Manifesto: The new Republicans

I picture a new kind of virtue, created by today’s Republicans not from inspiration but from their progressive, collective disturbance. It is a virtue where lying is diamond-strong and radiant. It creates a new world they want to live in, minds and mindset that can’t be moved by reality. It makes them men and women of perverse mystery, eliciting the other side's secret impotence and awe and the sense that the world has become fantasy, that reality has failed. We can't grasp how M.T. Greene speaks pure gibberish and doesn’t collapse altogether in her fake life. We don’t know how George Santos the life-faker lives, an exotic new breed that thrives without oxygen, on an empty inner core, something that should be impossible. We know that people deny all thirty-thousand-five-hundred-and-seventy-three lies* that Trump told over his four years. We once thought that being earthbound, honest and decent in the world was implicit. This may have been the child's bedrock assumption, but it held through time the way bedrock holds beneath skyscrapers. We “sane” ones can grieve this loss, but ultimately we may need – to co-opt Greene’s dream – a “national divorce,” not a political or geographical divorce, but a psychological one.

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* https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-false-or-misleading-claims-total-30573-over-four-years/.

Human side of therapist #1*: People with anxiety annoy me

Notice: This little piece is tongue-in-cheek, but not really, but maybe yes. It is dedicated, for some reason, to my sister.

 

A fair number of clients present solely with “anxiety.” It may be pointed out later in their therapy that depression is obvious, too, but that’s not their primary concern. No – it’s having the heebie-jeebies, the willies, being frightened of nothing and scared shitless, worried about the real, the rare, the remote and the ridiculous. They are on fire, walkin’, talkin’, flexing it up on my couch: panicky loosey-goosey and jackhammer dance-o-rama.

 

They feel jittery on the inside and then believe their life is jittery. Freaking out “to the manner born.”**

 

It is always serious. And it is a blockbuster. Some big study, back when I took a few psych courses preparatory to my Master’s program, said that anxiety – not depression – was the “number one” mental health problem in the United States. That still startles me a little. It seems so much more natural to picture the whole world depressed rather than skittish.

 

Somehow – and you know it’s true – depression seems like a legitimately stuck disorder, embedded deep and long, even as the depressive character; while anxiety feels like it should just be momentary, PRN to an occasion then passing. This is affirmed in the existence of Depressive Personality Disorder*** (DSM-IV axes for further study) and the absence of Anxious Personality Disorder. Actually, I have proposed an AnxPD, which I established in individuals who never grew up psychologically as they lived under the thumb of sick caregivers and remained fey dependents through their adulthood.****

 

The rest, though, normal people with jobs and families and mundane ADLs*****, and trepidation (a client’s favorite word for it) running on the inside. “Oh, come on,” I want to say with sweet sardonicism. “Can’t you take that sensation, see that it applies to nothing in your life now, and construe it as some residue of past crap, like indigestion from last night’s dinner?” Or: “Can’t you get angry at it, tell it to eat shit, over-power it because you are more powerful in your life?” This should be a rock-paper-scissors finesse. Depression covers anger like a thick blanket, but anger should cover fear. You hear a bump in the night and you ignore it or intrepidly check it out with a big knife in your hand.

 

But no. The person is beside himself: He is not all there. The understanding I convey is that this anxiety comes from childhood, when it was still fear and fear prevented identity******: I have no one to lean on – the crux of anxious insecurity – so I can’t grow a self. There was not a formed person yet because he had no purchase in a bond. Fear became his nature, and that led to self-soothing, the only bulwark against sensing his identity flaw. All the self-soothing behaviors found to stave off identity panic: obsessive-compulsive rituals, music, masturbation, school, imaginary good parents, thinking, alcohol, cigarettes, jobs, attitudes and philosophies, hatreds and other delusions. They are very versatile, because we use them for depression, too.

That is my understanding. But I realize that if I really understood anxiety, I would know why I was a vessel of anxiety throughout my childhood but do not experience it now outside of brief, instant situations. Somehow a steadfast theme – of Edenic goodness or confidence or some other molecule? – replaced it. I recommend that, but can’t explain it.

 

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* Actually, probably #346.

** https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/to-the-manner-born.html

*** https://courses.lumenlearning.com/atd-herkimer-abnormalpsych/chapter/depressive-personality-disorder/

**** https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2013/11/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none_22.html

***** “Activities of Daily Living,” one of the drabbest concepts in the mental status exam.

****** https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2015/01/idiosyncrasies-2-storm-of-eye.html

Soldier for life

I have an intuition about why a 34-year-old client dropped out of therapy after three sessions. Though young, he had served more than ten years in the Army where he experienced excruciating moral injury, near death and witness traumas. His life was changed for the negative by these crises while he “loved” the “feeling of Iraq, where I mattered.” The client did not join the military after high school. He had experienced more than ten years of physical abuse in his childhood home and his first escape was to sex, “narcissism” and alcohol in college. Then it was time to fight.

 

“Broderick’s” presenting problems were Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and anger, which would manifest in spontaneous black-out (or “red-out,” citing the domestic violence literature) blow-ups. He wanted to know how to prevent these berserker explosions that happened at the speed of heat and light. Third session, we had digressed to a discussion about his pervasively cynical view of life and people. In the last few minutes, to redeem the hour, I brought up the anger issue.

