Military life is a second abusive childhood

For many soldiers and veterans, the military years are a second abusive childhood. There is the recapitulated flawed separation-individuation phase, the first few years when recruits are the vassals of superiors who establish arbitrary rules, exercise sole power and require absolute obeisance. They are essentially tabula rasa again, with a few genetic predispositions. They sacrifice and subsume themselves or don't survive. Immature parents create sick bonds during the first three years which are the starting gate of personality disorders such as Borderline Personality. Will the infant gain the potential for healthy autonomy, or will the psychic umbilical cord remain attached in engulfment and rejection, in abject dependency, in schizoid alienation, in psychopathy or narcissism? Will the infant soldier somehow become an individual, or will his fundamental inchoateness be schooled by a new troubled master?

Following this second separation-individuation is their second latency stage and adolescence (the remainder of their original four- or six- or eight-year contract) where this time they must ditch whatever sense of a complex and caring world they may have had. Their friendships are forged in the landscape of subjection, humiliation, near-seamless surveillance and a life whose theme song is “we live to kill people.” Friendships that form in combat are a unique blood bond, or rather a bleeding bond where love is trauma. In an ambiance of two-dimensional humanity – right/wrong, good/evil, strong/weak, masculine/feminine, categorical/indecisive, calloused/emotional, superior/inferior – the formatively-injured psyche is recaptured and re-tortured right at the moment (late teens, early twenties) when it might have meaningfully escaped the family hypnosis.*

A veteran, twenty years post-service, said during a session: “They try to break you then rebuild you into the kind of person they want you to be. They put a way of thinking into your brain, different from normal people. You’re told to end people’s lives.” “They take empathy away from you. They definitely strip you of that.” “They want you to be submissive to them. They want to break your mindset. It’s definitely a cult.”

A Psych textbook, many years ago, cited research indicating that soldiers who came from a troubled childhood were, in similar combat or combat-adjacent circumstances, more likely to be diagnosed with PTSD than those who came from a healthier childhood. They are also the ones who, in high school, are more likely to choose the military, a peculiar choice – and occupation – when one’s country's survival is not at stake. Few if any other professions feature a prisoner re-education camp format or require the calcifying of one’s heart and the re-infantilizing and concretizing of one’s psyche.

More than a few of the veterans I’ve seen suffered deliberate, ongoing mental torture by one particular psychopathic superior officer, someone who should have been cowering in a dungeon, not cavalier in the upper ranks. These veterans were changed forever, raped to a new philosophy by the evil they endured in lonely, masculine indifference within a Kafka-esque FUBAR bureaucracy conceived by sociopaths over many illustrious generations.

It's one of the amazing ignorances of the world that recruits don’t know they are entering their second childhood when they join the military. They believe they are starting their adult life, maybe a life of great meaning and idealism. Instead, they have fallen backwards into the formative tragedy of their lives – child's helplessness and confusion and powerlessness, bullying, loneliness, unfair punishments, tedious chores, that awful second- or seventh-grade teacher – a nightmare of psychological regression. And permanent regression, because they leave the military as they left their childhood, having never formed their own center. The “false self” – a seminal principle in psychology – is the consequence of most lives that adapted, from infancy, to the needs and neuroses of powerful others. The military man and woman have redoubled that falseness, present upon past. They don’t know their self, twice co-opted.

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* A term conceived by psychotherapist David Calof in Multiple Personality and Dissociation: Understanding Incest, Abuse and MPD.

The most eye-rolling of defenses

My client, a retired physician, has always gone astray in her search for a good man. She is attracted to confident, masterful (and well-dressed) men, feeling implicitly just right to want to be taken care of and protected. I, on the other hand, a hard-working male therapist, feel manly and good to be the earner, providing a sense of security for my wife.

Here we are, two of the billions of adequately intelligent people who marched brainwashed into the right belief system bequeathed to us by history and television, the stalwart man and the limp starry-eyed woman.

This may be a stretch (I don’t think so), but I suspect that even the sweetest guys and the toughest women harbor, beneath their Freudian preconscious, these same ego-syntonic* and delicious urges: protectee and protector. Ayn Rand, most adamantine of women with her “virtue of selfishness,” her casting deviators from her Objectivist philosophy into the fire, her apotheosis of atheism and capitalism and her deification of rationality, believed that the essence of femininity is male hero-worship and therefore that a woman should never be, for example, president of the United States.

I think it’s valid to ask if these stereotypes (or archetypes**) are fundamentally right or fundamentally wrong. Can there actually be something instinctively “looking up” (at a man) in the female genome, something “looking down” in boys’ and men’s? What if world history has simply perpetuated certain self-medicating defense mechanisms as prosthetic egos when real self-esteem is lacking? “Boys better than girls” no different than "men superior to women" no different than “Whites superior to Blacks,” no different than Jews more “chosen” than you,*** no different than parents better than their children?

