The never-serene self

Twenty-nine-year-old married mother of an infant and a toddler. Excerpts from two progress notes:

“Client said: ‘I may have anxiety or depression. I'm not sure what is causing it but there are many days that I wake up with no energy to do anything or there are days that I can't stop feeling anxious. I have noticed that I have bad mood swings when I am feeling this way so for my family and work I wanted to speak to someone to get help.’ She said: ‘I have no motivation,’ a problem that comes ‘at random. I don't want to get out of bed.’ She described the depressive feeling as ‘empty, nothing.’ She said she has ‘no reason to be feeling like that.’”

“On two separate but related occasions, she informed her father that ‘I'm your daughter. You should care about my feelings more than your own.’

“Client was asked to look at her assumptions about her relationship with her father, whom she has feared from childhood to now, from a different perspective. She had told him that he should care about her feelings more than he cares about his own because ‘I'm your daughter.’ I suggested that he should care about her feelings because ‘you're an adult and should be respected by him as an equal.’ It was pretty clear that she is not comfortable with the idea that she is an adult of equal status, and that she would prefer to remain her father's 'little girl,’ in fear and injustice.

Which perspective, which principle, is right? To be the adult-child whose parent should be in perpetual reparations mode for all the past harm he’s done: the accepting, empathic and self-sacrificial “bigger” person? The adult-child who should finally be important to her parent, who is owed love long delayed? To have a parent whose own never-met childhood needs for understanding and respect must be set aside for his daughter’s long-delayed justice rather than immaturely imposed on her?

Or to be the ascendant adult who survived her nearly killed childhood and will not be victimized and needy anymore? The adult whose natural self-esteem could not form in the poisonous air of abuse but who has adopted logical self-esteem: knowing with brittle conviction that she is her parent’s and anyone else’s equal in dignity and mentality and autonomy, and that she must be treated so?

Are both inner child and adult valid? Do they both exist in the same person? Can one be invoked, then the other, by chance or intent? Or must they coexist simultaneously in some way, some strange fusion that can only reconditely be expressed?

Should my client both make demands of, and prostrate herself before, her father? Or should she show herself to be the real adult, the fragile adult who rejects him for his endless failure of unconditional love? Should her father always care for himself as a wounded soul who was never given nurturance and healing, see this as his ineradicable truth? Or should he once again bury his real self, as he had to in his childhood, for the sake of his daughter?

This is the unsolvable paradox of the person and of therapy.

Notice how quantum gravity physics is identical to psychology

This is the story of a superstring, the smallest possible and only constituent of existence comprising everything and nothing. He doesn’t know what he is, what he’s made of. He is hemmed in by other superstrings. He doesn’t know why he vibrates, constantly bumping into others. He wonders Why all are identical and when did this happen? He notices that it feels implicitly right to move as he moves, to go where he goes, exactly as if he willed himself. He remembers that during random moments spread across trillions of millennia he would realize that questions have no answers, but the insight was jostled out of him time and time again. He feels trapped – there is no escaping this crush of strings and no escaping the circle of the universe – yet free. He wonders how many there are like him.

He would be unmanned to know that he is not made of anything – he is the quiddity and the general, the irreducible fact, the answer that has no question – and that he has always existed.

By nature, he is impressionable, is influenced by the other one-dimensional particles. This gives him material for thought and imagination, hiding the ultimate eternal boredom that his existence is.

He is lonely in a crowd. 

The universe, he guesses, is eyes, and eyes only see what they are. Limitless time and space, he senses, are inevitable jokes.

But in his vibration that never ceases, there is music. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0VhKERbhkE.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIDQrU9kzhQ.

Clients who need a Weiss's pastrami sandwich shoved up their arse

I wonder if there is a company that produces robots that are sent to therapy to spew stories, brook no interruption, have no capacity to listen, project universal wisdom, and cannot conceive, in any way at all, of changing anything about themselves.

