for the first time. On that Mt. Olympus, to entertain the slightest doubt of my new heart and soul would have been to collapse into a black hole of emptiness.

 

It can be quite difficult to see how psychotic paranoia is more self-protective than destructive. The woman I knew who believed that every person and every occupied vehicle, including planes and helicopters, was surveilling her, would not consider the possibility that she was alone in the world. What had, in her youth, been public and private shaming and exposure to her prurient clan, being “read” by them and boundaries obliterated, but was also her protection and identity and place in the family – the self-less child – had to later be her haven: the cushioning and caring eyes of the world on her. Were something in her mind to turn and all the attention disappear, she would become a body with no soul, the most invisible, alone and dying person in existence. The delusion of being seen enabled her to live.

 

Three main facts come into play when we consider the person delusional by choice: Irrational-to-insane belief comes from identity pain that needs to be escaped;  identity pain and emptiness exist on a continuum of extremity; once a self-medicative escape is discovered (alcohol, video games, masturbation, intellectualization, etc.), it becomes entrenched and necessary. In the wide population of individuals who delusionally believe that the sociopathic former president is a person of good character, a related and progressive triad comes into play: unmet needs in childhood cause pain, pain leads to projection.

 

What makes this delusion “voluntary”? My thumb is a good example. When I was five years old, I found that I would relieve built-up tension by squeezing my thumb and snapping it. Had I been somewhat older, I might have thought that the behavior was disruptive or immature and quashed it. I might have gone to my parents with my tension and anxiety and asked for help. These would have been choices. Similarly, a five-year-old child may have to absorb his father’s projected hatred of ethnic groups and individual idiosyncrasies, while a 15- or 20-year-old would have some capacity to engage discernment and choice. Millions of adults in this decade have cast aside this capacity and have chosen to assuage their identity pain in projection: hating individuals, entire populations, memes, cultural trends. They have set aside discernment to admire, to believe in, the sociopathic avatar of their pain and anger. They have chosen their self-medication.

 

At age five, I didn’t have a choice. My delusion was automatic. At 71, I sometimes still squeeze and snap my thumb. The masses who love hate and haters had a choice. They still have it, and they still fail it.

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* Nathaniel Branden's definition: "Faith is the commitment of one's consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof."

** I’m specifically thinking of James F. Masterson's theory of the origin of Borderline Personality Disorder in "the concept of maternal unavailability for acknowledgment of the self, the resultant abandonment depression, and the developmental arrest of the ego." Psychotherapy of the Disorders of the Self, p. xv.

Bare naked friends

An old college friend, whom I haven't seen in many years, recently emailed me some cosmic questions about life. While these were questions that any serious and open-minded thinker might ask another thinker, there was a special powerful and piquant feeling to his concerns, as “John” has lived a uniquely searching and spiritual life for the last fifty years. He has studied esoteric healing practices and the wisdom of ancient and contemporary teachers, in his various retreats, sabbaticals and pilgrimages to foreign meccas.

 

Here are his questions:

 

Lately, I have been contemplating the topic of compassion, forgiveness and widening my scope of love - because it is becoming more and more difficult not only for myself, but perhaps for others, to interpret behaviors and motivations in our modern world in a magnanimous and charitable way.

 

As a deep thinker about human psychology, traumatization, and emotional healing, you strike me as a good one to consult on my wonderings.

We have the war in Ukraine, which in my opinion doesn’t have any heroes on either side, because so many innocents are being destroyed, handicapped, or otherwise devastated. 

We also have a lot of bad medicine carelessly studied, prepared and marketed more fror profit than desire to help humanity, which, I think, as a counselor, you are less inclined than most to recommend - as, at best, it suppresses symptoms, and is not likely to get to the root of pain and self medication.

It is said that forgiveness is mainly for the forgiver.

 

What is a wholesome way to live in a world that frankly seems more about evil than ignorance and blunder?

