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.