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.

Fantasy impromptu #9: Are you lovable?

What does it mean to feel lovable (alternate and equally correct spelling "loveable")? Or even to believe that you are lovable? I do not know. I do not know it at all, because it’s never been a feeling I’ve had or a belief that reaches some "place" inside me (despite the evidence I receive). I’d say that it’s the same feeling, or problem, of “feeling loved.” I don’t know that, either. I question my clients who say “I know that my parents love me. . . .” because they are likely saying they never felt their parents' love. But I am in the same, or similar, boat: I "know" my wife loves me, but I don’t know how to feel it.

 

This is preamble to my asking a client recently: Do you feel lovable? He’s had dreams in which his wife is leaving him. When he wakes up overwhelmed, and through the day, he asks her: “Do you love me?” We pointed out the obvious: If he felt loved, he wouldn’t feel the need to keep asking, irrespective of whether she actually loves him or not (she consistently and probably wearily says she does).

 

Many of us don’t feel good when complimented, when feted, when given love. Now, I have an almost orgasmically wonderful feeling when I know I’ve done something to make my wife feel happy or more secure – such as bringing home a really good paycheck. It’s a fused feeling of “good about myself” and “love for her.” That’s different. To feel lovable and loved requires something in childhood that many of us never received: the specific ingredients of love. Parents' inexplicable feeling of it, which is selfless. Calm and caring touch in babyhood and throughout childhood. Feeding on time, congruent empathic responses on mother’s face, parents’ respect for our self, their interest in us, positive words, absence of malign or benign neglect, and many other factors. Not to receive these gifts is pain, pain that keeps us frozen in need, need that hurts and which we must bury. And when buried, difficult to find, difficult to feel. The only way we could ever have that mysterious feeling of being loved would be to regress so deeply and powerfully back to babyhood – only in therapy – that our therapist would become the healer, the lover, the parent we never had.

 

Easy. Not easy.