If we look to depth psychology – the terrible place where we are all still three years old, the inner child crawling wounded from infancy to grave – we’ll find that my client's and women's need to need is half right and that men's script of superiority is all wrong. How? The women have allowed themselves, maybe unconsciously, to feel dependency, the unfinished child’s rightness to have someone to lean on, to collapse to, to look to for wisdom, the eternal bond to the perfect(-seeming) Mother or Father. Where women have erred is in accepting that it is the opposite sex, rather than the Platonic parent, who stands on a pedestal in their DNA.

The emotionally ingenious men who can feel this dependency in themselves will be holistically cleared of a poisonous obstruction in their lives, the conceit of macho godliness. They will be rid of a delusion that slowly breaks their backs, warps their spirit, and cuts short their lives. Ayn Rand was right about this: These false Atlases need to shrug. She didn’t know that they need to fall into their mother’s arms, in fact or memory or loss.

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* “Ego-syntonic” – basically meaning “in harmony with one's dysfunction.” For example, someone with Major Depressive Disorder doesn't like being depressed. But a Depressive Personality-disordered person is ego-syntonically fine to be miserable, morose, pessimistic, sure that the future will be as bleak as the past and present.

** Carl Jung conceived a few archetypes embodying traditional male and female roles, such as the hero, the great mother, the wise old man, the maiden, the anima and animus.

*** TPS is of Jewish lineage and therefore feels that he has standing to make objective comments about the tradition.

Anger or dissolution

A middle-aged woman said that her father was absent in her childhood. “I didn’t like him.” Growing up, she felt that she always had to be “big, strong and brave” because “there was no one to take care of me.” Her stepmother beat her severely. “That’s why I’m angry at women.” Despite “good” therapy a few years ago, her inner child still feels alone and afraid.

“I don’t give mercy and grace to women.” “I don’t like weak women.”

When she got cancer, her husband failed to be her caretaker. “He was concerned for himself.” However, she was “independent.” She joked about having to “kill him.”

Once she was a “pathetic people-pleaser,” a codependent enabler. No longer.

I confronted one of her statements: “I don’t like weak women.” What did she mean by “weak”? Sensitive, feelings easily hurt. I told her that she had been a child whose feelings mattered to no one, she had had to be “big,” and still feels she must be brave and strong and independent. She doesn’t dislike “weak” women: She sees sensitive, feeling women and her aged child feels envious, down to the soles of her feet, of their normal humanity. She was made to be a hard shell and they could be filled with hurt, love, need, life.

She saw that this was true. What could help her? Grieve her stolen childhood, the greatest tragedy that can happen to a person. Dismantle the barbed barricade around her heart. But that unraveling would demolish her powerful anger, her identity attitude, her bigness, her “independence,” her strength. She gave me a saucy stare.

We should all be able to predict, correctly, that she is a Trump admirer and voter.

I probably should have written "here-and-then"

Third in a likely sporadic series of Pessimistic tidbits

There are doubtless some do-gooders who do prosocial acts for sick reasons. They may, for example, hate the rich or be “people-pleasers” whose self-value is to exist for others. (Which is not real self-esteem.) One can bet, though, that most liberals are average people with a good heart. “Populists,” on the other hand, can be globally categorized as neurotic, a term describing persons who unconsciously seek redress for childhood needs and pain through present means. Psychologically, their present is their revenge for their past. The main reason Democrats are feeling helpless to reach their Trumpian nemeses is that they are trying to reason with people who seem to be in the here-and-now, but are in the there-and-then. (Comment to David French's 2/9/25 New York Times article "The Populist Cure Is Worse than the Elite Disease," https://www.nytimes.com/shared/comment/455qtk?rsrc=cshare&smid=url-share)

Therapy is a nonjudgmental process. But can we help a bad person?

Here is an indigestible paradox: Therapy is the most “successful” when it’s the shallowest and least effective. This is to say that Cognitive Therapy can work for anybody, as it’s based on the assumptions that (a) dysfunction is a matter of wrong thinking, and (b) irrational or pessimistic thoughts can be changed by logic and optimism. These assumptions could apply to anyone regardless of their moral system or political ideology. As it goes, the Cognitive approach can only help people who are heavily invested in their severed head, who live in their head and prefer to banish their historical body of emotion, felt sense, pain and developmental abort.

Depth therapy, that changes emotional chemistry by reaching to the origin causes of dysfunction, cannot help individuals who are married to blaming the world, to their love of a sociopathic president, to their antisocial ideologies and attitudes. These cognitive-conceptual stances are based in deep, early-onset pain that they will critically resist feeling else they will collapse into inchoate helplessness.

A woman whose childhood anger is redeemed in hateful leaders and governmental policies. A married couple who prefer the military life – seventy percent of the year – to raising their children, leaving them with friends and relatives. People with a vengeance sense of good and evil, who are deeply and complacently repressed, living on the surface of themselves and not wanting to reach or know their truth. Therapy will not help them.

But Cognitive Therapy can.

Maybe who we really are

Another in a possible sporadic series of Pessimistic tidbits.

