Real self (written at a noisy Whole Foods Market café)

Some schools of psychology, systems of therapy, and clinicians deal in the “real self.” I don’t know close to the whole history, but I’ve seen the construct was a rich part of Karen Horney’s thinking one generation after Freud. My knowledge skips to Helene Deutsch with her “as-if personality,”* then leaps to Masterson’s theory of personality disorder and Janov’s primal therapy of neurosis, basically defined as the false self’s seeking symbolic satisfaction – and pain or tension discharge – of repressed unmet needs of childhood.

I see the false or unreal self as what a child becomes when his parents do not respect his feelings. A child represses and loses himself if his expressions fall into the abyss of parents’ deafness, or are contemned or prohibited, or if the inchoate Self is overwhelmed away in birth trauma or in René Spitz’s anaclitic depression.** What endures is a personality of defenses and self-soothing, and a primordial or toxic momentum.

Actually, I used to believe the Self could be slid away to oblivion and death this easily. But I may have to respect Masterson’s idea that there could be a part-genetic gift of the real self, as I know a former client whose soul should have been killed*** by his mother’s poison, yet it has emerged in a beautiful way a couple decades later.

I do not tell clients they are a false self (which would be quite evil and incompetent), but may suggest that they grew an adaptive persona in a rocky childhood terrain, and that in order to combat their depression or identity diffuseness they may need to search for their smoldering fire, their latent loves or likes. Looking at some adult’s lostness is to see a tangible and actionable thing, while to contemplate the underlying flaw – the unreal self – is to see more but touch nothing. It’s the idea of air.

Only just recently have I discovered another field of productivity in the work of the real self: the child’s and adolescent’s losing of it. A young man, sixteen, who came here because of his body image depression, said out of the blue that he becomes his friends’ or peers’ personality features when he is with them. He doesn’t have a self he is grounded in. Not in touch historically with his feelings – their push, their biological conviction – and therefore being a younger child that remains in intimidated awe of any person’s ego force, he conforms and becomes them.  And he hates it.

Thank goodness he does, because that hate is the one-dimensional watchman of his submerged real self that has stayed awake to save him. What he must do is look for the molecules deep below the cloudy surface, the molecules that say “no” or “yes,” “I want” or “I need this.” Holding on to these buried radical self-elements, he will not pretend to have an adolescent feeling his friends have, or to like a sport that they like. He will not find himself going with them where he doesn’t want to go. He will smile or frown against the current. He will be disinterring, and building, a Self.

Many of us believe we’ve seen a false self. Hillary Clinton comes off to many as a contrived personality, though Mitt Romney may have been caught more often adapting his convictions to the moment. Politicians, the lot of them, have been branded as narcissists whose altruism is a con. What matters for psychotherapy is where this problem comes from, and especially what we may do for a child slipping into the as-if world. Watch for the little boy conforming to his friends, and to you, parent. See if he is quieting in body and spirit, in a quiet and depressed home. Be aware that anxiety – a fearful home atmosphere – can drain the pool of an infant’s or child’s self-energy. Notice if he loses interest. This may, per the DSM bible, be a sign of depression. But a child’s depression is a sign of her identity flagging and folding, someday disappearing.

Nurturing and honoring the child’s real self is probably the most critical thing we can do.

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* Helene Deutsch’s “as if” personality -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helene_Deutsch.

** René Spitz’s concept of anaclitic depression -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospitalism.

*** Shengold’s concept -- http://www.amazon.com/Soul-Murder-Effects-Childhood-Deprivation/dp/0449905497.

Different eyes

I have not been able to grasp the nature of this woman’s disturbance.  It’s even very difficult to describe.  She has a subtle psychotic air yet everything she says is reasonable, conventionally insightful, and expressed without especial drama.  Her eyes look off, and I believe this is a real indicator.   They somehow seem focused and unfocused at the same time, as if they are transfixed on some inner, but invisible, scene.  The main signs of something amiss are her verbosity, interminable and circumstantial, her metaphor-laden storytelling, the tortuous yet complacent rationalizing of every confrontable statement and action – including her felt need to waste session after session with coma-inducing monologues.  I once apologized for falling sick into the Zone of Anesthesia as she spoke – I felt I had collapsed inwardly as if drugged.  She hadn’t noticed a thing, blamed it on her “overwhelming” cataract of words, then sallied on.