 

I initially thought I would reply in The Pessimistic Shrink style, which would helplessly feature the purple prose that I am always embarrassed to read aloud. Instead, I produced this off-the-cuff:

 

It feels best, to me, to give you some bullet-point thoughts rather than an essay or a lecture, which feels pretentious.

 

I personally don’t try to “interpret behaviors and motivations in a magnanimous and charitable way.” That fact relates to the difference between doing therapy and living. In therapy, I may not have Carl Rogers’s “unconditional positive regard,” but I do find myself having a feeling of compassion for almost every client. Example: A man came in because people told him he was off-putting and unpleasant. He watched a number of youtube videos and gave himself a provisional diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. But he wanted to know for sure, so he came to me for an assessment. When I verified his self-diagnosis, he cried. I felt for him. However, if I had met him in the outside world – while still being a psychologically-minded person – I would likely have found him obnoxious or pitiable. I would have no reason to activate a sense of compassion for him. How does that “double standard” work? People who are in therapy know there is something wrong with them and want to be helped, want to be different. That is what evokes my warmth and care. So – is there really a double standard? I’d say “no.” Because of the way I’m built and have grown through my own self-work, I would feel these positive and helpful feelings toward anyone in the world who appeared troubled and was open to help – even the narcissist.

 

I am not loving toward anyone but my wife (and pets), but I am “magnanimous” and caring. The source of that is not simple. That is, it’s not just “being a caring person.” I remain, to a meaningful degree, shut down because of my unloved childhood, so I only have a certain amount of caring feelings to give, and those feelings are doubtless mixed with my own neediness for affection. That is, my altruism is significantly selfish.

 

I’d offer that as a lesson in the complexity of feeling and motivation, and a lesson in the necessary naturalness of feeling. Meaning: I don’t and can’t work to “forgive” or “widen my scope of love.” We feel what we feel, and trying to change our feeling by thinking different simply cannot work. Do abusive Catholic priests think different, re-read the Bible, and then come to feel respectful of the personhood of their sexual abuse victims? Did Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson become a good person who loves animals because he immersed himself in the poetics of Sanskrit and the dogma of Freud? No – the feelings are who they are or who they became in the crucible of childhood.

 

As to forgiveness, I mostly endorse my blog article.* The only addition I would make is: Actual “organic” forgiveness can only correspond to the amount of healing of wounds the person has done. Being relatively healed of childhood pain – if and when possible – brings a renewed heart, and with it a “new natural” feeling of benevolence. That would include forgiveness.

 

As to the evil in the world, I’d casually differentiate sickness from deliberate sickness. An angry, botched person such as Trump need not have been vigorously destructive. This was choice. In my twenties and thirties, I was a solidly minor league narcissist. I didn’t know it as I had no introspective ability. I vaguely knew that I was hurting people’s feelings, but the self-medicative haze of the narcissism, and the weakness of the rest of my structure, blocked any actionable awareness. If I was “evil” then, it would have been at the lower end of the continuum, higher up being those who foment insurrections and cage immigrant children.

 

As to a “wholesome way to live in the world,” my first thought is: Do you have, along with the rest of the molecular mess of your psyche, a sense of dignity and vitality in the world? For me, it’s partly healing and partly old age that make me feel good to see a bug on a leaf, or rescue one stranded in my apartment. I have a positive – not “happy” – feeling when I take a walk late at night, or when I wash the dishes for my wife. I didn’t create this feeling. It somehow escaped being killed in my childhood.

 

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* https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2017/05/curmudgeon-2-forgiveness.html

Ramble #8: Therapy interminable

I have a client who cannot believe that therapy should have an endpoint. It never occurred to him, in his forty-three years, that therapy is to try to solve a problem, or improve oneself to a place of greater independence or self-esteem or happiness, or help to eliminate destructive anger or seriously mitigate depression or anxiety. It never occurred to him that he could or should change. One always needs to talk about one’s feelings and pains, he would say.