I’ve seen a few thousand people in therapy over the past 26 years. Regardless of what they may initially say – “I had a great childhood”; “My parents never hit me” – the fact is that none of them received respectful empathy and unconditional love in their childhood. This doesn’t necessarily mean they had terrible caregivers They may have had distracted, or weak, or immature parents who “meant well.” (Note my challenge: “Parents don’t do their ’best.’ They do their feeling.”) When you consider that the therapy population is only a fraction of the people who are hurt and damaged in their formative years, it is theoretically plausible that a majority of our citizens harbor buried anger, feeble and selective empathy, and a fundamental lack of prosocial feeling. It would take a powerfully inspirational personage – like Obama – to pull them out of their primary self-regard and into a prosocial spirit (“We are all brothers and sisters”; “I care about the poor, the homeless, etc.”). Trump may represent the default id that is angry, self-focused and nihilistic. He may have to fail spectacularly before people’s better angels again find room in their psyche. (Comment to a Washington Post article.)

Ruminating / Overthinking

One in a possible sporadic series of Pessimistic Tidbits.

Overthinking is a form of self-medication, similar to alcohol and drug use, excessive exercise, continual social media immersion, chocolate, etc. It often is kick-started in adolescence, when unhealed childhood pain and injustice must be escaped, moved on from. People escape from feeling by falling upward into their head. It will feel better to think questions and options than to drown in helpless feeling. Like other self-medications, what starts off being helpful or even life-saving will eventually become a major encumbrance. Depth therapy says that returning – regressing – to the original pain and expelling it in its raw form will undermine the need to escape into ruminating and racing thoughts. (New York Times comment, https://www.nytimes.com/shared/comment/44or4o?rsrc=cshare&smid=url-share)

Reparenting

Reparenting in psychotherapy is a term, and concept, fraught with mischief, nonsense and some valid theory and practice. Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy can regress adult clients back to childhood and infancy by memory-feeling access not hypnosis. They might “call out for Mommy and Daddy” and let “imprinted” pain out, a healing process. Paul Vereshack, a Primal Therapist of a slightly different stripe, sometimes encouraged patients to regress to a child state where he, the parent figure, could facilitate reliving and healing:

A woman in her thirties lies in my primal room, adrift in the winds of time. She unconsciously reaches for my hand and begins to play with my fingers. The object of her touching is not romantic or sexual. It is something deadly serious in her search for growth. Slowly she plays with each finger and then, quite unconsciously, she closes my hand and makes it into a fist. She begins to whimper. She is six years old now and she recalls how her daddy used to beat her with his fist. Unconscious necessity, below the level of logic, has impelled her to arrange a congruence; the fist of her therapist has been brought to match the fist of her father. The tumblers fall, defenses clear away and the original event is re-experienced.

Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis featured, for a long time, a Nazi-like version of reparenting ruled over by cult leader-like Jacqui Schiff. Physical violence and pain, authoritarian power and control were inflicted on adult patients who would be treated like infants and prisoners – diapered, toileted, tied down and beaten. (See “A Most Dangerous Method” by Tori Marlan, Reader, August 10, 2000.)

Most contemporary definitions of reparenting have avoided these extremes. They were, I believe, chastened by the scandals associated with Schiff’s use of Transactional Analysis and, to a lesser degree, the radical nature of early Primal Therapy. Now, reparenting is “the conscious act of providing ourselves with the consistent care and understanding we may have missed as children.” It is “a process where an adult works to meet emotional or physical needs that were not met in childhood.” “By nurturing and validating this vulnerable aspect of ourselves, we learn to provide it with the love and protection . . .” Wikipedia features a throwback definition: “Reparenting is a form of psychotherapy in which the therapist actively assumes the role of a new or surrogate parental figure for the client.” “Typically, reparenting starts with the regression of the client to the child ego state. The therapist accomplishes this by partaking in child-rearing acts such as bottle feeding, lap pillows, and other techniques.”

Steven Levenkron, specialist in anorexia and other self-destructive behaviors, described his creation, “nurturant-authoritative psychotherapy,” as reparenting. He worked with adoles­cents who had lost trust in their adult caregivers, no longer emotionally leaned on them, and came to depend on their own self-soothing and identity-forming behaviors. (An anorexic girl might pride herself on being “especially thin.”) Levenkron wanted his young clients, set adrift within themselves, to eventually regress to the child needy of a strong and caring parent figure – himself. To do this, they would have to reach a crisis of dependency, the stressful dilemma of choosing to remain in their pathological state or giving their pain to their therapist re-parent.

I see reparenting as theoretically radical yet valid and therapeutically gentle yet unlikely to happen. No adult can or should be regressed to his baby on fire in the crib – birth trauma – or to helpless, preverbal infancy. For this to be accomplished, all adult defenses, especially the concept-forming, concept-infested mind, would have to be extin­guished – an impossibility. While adults are, in essence, their inner child as identity and feeling founda­tion, they are nevertheless always in the present and must maintain their adult persona. By default, then, Levenkron’s method of reparenting is the only one that may be possible. His anorexic, self-mutilating and obsessive-compulsive children and teens really do need someone to lean on once they are alienated from their parents. Whether this can actually happen in once, twice, or three-times-a-week therapy is the question. Fairbairn’s theory of “return to the bad object” would object. The child would be at a loss – the greatest loss possible – to forsake her frustrating parent for a new-and-improved professional version.