Am I being a “male chauvinist”?  Because there is a man, too, who has droned on for two years with his caviling philosophies, God cynicism and incapacity to question the check-mark in his head that ratifies every idea and makes self-doubt impossible – yet I never saw him as psychotic.

But it is a psychosis.  Where reason is co-opted by ideas.  Explanations replace feelings.  A seventy-minute-long barrage of words feels natural.  A sane person can see himself and see others.  But to be without agency in one’s problems, to justify with airy concepts callousness to the earth and to people, and to bore and not listen to the other, is to do neither.  It is the insanity of the responsive insensate.  He spanks his son, but feels rage at the world.

One needs to become perceptive of this disembodiment – not the easiest thing as there are convincing strata of seeming-authenticity.  A woman who claims to have “good talks” with her angry son, stockpiles my referrals to Parent Effectiveness Training and Siblings Without Rivalry and Toxic Psychiatry in her purse, then goes home and paddles her children, is at one level of unreality.  She seemed pleasantly sane until I learned about the screaming and beating.  I will have to look her in the eyes and say, “You do not have good talks with a son you hit and do not listen to.”  Robert Hare, I believe, described a psychopath who looked up emotion words in the dictionary in order to simulate feelings.  His mask of sanity* might snow me – or even an expert in psychopathy** – longer than would the mother’s.

I’m suggesting that insanity needs to be understood as separation from the heart, that is, from the self.  This happens when pain is too much and gets buried under ice, or intellect.  It can then only come out in terrible ways.  An eighteen-year-old who has no hope.  A man has hated his wife for twenty-six years and blames the universe.  A woman can talk on and on, replacing “I” with metaphors because, she explains, this keeps her from her breakdown, always waiting.

Insanity may be what we do to escape the fire of our history.  Or try to.

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* The title of Hervey Cleckley’s classic on psychopathy -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mask_of_Sanity.

** Robert D. Hare, PhD, Without Conscience, The Guildford Press, 1993.

Rabbit hole

"I call the process focusing.  It is a process in which you make contact with a special kind of internal bodily awareness.  I call this awareness a felt sense.

 “A felt sense is usually not just there, it must form.  You have to know how to let it form by attending inside your body.  When it comes, it is at first unclear, fuzzy.  By certain steps it can come into focus and also change.  A felt sense is the body’s sense of a particular problem or situation.

“A felt sense is not an emotion.  We recognize emotions.  We know when we are angry, or sad, or glad.  A felt sense is something you do not at first recognize – it is vague and murky.  It feels meaningful, but not known.  It is a body-sense of meaning.  When you learn how to focus, you will discover that the body finding its own way provides its own answers to many of your problems.

“The process brings change.”*

In Focusing, Eugene Gendlin describes and gives heuristic structure to the natural and omnipresent fact of bodily nuanced feeling.  One senses inner truths that the here-and-now head, with its brand-name labels for feelings and attitudes as platitudes, is not in touch with.  My client’s head says “I love my mom to death,” but inside are oceanic colors of moods contained in countless facts of history, that say otherwise.  In that ocean may be – probably are – “you were not there for me”; “I feel sick and hungry and dying at the sight of your face in my mind”; “Mommy!  Where are you?!”; “I cannot see you, as an adult, because I am not one thanks to you”; “you crazy evil shit”; “smile and give me life, please”; “you are not a grown-up”; “I feel pity, I feel hate, I feel love that has sharp teeth, I feel crushed, I feel hopeful and six years old”; and so much more that the years within the body know.  Gendlin found that when we get in touch with some point of this body knowledge (the “felt sense”), there is a micro or larger feeling epiphany: Some gut-to-mind neuro-physiological connection is made that is a resolution sensation.  I haven’t read his books in a while, but I remember a simple example given: Someone going on vacation, or riding in a taxi to the airport, gets the amorphous but certain inner feeling that “I know I forgot to pack something. . . .”  This slight knowledge and its bigger mystery are an uncomfortable weight, like a heavy or sharp-edged question mark.  With a somewhat quieted mind one may see the underwater iceberg: “Yes!  I forgot to pack the family photo albums!”  This discovery feels good – the question mark dissipates – like a tip-of-the-tongue word that finally comes to you.