They are here to “F” with the real world.

These robots show up at my office not infrequently. I’ve seen enough of them and am ready to throw some moderately heavy, dull-pointed metal object at their forehead, chest or crotch – their “off switch” – to get them to shut up and to discombobulate their “zero insight” subroutine.

Since they are actually people, the best intervention would be to say to them: “You are talking, not listening, you are acting as if you know everything, and it is clear that you have never thought of changing anything about yourself. Or possibly you did think of it once in the privacy of your mind, but as soon as you came into this room that flew out the window and now you want to give speeches. You will need to stop that immediately, if you want help.”

The robot-person is now disturbed – sudden silence – as their inner Twilight Zone reveals the heads of ghouls and the twiddling toes of their inner infant, as I begin my end-stage renaissance as a therapist.

Reparenting

I suspect that the last theory most therapists would want to accept is that our job is to reparent our clients. This is in no way the meaning of Cognitive therapists’ paternalistic (but secret) sense that genuflecting at the altar of Albert Ellis bestows upon them the ability to think more logically and rationally than their clients do.

Reparenting assumes a depth therapy of pain discharge and degrees of healing of the past. Our clients are injured in time just as physicians’ patients are injured in body. Thinking is their present palliative of old pain – their drug, their band-aid, not their medicine or surgery. When we help a client regress to her childhood disaster we must be there as the parent should have been, to be the ultimate strong and caring listener and believer of her real self. The person she can finally lean on, crash into.

The notion that we are just a discussant, feeling facilitator or teacher is so wrong because it assumes our client is his adult character. He is not that: He is still a child. As are we, but it is our time to help.

Sensitivity alert: Don't read this if you're a baby

Congratulations to my three clients this year who have disowned their toxic parents and family or are “in process.” Yes, this sounds ugly. But look at the alternative: those who remain stuck in their childhood bedroom in spirit. It matters not that they have careers and partners and children and friends. They have converted a sordid past into the rotten present, despite what bells and whistles and nice rationalizations they have attached to it. None of them has the feeling of being their own person. Part of them is always sitting, unmanned and soft, on their father's lap. Giving parents money, listening to sister’s terrified beg to pretend to be a happy family, “needing” their children to have grandparents, malignant as they are, having an “adult” relationship now with an always cold, intellectual parent, taking their money, caretaking them, telling yourself your childhood was great, remaining afraid of a Nazi-like father who should spend his life in prison, contemning while catering to them.

The one, single, only, unique factor that differentiates psychic adults from psychic adult-children is this: Have they put their parents in their place or do they drink from the empty teat of neediness. All else may look the same about them in the outer world, but in therapy (and in their own constructed family), their depression, anxiety, failure to thrive permeate the air in the room and all come from one source: their family that didn’t live and won't die.

My first lazy post of all time: Mid-life crisis

In response to today’s Washington Post article, “Middle age shouldn’t be a drag. How a 'chrysalis' mind-set can help.” Subtitle: “Author and hospitality guru Chip Conley wants to replace the midlife crisis with a midlife renaissance.”

I’d recommend not listening to fake-happy fools who tell you how to goose your mind into feeling better. If you’re facing the ‘crisis’ of being 50 or 60, it’s likely to be an identity issue – a dormant depression issue – that has roots all the way back to childhood. Many people wake up in middle age and realize they ‘don’t know who they are’ or feel like imposters or lack a sense of meaning. It’s not because half their life is over or they’re spooked by a number. It’s mostly that by then, the big challenges of life (college, career, marriage, house, kids grown, savings) have been met or normalized, there is no next-big-thing to distract them, and they’ve plateaued. The past is opportunistic: Without distractions in its way, it will percolate into the brain and materialize its dormant depression. A good time for therapy.

The past is opportunistic. It will always catch you, despite your aluminum foil hat, your Cognitive Therapy, your halcyon here-and-now life. Face it or be replaced by it.