The obtuse side

I presently see several teen clients (15 to 18) of varying degrees of intelligence, maturity, insight and capacity to engage in therapy. To my prescient lack of surprise, not one of them was able to understand or feel the humorous meaning in the several Gary Larson The Far Side cartoons I showed them. Two of them:

 

I cannot remember what caused me to suspect, strongly suspect, that these teens would be at a loss to grasp the irony of a snake suffering mental distress or an insect named Carl, or the nonsense of a man happily whistling in hell, or the anthropomorphizing of a fly requesting his moribund friend's stereo system. I know I was struck by a lack of subtlety in their thinking and feeling: Kids today needing therapy live and breathe psycho-diagnostic memes instead of the felt senses in their own bodies. One young man did have a smart insight. He said that he and his fellow teens learn the world through videos, not still images or the printed word. Rather than their mind insinuating itself like a diamond drill into the captive audience of the image or sentence, it sits bovine-like before the rushing freight train. My image was of teenagers milling about the sidewalk as a misshapen wooden cart hauling manure trundles by. As it passes them, a clump of manure falls off the back and that's what they are left with.

I’m sure there are other factors. The world now wants young people to become money-makers not dream-achievers. Social media has decentered them from themselves: They are Nathaniel Branden’s “social metaphysicians,” whose reality ground is not the link between their senses and Planet Earth but their cohort’s judgmental heads. They have parents who have agendas instead of empathy. Whatever the causes are, I deplore that a 16-year-old can stare at a delicately trenchant cartoon and think “duh,” as we children of the ’50s used to scorn our lesser peers.

Recently, another consideration availed itself. Wanting to share and compare my assessment with my attorney sister, I showed her a slightly more obvious Far Side cartoon. It features a few aliens standing in the entranceway of their just-landed spaceship while a crew member lies flat on his ass on the ground, having tumbled down the steps. There are several humans gazing at the scene. One of the aliens in the entranceway remarks: “Wonderful! Just wonderful! . . . So much for instilling them with a sense of awe.” My sister did not find the cartoon funny. Her thought was that she has possibly lost her sense of humor. I wonder if this has happened to many young people today, those in therapy and those not, owing to the factors named, to the toxic social and political atmosphere, to their home and school environment, to lives of appearance and allure. That would be most unfunny.

If Nick Cannon thinks he's healed from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, then he's, well, full of it

The vehicle of a narcissistic personality, the disturbed inner environment that forms his world, is a belief: a belief in perfection, unique specialness, a priori entitlement, absolute ascendency, and differ­entiation and alienation from all other people. The engine of that vehicle is a feeling. But it is not a feeling of perfec­tion: “Perfection” does not exist as a feeling or emotion in the human spectrum. It is a disturbing feeling that fuses anxiety, emptiness, a disabling falseness of the adult self and the dreaded reality of the never-grown child. The feeling’s engine is the truth of, and possibly the sense of, developmental failure in the first few years of life. Something – often the parents’ empty idealization (“you are the best”; “you’ll play at Carnegie Hall one day”; “you are the smartest little boy”) – plants the future means of escape from that truth. The person may have been pathologically immature at fourteen and suddenly falsely mature and intellec­tualized at fifteen. His buried feeling of still being a child will remember his parents’ attribution of specialness. It will not contain love and will feel alone. He has become the solipsist whose entire universe is a mirror.

Narcissistic personality is a delusion, which is a false belief a person is deeply invested in, making it feel true. It is a core delusion, protecting the person from feeling his lack of identity. There are other, non-core delusions that a narcissist may have. He may lose his arrogant certainty that his political party is always right (he may detach and feel that it is not a reflection of him). He may even stop believing his spouse loves him (deciding she is psychologically botched), and his ego would remain intact. But he would not be able to shed his belief that he is physically appealing or that he is perfectly expert in his chosen field. Dismantling these beliefs would cause him to descend into the all-consuming fire of infancy pain.

The most obscure aspect of narcissism is its identity of pristine perfection. Hard work and assiduous effort mean nothing to a narcissist. Excellence is intol­er­able: It doesn’t say he is above all others and it allows for inferiority. A narcissist requires absolute Godliness in one way: There is only one god.

A narcissist who moved away from civilization, who had to survive alone, would be distressed to feel his sense of uniqueness and perfection fading away. He must be unique and fundamentally unlike other people. But literally alone, any sense of self would disappear. With no one to be better than, he would feel nothing but the radical emptiness of the child he was who never grew. He would collapse in a painful void. Struggling to maintain his only sense of living, his narcissism, he might exalt feeble virtues: He walks with perfect stealth on the hunt. He designs the flawless trap. He grows the perfect crop. His thoughts are noble and stern and master his world. Only these conceits could keep him safe. He would eventually, in a terribly lonely moment, give in to the wish that he could just be a person, a feeling person who could lean on someone, cling to someone, fall into someone, a caring nurturer. But there has never been that person. So he had to be alone, not needy, not dependent, unique and impervious. He could only feel pain so he had to become a thought, a belief. Pain became deluded to pleasure. Failure became deluded to success. Inferiority became deluded to superiority.

