Micro-book: Pessimistic Psychology

Pessimistic Psychology

Part One. Introduction

Chapter 1: Old baby psych

All the psychology you read talks to the adult. But there are no adults. There are just old bodies that left their child behind. It has never died. Its heart is still beating from below, its eyes are still looking out. We, old bodies, live in a fragile dream of now, fragile because reality has more power than it. The reality that we are still our roots, our beginning. On our deathbed, we will remember, and be remembered by, our child self.

It is fine to throw away all the disorder labels, because they are just containers of injury, loss, soul death, pain, and our mind and body behavior that comes from them. The so-called disorders are essentially all the same. Anxiety and depression and anger, sadness and aimless energy and the false self that has covered us. You don't need labels to come for help. You don't need diagnoses to be helped,

You need your Rosebud. Your telltale heart.

Chapter 2: Come in

Most everyone is a lost soul. We can't live our rare childhood love anymore. It was taken from us and buried. We're older now. Time has jailed us. We may picture that distant Eden, but to go there feels like dying.

You may not know this in your therapy. Your therapist, believing you can retrieve your happiness from some magical source, won't know it either. Together, you'll be on the same blank page.

But if you come to depth therapy, what could be called time and space therapy, you'll be helped to see the cosmos whether you want to or not. Within it is the potential for contentment. You may quit, or you may stay.

Chapter 3: Stay

It's ok to be the audience for a brief moment, sitting upright, saying what you know or believe you know about yourself. Describing feelings you have or that you think you have. It is necessary to sit and listen to facts about psychological nature. But then you need to sit back, get sloppy, lie down on the sofa. Now you're adult and child, wide and deep like the ocean. If fortunate, you won't know what to say. How do you paint the ocean? So you say anything or nothing, or you cry. Even if you know it's your child that needs to be seen, you or it won't know what to say or do.

Part Two. Beginning

Chapter 4: You think you have a feeling, or you have an idea

You may say you're depressed, but since you don't know what that means, it would be better to say you feel bad and don't know what it is. In some hundreds of years, therapists will be able to pluck the childhood pain from your brain and from the cells in your body. But they will never know how to create the years of growth and maturity that never happened.

You may say you have anxiety. You don't know why your body has dread, or why you worry and fear chronically. Lying down, you should shake, cry, moan. Then deeper, cry for mommy and daddy, need a hug and a hand to hold. Then deeper, you are drowned in the losses in your childhood, seeing your angry father, being completely alone and invisible in your family in a moment and in all the years.

You feel something else is wrong. You may not know that you feel out of sync with the world, embarrassing or invalid to be in the present moment. It would be best if your therapist could tell you this, which would be galling yet supportive. Therapy is not what people have been taught it is, a place to talk, to cry or name a feeling, get a new perspective on your life, people, the future. That's having a friend. Therapy could be defined as the penultimate moment:

The moment before it's too late.

Chapter 5: There is no here-and-now

To believe we live in the present is to be a person treading water in the middle of the ocean, sharks and other single-minded murderers swimming beneath, and looking up at the wide blue sky, thinking: “This moment is beautiful. The day is mine and it is unique. I am in love with life.” In therapy, you need to be in touch with yourself as your history, as a galaxy of feeling sensations that started in your childhood and that became you. Words are timeless: They completely exist outside of past time, moving time, and are barely your time. They are poor labels with little meaning. Neuroscientists don’t understand consciousness, and similarly our words are alien squeaks. People say “love” and they don’t mean it, they mean something else, a dozen somethings else. They say “hate” and they mean “I am hurt.” They say “I’m fine” and they say “thank you” when their history has made them incapable of gratitude. They say “I am sad” and in doing so, they ignore molecules of anger at their life.

 

The more you talk in therapy, the more you are incomprehensible.

Chapter 6: A human being is a universe of defenses

 

A person is a homunculus of defenses. There is hardly a thought that isn't an escape from a feeling. There is no belief system that is not a soother, a plush bed and feathery pillow, whether it’s a religion, a political party, a conspiracy theory, an intellectual opus, an advice book, a mantra or philosophy. If you are not writhing on fire and screaming until your vocal cords burn out of you, you can thank your thoughts, even the most truth-telling, anxious and depressing ones.