One can learn much about oneself from the felt sense, and Gendlin has made an industry, a veritable psycho-culture, from the benefits of Focusing.**  It is, to him, the true lever that moves psychotherapy.  It gives hope.  It can interpret dreams.  It is a near-endless subterranean labyrinth that contains elusive gold at each step, each layer.

And it is, in part, true.  A client had always known he wanted to be a programmer like his father.  Yet when, in his early thirties, he could finally afford college, he found that he couldn’t open the books: They sat stacked on his desk as he indulged in many other activities.  What his head knew, congealed and sanctioned by his history, was the decayed particles of deeper feelings, deeper truths.  Focusing, he touched the molecules far, far below his surface.  He felt that his father had never talked to him about his job.  He felt that his father had never talked to him about computers or programming.  He felt – another tumbler falling – that his father had never talked to him at all.  That pulled down the final tumbler: “Wanting” to be a programmer was the little boy’s feeling: “Dad’ll be my pal if I like what he likes.”

Focusing, or simply reading oneself, proves to us that so often the feeling is the fact.  Why do I want to be a writer, but never get to it?  I feel in this inner cloud an urge to live, a spurious sense that writing is living life, but it isn’t.  Why do I lose job after job?  I feel an anger at authority, or a depressive dread of adult routine life, or the child’s anarchy.  Why does nothing motivate me, though I wish it dearly?  In my body is a feeling of early abort, of leaving myself and entering the nether zone of my mind.  What is this wishing composed of?  That, I realize, is a word: It’s really wanting to wish.  And what is my “wanting”?  The answer to these and most questions is a rich feeling vein because that is the energy we are born with, that pushes or pulls us or keeps us an empty cave.

My issue with Gendlin is that, probably in order to maintain the beautiful flower of his invention, he advertises only the ultimate positive.  But that is false.  Not all answers are, as he says, temporary stops in ongoing process: perpetual discovery rather than pathology.  There are not only underground rivers within us but also still lakes, that may be lonely and stagnant.

I described in an earlier post*** how focusing would have led me to an unsustainable place had I used it on the threshold of college.  Quietly felt-sensing “I will study philosophy” would have summoned body sensations of dreadful imprisonment, of life always and future lost.  But then, transfixed in that dark cavern I would have seen: “I have no business going to college.”  And deeper in the cavern’s pool, “I have no business being a grown-up.”  And then further down the rabbit hole to a child lost and not knowing what to do.  And feeling that, I would have become it, because focusing is – Gendlin failed to say – an earth magnet to the deepest meaning immanent in us.  This Self-continent is murky, a place of smoke, and mirrors, and many doors.  The danger is that when you clearly felt-sense a door, it opens.

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* Eugene T. Gendlin, PhD, Focusing, Bantam Books, beginning of chapter 2.

** The Focusing Institute, http://focusing.org/.

*** http://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2014/02/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none.html.

Storm of the eye

Chronic inane tunes in the head. Squeezing the right thumb and snapping it. Jackhammer-braked inhaling. Arching four fingers, like yoga. Coughing psychosomatically – while entering a car in cold weather. Finger pad chewing. A single musical note sneaking in, to replace a breath. Palm gouging.

Before the New Year I stopped all of my tics and stereotypies that have afflicted me for decades. Without them, I’m left with the pressure roar, the logjammed bloodstream of tension that they always assuaged or distracted me from. Without the distraction, I am looking at a world I’ve never seen: the non-me world, a world without comfort, because distractions and tics always had my name on them, sickbed lullabies. And because the tension was a little boy’s handling of the world terribly poorly, and the world treating him poorly, allowing him to be invisible, I am left sunk in my primary ineffectiveness and the world’s predation. They want me to fall into them, to scream out the agony of the child. But I can’t find the bullets and assassins anymore, they are lost to memory, by repression. So I now sit feeling good about myself in a nonviable twilight zone.

I believe that my plight would be that of anyone who could quiet everything, all the noise of self-medication, thought, intention. In this silence in which one sinks to first cause is found the storm within the calm eye. It’s the unresolved past, the un-begun past. In the silence is the chronic paradox of being adult sobriety, maybe as thin as a membrane, calmly containing its inner chaos. There is no real calm; there are no real feet to stand on. Intention is strong, but it’s a membrane – permeable. Or it’s a soap bubble, that bursts.

This, I think, is why it’s so hard to stop an addiction.