In sum: Feeling is pain to the future Narcissist, the pain of never becoming. To have human feelings is that early abort. He had to be beyond the human: perfect.

Terse and pithy explanation of Trump's win

Unlike all the pundits, apparently, I don’t have the knowledge and analytical skills to weigh every factor involved in Harris’s loss and Trump’s win. Then again, they all have differing views that are controlled by their feelings, so it’s sort of a wash. My sense, coming from a psychological perspective, is that policy preferences were not the point. I believe the essential factor was Trump’s extreme personality of angry contempt that honored the “bitter inner child” of millions of people then swayed their minds to his agenda. For example, he made them despise immigrants where on their own most of them would have had more considerate appraisals. My few Trump-voting therapy clients are different at the core of their identity from my other clients. Essentially, their deep-seated pain turned right to rage rather than left to tears. Therapists know that clients who can grieve can be helped. Grieving can dissolve the thorns that aggravate their heart. Those who cleave to rage remain unhelped, and impaled.

(Adapted comment to a New York Times published interview with Nancy Pelosi)

Today should be named Parents Day

The least interesting and the most valid perspective: If Trump wins, blame the parents of today’s voters for giving their progeny a sense of life that features impotence, bitterness, free-floating anger and a need for superiority over others. This is the essence of it: Trump is the redeemer of victims who became bullies. (TPS published comment to an NYT article – https://www.nytimes.com/shared/comment/42vegc?rsrc=cshare&smid=url-share)

This is why those errant minds aren’t changing on Election Day, why they rarely changed over the course of the candidates’ campaigns or over the last eight years, and why they were unlikely to change over the span of their entire lives. If Trump wins the election, it will be because the parents of his voters (and the parents of their parents) wrote blueprints for their children’s formative years that created angry wounds and a broad landscape where healing couldn't happen.

I see the psychic difference between those who opt for a narcissistic, sociopathic and authoritarian president and those who don’t as a factor of bereavement. Those who could grieve the critical loss in their childhood – essentially, deprivation of their distracted or disturbed parents’ love and bond – would find some sad or resigned inner peace. In that calm, they could see and feel more clearly. They would feel tragedy more than outrage in their own lives and, by extension, in the world. They would know, as Irvin Yalom’s Carlos in Love’s Executioner finally knew, that “everyone has got a heart.” Those who did not have the opportunity or courage to grieve the critical loss in their childhood would remain on fire. They would remain the bitter, defeated king on their underground throne, nursing their rageful pain and projecting it into the world. They would see, through unconscious eyes, other people as better able to flourish, as indifferent to their suffering, as their defeaters. They would find comfort in those people, and that candidate, who justified their inner pain and its projections.

Like many who are voting for Harris, I do not find her powerfully inspiring. Presidential politicians are egoists who don’t know how to fix the country or the world. They use different aptitudes and personality points as their guideposts, and we have to hope that they don’t damage our lives. One-half of the population realizes, however, that Harris is a normal person with normal-range flaws, and that this is infinitely preferable to a man whose errors are more toxic to others than to himself, especially as he vigorously endorses those errors as is the nature of personality disorder.

On Election Day morning, I’m slightly optimistic about a Harris victory. It’s not an angry optimism and is not actually focused primarily on the candidate. It’s more the underlying optimism of someone who sees life, the universe and everything (homage to Douglas Adams) in the benign and sunny way that a cared-for child – or slightly healed adult – would.

Trump lovers are constipated, angry babies

Most if not all therapy clients, from a depth psychology perspective, could be considered immature. Fundamental depression and anxiety are formed in a home where a child was hurt and could not send his pain to a loving and empathic caregiver. This means there is aborted emotional development – immaturity. Most if not all therapy clients, from a depth psychology perspective, have repressed or “leaky” or overt frustration of childhood needs not met, manifesting in anger, irritability, self-blame or other-blame.

For a child, other-blame, also known as externalization of responsibility, is right. He did not cause his problems and he is right to blame those who hurt him and left him with no other recourse than to misbehave or inflict pain on others.

Many children, owing to some shard of decency in their lives, are able to grow up and face, in or out of therapy, their emotional immaturity. They are desperately needy but challenge their codependency. They see that their anger comes mostly from their past and they cease blaming it on others in the present. They have achieved adequate separation-individuation not to fall on their knees before heroes. They have achieved enough independence of thought not to form delusions about other races, ethnicities and sexes.

These are not Trump lovers. Trump lovers have not faced their emotional immaturity. They have not done deep grief work in therapy. They continue to blame others in the present, though their perpetrators are in the past. They cling to dependencies – heroes, victimized wives, groupthink, rally mobs. They had to bury the starved need for warm benevolence in their childhood and viscerally hate it now, believing that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are hateful, terrible people. Lacking a caring hand, an “enlightened witness” in childhood to guide them out of their self-breathing and self-reinforcing bubble and into the real world, they suffer global delusions about millions of individuals they have never met.