 

Depth therapy is a battle between fire and tears. Tears put out some of the fire, but you must be burning up first. That is present pain based in childhood loss, from which no one has ever recovered. When my dog died in 2001, I knew I would never cease grieving, because the feeling of her loss was one with all the devastating losses of my childhood. One was all, and could not be otherwise. I don’t know if people realize that’s what grief is: It calls forth our whole life, weighted to our beginning. If I could have cried, then, loud and long enough to honor all of my pain, I would be better than I am now. But it was just me, alone with my euthanized dog in Cañon City, Colorado, late at night in a room in a veterinary clinic. Alone does not work for grieving.

Chapter 7: False hope

 

Therapy is sabotaged time and again – time eternal – by birth. A child may be born in crack cocaine withdrawal, screaming not crying, in the pain and rage that prevents all bonding and human connection: the psychopath. He may be premature and incubated, too late for the beautiful bond, to become pure need and pure rejection crushed together. She may have that oxytocin bond to a mother who has no maturity, to form an unrequited love for the rest of her life. This is the one, this is the millions who will forever need their mother and will forever be starved by her. She will never separate and she will never join, never be held. She will wander yet never move. Where does therapy go? All her moods are blended with hope and starvation and will not be improved by techniques or advice. If therapy wants her to “individuate,” to cut the cord and walk away, she can’t. If it wants her to think positive, positive thoughts will be stillborn, and she will carry them precariously. If therapy wants her to regress to finally release her childhood pain, that is too dangerous: She is still too much the child, and process strips away the adult that has given her refuge.

 

And still therapy goes on. As far as you’ll allow.

Chapter 8: Therapy is too-late love that must be rejected

 

We are trying to heal our past. There are two real, and countless artificial, means of healing. We change when our whole life is suddenly stirred. But the stirring has to be violent or disruptive enough to pour some of the original pain out of our vessel. This happened to me, to a certain degree, when I realized that I was not a defective piece of life, an error of life, but rather an injured soul. After forty-two years, I was awakened. Some pain left me. Had at that moment I wept enough to flood the earth, I would be more healed than I am. The past was changed, because some chemicals of the past evaporated.

 

The second part of healing is to become the child again and finally be loved. Everyone can feel the truth of this if they want to. If we could only go back, return to that loneliness and those moments of injustice and be true to our feeling, and be loved when we are, we would heal. We would wake up in a different world. Unfortunately, this does not happen. People are in terror of going there, regressing that deeply, and they do not want the therapist to be their ultimate parent, their loved one.

 

Too bad.

Part Three. In the midst

Chapter 9: You may have to destroy many things

 

Ralph Klein, M.D., of The Masterson Approach to personality disorder, said that individuals with borderline personality come to therapy to feel better, not to get better. I am certain this could be said of most clients, no matter their diagnosis or problem. Getting better must be seen this way: It is to change, to become different from who you are, not merely to be the same person but to somehow feel better, a drugged brain. Picture what this means at the core. In your therapy, something has happened that has changed your heart, has changed your feelings, has changed your understanding. You now see the world in a different way, see people differently. The personality you've been is behind you. The ground beneath your feet feels different. You suddenly can no longer tolerate your family's personality, their abuse, their denial, their enmeshment, their sarcasm and condescending, their minimizing or controlling you. You reject them or stand tall, and they reject you and stand small because they have never grown. You feel heavier, more serious, and yet light, a new lightness. You may laugh less, but wiser. You no longer people-please. You see your childhood being rewritten: you now know the truth. It is not the fable that you had believed.

The modern culture of therapy is to assume you'll be happier by rational talk and encouraging new behavior. That is a fantasy: Therapy cannot do this. Change means the destruction of the old, questioning everything, and it means growth without growing up. It is unique, and it is alone.

Chapter 10: The goal never, yet partly, to be reached

 

The ultimate goal, of course, is to become the perfect child: spontaneous and deliberate, confident by birth, curious and quickened by everything in the world and the universe, quiet and busy, full of imagination and creativity, equipped to feel all possible feelings even the worst, so secure and un-bottled-up that there will be no global beliefs, hates and prejudices, with nearly every vicissitude of life set upon a proton – from a good in-utero nine months – not an electron. This won't happen, sad enough: We won't even be spontaneous, before therapy and certainly not after therapy, because therapy gives us a surfeit of self-awareness of good and bad.

 

This is true even of feeling-based therapy – banish the evils of cognitive therapy that wants your life to rest upon a thought. But feeling therapy can bring a new spontaneity (that blends with new consciousness): It can invite the exonerated child to leave its prison cell. I, myself, am more spontaneous and childlike now than in the past, when I would have to guard against my immaturity.

 

So that's where it goes: facing the worst, being the worst, being naked and bleeding and protected, to ultimately be yourself.

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