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.