My therapy clients who are Trump admirers are self-declared misanthropes, bitter rejectors of groups of people or of all people. They are rage-filled children still drowning in adult bodies. Beneath a surface which may feel benign about small things and about like-minded people and about the families they protectively own, lies a lava field of unhealed pain and injustice. They, the child, will forever be out of sync with themselves and the world that grew up around them.

It is impossible for a healthy or healing person to admire a sociopath and narcissist like Trump.

Preface to a barely conceived future second book (not a joke, probably)

In America’s present psycho-culture, the term “evidence-based” has become the favored hypnotic buzzword of my hypnotized profession. Implying rigorous science, it is the imprimatur of instant trustworthiness and value. It is applied primarily to various species of “cognitive therapy” including cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), rational emotive therapy, EMDR (“Phase 5: installation of new cognitions”), reality therapy, existential therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy. What is the nature of this evidence that equals tacit proof of effectiveness? During or after their therapy, clients and former clients tell someone they feel better.

I submit that they do not tell themselves they feel better, not for long, not within themselves at the deepest root of their sense of self. This is because thoughts – the medium of exchange of cognitive and most other therapies – can’t change the physical history of the body and mind and feelings. Thoughts impotently, fickly, restively color then pass through the cloud of the head. One has to force, over and over and over again, positive or “rational” words into consciousness to believe one has improved, become a different person.

In psychotherapy, the only true evidence of improvement is inner experience. No one outside of you can fully know who you are or how you are, even while analyzing you, even while knowing you for years, even if you are rich and full of laughter and surrounded by friends and love, or poor and alone. No one else can know. To understand your psychic status is to feel yourself, not just your surface changeable feelings, but those embedded in your inner childhood, the emotional themes of your existence.

My previous book, ‘I Forgive’ and Other Delusions, is a collection of ten years of therapy blog articles based on established principles, client work and brutal introspection. It features many case histories and, admittedly, a title that is bound to separate the men from the boys, or more accurately, the seekers from the hiders. Illustrated Dictionary of Contrarian Depth Therapy aims to establish a foundation of insights about the human psyche that I believe can only be contested by wishful thinking. I am disgusted that people’s need for healing has been turned into smiles and brute-force hope by a profession that should be intransigently reality-based. Psychotherapy has become the most deceptive of self-medications, a bait-and-switch where hurting people may initially be profoundly heard, possibly for the first time in their lives, but then quickly guided to bright-paint and spin (“reframe”) their lifelong pain, pain that needs, above all, to be expressed exactly as it is to a caring person.

Stacked deck: The Colt Gray matter

Response to Megan Stack’s September 6th New York Times article, “Blaming a Parent, Again, for Failed Gun Laws.” The article’s title itself (which she may not have written but doubtless inspired) is an étude in tendentious illogic. The article shows that Ms. Stack wants to understand nothing about mental health and illness. (Comment is actually at The Washington Post as Ms. Stack's article didn't include the comment function.)

It’s adults, not young teens, who are prone to turn their childhood injury, such as parent’s shaming or physical abuse, into an emotional illness of global hatred and destruction: “All (ethnicity or color or age or sex of choice) should die.” Children haven’t experienced the cumulative years of injustice to degenerate into such a global delusion. So imagine what this boy must have gone through by age 14 to be so full of hatred for self and others that he must kill random people and end his own future. Warning signs? Probably every single day of his young life.

Yes, it probably takes a motley village of abusive, and blind, and overburdened, and impotent, and distracted, and uncaring, and ignorant adults to produce a child murderer (with the possible exception of the “callous and unemotional child” turned psychopath). But the line of acceptable disconnection and irresponsibility must be drawn somewhere. In the case of Colt Gray, the father appears to be well over that line.

Trauma (aka "Get real, label-heads")

Therapeutic healing should be natural, like breathing. You breathe in, you breathe out. How destructive – literally – it would be to just breathe in and not breathe out. You take in the emotional stimuli of the world and you must express them outward. You love your dog and you must pet it. To withhold that expression would be to suffer. A child is hurt by her father, she must cry and possibly rage; but the hurt and tears are primary. Trauma is simply a more powerful injury that must be commensurately expressed outward. Commensurately: You don’t “primal scream” if you spill coffee on your shirt (unless it is the latest in a long series of unexpressed frustrations), and you don’t just say “ouch” if you’re raped. If we set aside all the species of therapy that exist, I believe most people would have a natural sense of what they need to do to answer traumatic pain: Get it out by the most powerful expressions. Tame therapy cannot work. Process must be expulsive, explosive, emotional, verbal, physical.

This was my comment to a Slate.com article about a bad therapist. (In fact, I didn't read the article as I'm not a paying Slate member. My statement didn't require a reading.) Many of the other commenters showed their knowledge of this or that brand of therapy, such as EMDR, “brainspotting” and CBT, and their good and bad experiences with different therapists. I just wanted to point out what should be obvious but what remains as contemporaneously unknown as the foreplay before the Big Bang.

Choose your Trump side, or your life

This is vaporous theory, but I believe it’s true and actionable. For most Republicans who are not diagnosable sociopaths like Donald Trump, it is a matter of choice whether to live internally in a warm place or a cold place, to be an endorser and concluder of alienation or a recognizer of need and love. This would be true because most of us who grew up in emotional starvation in our home also owned a kernel of birth love or infancy bond. My own example may suffice.