 

From the session Progress Note: “Client wants to return to work on his ‘anger’ and the near-impossibility of intervening before it carries the day destructively. I provided one point of view, having to do with allowing oneself to be vulnerable. That is, to feel hurt rather than rageful in the face of an insult.”

 

In the previous session, I had cited a case of mine, twenty-three years earlier, of a domestic battery client in mandated group counseling. I told Broderick that the man, a Viet Nam War veteran, had cried when he described the physical abuse he had suffered at his father’s hands. He cried but did not rage, though rage had long been his medium of exchange in difficult situations. Rage would have seemed natural, because he could now feel the power of his adult precarious status and of his broken childhood and all the years of loneliness that followed.

 

But being vulnerable to the pain of loss beneath the rage of injustice was what saved him. Collapsing in his child grief, head on his arms in the middle of a group of ten other tough and injured men, gave him the voice and the listeners to his life. Collapsing gave him strength, the strength of his true self.

 

This is what the last three minutes of my client’s third session was meant to convey. In the infinitesimal fraction of a second before hurt turns to blind, destructive fury, fall. Be hurt. Weep. Bleed thirty-four years of pain. That is the cure.

 

The cure he didn’t want to know.

The very important concept that I hate: "Boundaries"

A client recently brought in a book on “boundaries” by two Christian psychologists. The book is very meaningful to him and I listened to his enthusiastic testimonial. I didn’t want to say anything because my client enjoys talking with me, and because I have never been happy about this Special Deluxe Meme of Psychology.

 

My feelings about it are slightly sick. There are various facets of this sick. One, the concept is shallow. “Put up a wall” of sorts, is all it says. Two, it is negative. Rather than the positive “have good self-esteem so you care about yourself," it says “wear armor.” Plus, the whole self-helpy tone of it, such an adolescent-sounding slogan that never quite grew up.

 

Not to ignore the other side of the wall: those peremptory sorts who don’t recognize other people's boundaries – where they leave off and the other person begins. We had an Asperger’s apartment-mate for a year and some months, 25 years old, who would skip up to me while I was writing Progress Notes and Assessments, stand at my side with a silent deer-like stare, assuming that I was permeable, that I had time and attention to give her. My wife, a social worker and nurse, gave her lessons in boundaries, probably a hundred times with many different blunt and nuanced speeches, some louder than others. But boundaries was not something that she couldn’t do. Boundaries was something she couldn’t be. And that is my main problem with the concept.

 

A person doesn’t “have” boundaries: She is emotionally aware of her self as a person of value and therefore others’ selves as persons of value. She feels her own privacy and peace, her own difference, and others’ privacy and peace and difference. Without the first feeling there won’t be the second. Someone with no self-esteem will be intruded upon and is likely to intrude upon others, a fact that may be missed as she is likely to be afraid of the other person. She will timidly and ignorantly step into their space as she doesn’t know integrity in her bones. (This will include, paradoxically, the Narcissistic or Antisocial character, who has only prosthetic self-esteem and fear at the deepest base of his psycho-history.)

 

You can’t teach someone boundaries, many books notwithstanding. All these blessings to be strong, be courageous, say ‘no,’ be assertive, love oneself, stop apologizing, set limits, sung by television stars and girl singers, deflating the currency of psychology to sweet nothings. What therapy can do is change the person’s inner weakness to strength, her fake smile and numbing and compromising to real feelings and armed guards. That’s not establishing “boundaries.” It’s growing a whole person.

Ephemeral post: My simplest parent statement ever

I've recently worked with two teenagers, a girl and a boy, whose parents punished them for feeling bad. Bedroom doors removed – yes, taken off the hinges; video games and cell phones confiscated; friend visits prohibited. The girl's bedroom door was removed and she was forbidden from seeing her friends after she made a suicide attempt. The 16-year-old boy, parking his father's manual shift vehicle, didn't know (or possibly didn't remember) to put it in first gear. It rolled back and bumped the car parked behind it and got a minor dent. His father, furious, prohibited him from driving for a year. Worn down by years of similar punishments-by-neurotic-revenge, the young man tried to hang himself. "My parents didn't actually care, it seemed," he said. He called 9-8-8, an ambulance arrived and took him to the hospital. When he came home a week later, his parents locked him down.

 

In the news today, one reads about several high school bullies who drove a 14-year-old girl to suicide.

 

I tell my clients that "therapy is a non-judgmental process. The rationale is that everything that comes from the person – their thoughts, feelings, words, behavior, their nature itself – is valid. There are always legitimate reasons – not necessarily socially acceptable ones – for any behavior. The reasons have to do with pain, sometimes deeply buried pain, and my primary job is to find it and help mitigate it."

 

I don't tell my clients that I don't judge their parents. I do judge them. Parents who are bullies and whose children are bullies should be in jail or should be court-ordered to counseling, at least half-a-year of it as adjudicated Domestic Violence perpetrators are. The only exception is for the most part fantasy: The parent comes to therapy because he knows he is a problem and wants help. I’ve seen that happen fewer than half-a-dozen times in twenty-four years.