 

This might be an interesting challenge if the person were new in therapy, sitting on the couch for the first time. I’d ask: Why do you think nothing changes for the better, where you feel you can't be on your own without a listener or “leaning person”? The sordid fact, though, is that I’ve been working with this person for over two years and it never occurred to me that he is not trying to get better, or to see himself as an improvable person. How was this possible? How did I not see his failure to care about the theory of dysfunction, his failure to explore any of his feelings present and past, his failure to request any input from me, as a therapy game-ender?

 

I can only say: Ask my toilet training. Plus, my general aversion to turning a client’s psyche into very specific goals. And there was his serious presentation: always talking about his pains and frustrations.

Quite an oversight. Finally being remedied.

 

Why would this client feel that therapy is just to vent? Some years ago a psychiatrist told him that he would “probably have to be in therapy for the rest of my life.” And he believed it. Did that doctor, saying that, instantly extinguish my client’s sense of personal empowerment? There’s no way to know. But I know he was startled, somewhat shaken to the core, when I informed him that people want to change. They want to reach a place of happiness or serenity or “coping” – and independence. This was not him. It wasn’t that he was dependent on me. Several times when confronted with a scheduling or insurance glitch, he remarked that he’d have to find a different therapist who charged nothing (beyond the copay). He needed and was entitled to therapy, forever and mostly free.

 

Many months earlier, I had begun to suspect an unspecified personality disorder, difficult to grasp and describe. He loves his pleasures: gourmet meals, social gatherings, gambling, alcohol, and would recount his epicurean episodes with delight. He could dismiss me easily but was suitably pleased with me. He both tolerated and rejected his father’s mental abuse when they would meet occasionally. His problems – anxiety and depression – were ego-syntonic: He named them but did not challenge them. He sometimes felt suicidal but did not act on it. What was the nature of his regressive dependency, which he was fully unaware of, that I felt but could not identify?

 

He had left home under extremely adverse conditions at age fifteen, staying with a girlfriend, with an aunt, with men. At fifteen, he must still be ten years old, and eight, and five, and probably two, because he was unparented. His father was a shaming narcissist. His mother was a religious hypocrite. I wondered: Is this Borderline Personality without the abandonment pain, the dramatic acting out, the temper?

 

A younger Borderline I've seen also seems to feel that therapy is akin to a once-weekly sedative and a lifelong prescription. In her case, I can come close to accepting her open-ended necessity even though she has been mostly stable for a few years. And what about all the clients without a personality disorder? Might their therapy continue long-term for good reasons and end, by treatment plan, for bad reasons? Do the deepest pains and existential undertows end? Do the clients stop being “psychological,” where after months or a couple years of attendance in sessions they have now retired their emotionally introspective mind and returned refreshed, renewed, reborn, cleanly opaque in the here-and-now world?

 

I believe it is easy to see it both ways: Therapy can't end because there are no “independent” persons. We can’t refuel ourselves. And therapy should end when something – anything – changes: resigning from a bad job, writing that granite-hard letter to one’s parents, growing the balls to file for child support garnishment – because the person is no longer stuck. They have solved a problem and now feel different in the adult way: superficially. Or they’ve had enough of self-knowledge.

 

I seem to go along with both philosophies. Because some people want to be adults, some want to be children.

Trauma healing

Hard to believe, but this was the first time in my career that I saw a client whose Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was “in your face”: so presently and chronically symptomatic that it constituted a seamless crisis. All the other PTSD clients I’ve worked with named their various symptoms, symptoms they were not experiencing in session but which would occur on occasion – cues, memories, flashbacks, hypervigilance, hyperarousal, avoidance of places. This man’s brain was a tsunami in his skull, roiling and overpowering his composure and nearly his sanity every second. He wanted, he requested an immediate remedy which I could not provide. We brainstormed. Ketamine therapy through the V.A. Consider psilocybin. EMDR in town. Rage room. Psychiatric medication referral posthaste. The recourse of a safety hospitalization.