My childhood was loveless and inert in feeling. I’ve never had the slightest inkling of warmth, love or even pity for either parent, yet also never any anger and disownership. But something somewhere in my origin planted, along with severe need, the potential for affection. That bloomed during a very short window in my latency years, around six to nine. I loved a friend like the sun is burning bright. That feeling faded to nothing as I approached my teens.

In high school, I was a Libertarian. Libertarianism, not far from Conservatism but more nihilistic, is an emotional attitude turned into specious logic more than it is a political ideology. We Libertarians were for the most part followers of Ayn Rand: lost, inferior-feeling, with no heart-driven loves or passions. We needed some belief to let us feel superior while alone and alienated.

I’ve done some work on myself in the meantime, over the last thirty years. A result of that work was to let me see the buried “golden kernel” that already existed – more than it was to grow that kernel. Even now, in a mood, I can feel my predominant darkness and see Trump as the perfect representative of my survival as a soul amputee. I salute him and wish his malignant agenda great success. But then I feel – a molecule to the left or maybe beneath – my seed of life, the good, the cherished bond, the best potential of life in love. And Trump is revealed to be the disease that he is.

I choose that molecule. I choose it because it is right and feels best though it brings pain. It sits alone, an ungrown seed of gold in the dark field of the past that will extend to the future, to the last day of my life. But I would rather love and be loss, than never to have loved at all.

This is the choice that most of us have. It’s the choice to be our human best not failure. And incidentally, it's the choice that would relegate Donald Trump to obsolescence.

Victim Personality Disorder

I have recently had six clients who would not, I believe, be diagnosed with a personality disorder by any rule-following therapist, yet I believe they would qualify for an unspecified one. Some of them have paranoid-like assumptions. Some meet criteria for the once-proposed Depressive Personality (DSM-IV axes for further study). Some meld both syndromes in a thick soup of negativity.

They could be called Victim Personality Disorder.

D, 43, is enmeshed in his family of origin. They are the constant headline in his life. There is a bitterness and rage against them for deprioritizing him. It is the subject of every session. E, 23, is similarly fused to her parents and older sibling. She has been the recipient of bullying and malign intent at every job she’s had. This includes conspiracies among coworkers. T, 52, with chronic baseline anger and vengeance intent, feels condescended to and harassed at work and has an EEO case in the works. Same with N, age 41, except that her discrimination case ended in defeat. K, 31, suffers extreme dysphoria, is constantly miserable, passively endures bullying by coworkers. He has a girlfriend but she doesn’t seem to bring him any happiness beyond the moment. L, 24, has lost five jobs in a row, has been bullied and made fun of at each one.

None of them has a capacity for stable happiness or even calm, though most of them are in a relationship they would call positive. This is the Depressive Personality component.

What in these clients equals or approximates a personality disorder? What differentiates them from people who have a “bad attitude”? I think you have to go geological here, down through the layers of their character history to some early place in childhood where there was either a proton or an electron, a positive kernel or a flame. Those still simmering will see only smoke in their landscape and will probably have no insight: “I am being harassed, disliked, mocked every place I work. It’s not me, it’s them.” It’s this seamless certainty without relenting that begins the diagnosis of a character disorder.

Next step is the cognitive escape from feeling. Each of them lives in thought, pessimistic thought beneath which they cannot go that covers their volcanic, childhood-origin emotional pain. Their thinking insists and argues like a cornered rat to prevent their vulnerability to the tears that belong to their youth.

A supplemental feature that I've seen in some of these clients is a blind childishness. They believe with rock-solid certainty that their fellow adults are disliking and bullying and ganging up on them, persecuting them as only immature children would do. They don't realize they are still children forlorn in their elementary and middle school classrooms.

I don’t doubt that some of these individuals have both flame and calm at their core. These are the ones who can grudgingly accept that there may be reason for hope, the sun may come out, but they can’t live in that place.

Therapists know (or should know) that personality disorders are next-to-impossible to dispel. Dialectical Behavior Therapy and other Cognitive approaches do not attempt to get to the root of Borderline Personality in Masterson's "abandonment depression." A Narcissist would disintegrate were he to somehow lose his sense of special perfection. We can’t make a Dependent Personality want to have initiative, be independent and alone. We can't give a sociopath a conscience. And my lesser afflicted clients? Is there a way to break through their suffering and thinking and victim-mind that protect their pain from exiting?

Why most of my therapy clients are wiser than all the pundits’ and psychologists’ printed words

(Article submitted to a journal which will bury it then expunge it from memory.)

I’m not a happy adult, but I am a joyous infant. I was also an unhappy, anxious and depressed child and teenager, but the infant remains permanent. I can feel him any time I’m not distracted by my present successes and failures. Absent the distractions, I feel something joyous at the molecular level. It may be only three or five or ten molecules, like the surface of a tiny lake, delicate and poignantly sweet, but it seems to be the foundation of my life. Now – if I tried to find what the arcane psychologists call cellular memory pre-birth, there would probably be a mess of trouble down there. I was born premature and kept in an incubator for a long time with no bond with anyone. So it’s probably the post-birth molecules I feel, let’s say, much of the time.

Examples: I take a tissue from the box and feel a split-second beautiful high and the subliminal thought: “I can have this! It’s free for the taking!” I walk outside the apartment door, down the walk to the dumpster, and feel the enchantment of the world. I grab a small Fiji water bottle: I feel like a prince sitting on a voluptuous cushion on a throne. A honey bee hovering around a bud: a sensation of love of nature. It goes even more quiddity than that. I pick up my wallet before leaving for work. “How am I so privileged?” is my chest sensation. My wife has bought me two different brands of fancy toothpaste. I feel blessed.

At different times, I have interpreted this phenomenon in a diametrically opposite way. By “interpreted” I mean that sometimes the joy feels sad. That is because the dark weight of my adult life pollutes it. But it really can’t be polluted. It’s always at the base and is frequently invoked by itself throughout the day. I know that on my death bed, which is not unlikely to be in poverty, the early toddler’s wonder and shock at the free gifts of life will be there.

I know, and I teach my clients this, that this positive core may exist but doesn’t exist for everyone. Look for it by quieting absolutely everything. They also learn that childhood pain and spirit-amputation become their more powerful foundation, above the earlier one. They learn that we are what we were, that positive thinking and forgiveness and grace and rationalization and religion and futile hope for an emotionally dead parent won’t change that foundation. They learn the difference between their façade, their persona and their fundamental self which is their alpha and omega.

I’m sure some of the psychotherapists and pundits have felt all this both before and after they’ve written their words. They probably chalk it up to indigestion or depression or an ignorable quirk. They write happy or hopeful, invariably. Cognitive and “spiritual” therapists and Arthur Brooks and David Brooks and Anne Lamott. They know, I suspect, that all of one’s experiences from pre-birth to now add up to an internal wash: meaninglessness. But for their readers, they are impelled to paint good and hopeful. What does this really mean? That the answer is to live and die in dogged and perpetual pink thought, which we must force. If we do that, we will never notice the joy of the infant, the eternal template.

Double feature: Social Depression, Silent Empty Chair

Social Depression

From an earlier TPS blog post: “For some (dysfunctional) people, it can be painful, though subliminally, merely to entertain the consciousness of another person.” By a very strange coincidence, within a recent week I saw three clients who named a peculiar phenomenon featuring this uncomfortableness with another consciousness. Not in the twenty-five years prior to that week, as far as I recall, had a client ever described it. Two of them, one a twenty-year-old woman, disclosed that it is “draining” to be among people, even for five minutes, to be expected to and proceed to talk. The third client described it as "a drag." A single person’s presence, it could even be a family member, would be enough to distress, numb and pain her mind.

This is not “social anxiety.” It is “social depression.” I know the essence of it because I am the fourth person on that list. In my predominant adult persona, as therapist, I am invigorated by a client’s presence, his thoughts and feelings and challenges. In my secondary persona, as husband to a compatible, former-therapist wife, I am comfortable with our mutual familiarity with my preconscious* psyche and its easy translation into conscious talk. But outside of work and marriage, I find it painfully and heavily burdensome to be silent with or talking to a stranger or a neighbor or to one of my wife’s friends, small talk or ‘medium’ talk. (Deep subjects would invoke my adolescent-stage narcissism fused to my professional garb.)

This is not because the more real self of me is too murky – complex and historical – to know which words to pull from the deeps. It’s because without the appropriate context for my (professional) conscious and (marital) preconscious selves, there is only left the inner child – the unformed and ungrown self – that has only fear, oblivion, and no words. Were there no behavior controls that must fall into place, in an “adult” context with stranger, neighbor or friend, the needful urge would be to collapse and become fetal.

My three clients are also this person. We don’t really go to that inchoate darkness but to recognize how recondite we are and to offer therapist’s empathy and care for it.

 

Silent Empty Chair

This is a slight idea but one that I find meaningful. I don’t know if many or all therapists who use Perls’s Empty Chair exercise bastardize it as I do. To me, the client needs to feel her internal ocean of “all the unsaid”** between her and a parent. But to feel this and then try to talk it, put it into words and concepts, is like painting the surface of the ocean. It's reducing the immeasurable to something temporal.

So sometimes a client’s failure to have the nerve to speak to an agelessly frightening father or an unloving mother can bring her to an even deeper place, beneath words. In her silence she is starting to feel and know parts of her history, aspects of her true character, and feelings that she never experienced but for a glinting moment in childhood. The look on a silent client’s face as she stares in the direction of the empty chair shows that she is changing on the inside, is finding and reclaiming more of the real childhood self that was banished early on, more of her self as left open and empty of her parent. I can’t assume, but hope that this internal change will manifest in new eyes, new seeing, new acting in the world.

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* Look up Freud’s notion of the “preconscious.”

** Term taken from Nathaniel Branden’s “Death Bed Situation” exercise. See blog post "The antithesis client," July 16, 2024.