 

He knew, on his own and through therapy, that the extremity of his trauma pain was his war experience fused to years of child abuse. He didn’t know why the trauma would have resurged now when everything in his life was going very well – career, great partner, kids, money, home. I took a minute to offer a provisional explanation: Many trauma victims manage to maintain self-control, self-inhibition, when under siege. For example, when they are in a potentially dangerous environment, such as domestic violence victims. It is only later when they are safe – in a good relationship, when their defenses no longer need to cover their truth, that suppressed pain and rage will be released.

 

I did suggest a process that might help him. Actually, that would help heal him to the depth of his psyche if it could be used. I recalled that a client from years ago, the most ripped up and demolished man I have ever known, never lost his berserker-level rage over three years of therapy. I had failed, and I knew why. He had never grieved as deeply as possible, had never reached his most awful tears of the raped and crazy-made child. The bawling he did in session after session was always polluted and held suspended in air by his rage and the chemistry of his adult personality. It could never reach the core. He would have had to regress, to be a child, to be my child. But I didn’t hold this tough guy. I didn’t let him weep in my arms. This wasn’t a holding back owing to the ethical mandates of therapy, but from my own fear of his tragic power. He would have been a hurricane of pain and sadness, and I was not that strong.

 

My client, now, was asked to cry in his wife’s arms, to unload everything he could feel. Having learned my lesson, I was ready to be that restorative parent for him, but he was too much the soldier to accept it. His wife could contain everything that hurt in him. That would be the way. Can he be brave enough to do that?

Clients who can't be helped #3, aka I appear to be ChatGPT "regenerate"*

This is another of my very unpleasant posts whose only redeeming value is that it speaks the truth. There are many therapy clients who will not change, think better, feel better, act better, improve one whit, whether they attend for three weeks or three years. I’m not just talking about those with personality disorders whose character, outlook and feeling nature are a whole wide world of self-soothing that hovers over and protects their infant that never left the crib. They won’t change, though they may want to believe they did. The narcissist will not become humble, though with the right acid therapy he may see that he’s wrong to feel so right. The dependent personality will never feel right to be on her own. The borderline may think Dialectical Behavioral Therapy day and night, but it will be a loose straitjacket, easy to shake off in a fit.

 

Many clients are enthusiastic about, or just keep coming to, therapy, who are there to – without realizing it – entertain and reject insights and uncomfortable feelings almost as a kind of spectator sport, just as we admire movie war heroes but wouldn’t want to be where they are. There’s the psychosomatic man who will never walk back into the fire of his childhood to burn it away, the psychosomatic woman who is still little and can’t become an adult. There are the “ADHD” adults who have been sprinting away from feeling their whole lives, either because of birth or a bad family. Feeling would reverse them at the speed of light to their helpless childhood. There are the many thinkers and intellectuals who can never, quoting Fritz Perls, lose their mind and come to their senses. Feeling would be darkness and death to them – unexistence. I suppose all these clients feel that something must be happening in therapy, and that wish may sustain them for quite a while.

 

But I would say “don’t be sad.”** It’s hard for anyone to change. Maybe the most somber truth is that clients come to therapy with the hope for some life-changing epiphany or decades-delayed feeling expression, but then find it not enjoyable to stay in their underground place where the sharks and gold are. After some powerful exposure, they instantly find themselves back in their waking dream of the here-and-now.

 

I want every single one of my clients to become different. That’s my hope when they first come in and each time they appear. Four months down the road, though, I know they are – without realizing it – more stubborn than I am. They are “winning.”

 

But then I’m stubborn again and try again to move something in them. It’s not a battle or a sport, just all that therapy can do.

 

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* When I had completed this post, I remembered that I had addressed the same problem three years earlier. This is a somewhat flaccid version of the more intricate earlier one:

https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2020/04/self-destruct-1-clients-who-cant-be.html.

 

** Inspired by Charles Bukowski, Bluebird, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmWZOsVtqR0.