Child to adult

Benjamin Button – the man who grew younger and (presumably) more immature as the years went by – is often the reality in human psychology.  The feeling of a first-grader who falls in love with a girl on the school bus; a child’s real questions about the world; early teens, with their youth group self-explorations, middle teens and their starry night Kumbaya love and camaraderie on a confirmation class retreat; kids who see through their parents’ smiles and sophistic explanations – there is more gravity and reality in them than in many of the adults I see in therapy.  The complexity of adults’ malaise, confusion and rage is, in fact, a factor of their ascendant superficiality, their loss-of-touch with their true feelings and sights.  To reach emotional truth, depth, is to become simple again.

Not long ago I worked briefly with a troubled young-thirties couple married only two months, whose pinball-like emotional and commitment oscillations were more adolescent than adolescence.  Her caroming on and off grew out of loss and shutting down in a childhood of deep neglect, leaving her to live blind and on scar tissue.  She was so out of touch with her inner life that she laughed, sighed and smiled about her first marriage as a victim of Power and Control abuse,* and about the gossamer quality of her second marriage.  The man was prematurely powerful, head of a successful construction business.  This was his strength, like an iron lung detached from his hollow infirmity.

I wonder what the “systems” marital therapists would do with this couple.  He did not trust her, as she continued to talk with “old boyfriends.”  They each felt their relationship with their own children had been damaged by joining this marriage.  That one fact revealed in each a pathological child-state of emotional neediness, in the same way that some divorced fathers remarry, dedicate themselves abjectly to their new wife and her family and abandon their own children.  Marrying, did each spouse instantly lose the substance of his and her parental bond by succumbing to their greater need to be nurtured – like a child – by their partner?  If so, it is not a systems problem.  It is a core wound problem, a primal scream problem.

I remember using one of Dr. Hendrix’s slogany ideas: You have to be allies not enemies.  And a catalyst of my own: You may need to ask yourself if you actually like the character of the other person.  Some marriages are ruined from the beginning by this hidden, never-acknowledged dislike which turns an even deeper “compatibility” into an eternal tornado.  Underlying everything we did early on, including the discomfiting Couple’s Dialogue, was my sense that these are children who are grudgingly play-acting “being there” for the other, when each is too starved to be there for anyone but himself, herself.

Each partner would need to quit this dance for a while and plunge into regressive therapy that would show them, by touch, where they came from.  Returning to the child is to regain the depth, the self, and hopefully the love, they lost while growing up.

- - - - - - - - - - -

* Referring to the Power and Control Wheel -- http://www.ncdsv.org/images/PowerControlwheelNOSHADING.pdf -- used in Domestic Violence classes.

A final sort of statement

There is just something very nice, even lovely, about people coming into the office to ask about their problems, seek help for them.  That idea may be strange to a happy or content person.  But therapists like me live at some remove from the natural world and its pleasures.  We live, in a way, on a question mark, on a crooked boat in the ocean.  So we’re more comfortable being watchful and uneasy.  As for me, I see enjoyment as sweet icing on a cake, and the cake is mystery and hardship.

When a person sits down, first thing I do for myself is push through – with enjoyable perverse optimism – the absurdity of helping someone who is basically a billion clocks and a billion clouds under a coat of paint.  The coat is his personality, his hiding.  You might as well twist a screwdriver in the deep blue sea.  And then, what we do is soothe and bruise him, at once.  This works in actual surgery: The patient is etherized on the table, heart exposed.  But in psychological surgery, to encourage while uncovering blood-red truth, give hope while proving the hopelessness of mother’s ever seeing you, loving you, is an operation that can be finessed only with heartbreak.

So some patients come back for more, others don’t return.  There might be a formula here: If too many of your clients keep returning week after week, month after month, you are not a helping agent.  You are a soothing agent.

Within a few months I will be relocating to a new state.  This feels a little odd – to be bringing my crooked boat to a place where Counseling – by all the group and private practice websites I see – seems so happy and hopey and helpy.  I’d like to make some professional friends out there, and have a strong practice, and not have to keep my mouth shut about being a pessimistic-optimistic shrink.  I’ll let you know how the operation goes.

Borderland*

What do we make of a 26-year-old good-looking, hale and hearty guy whose presenting problem is relationship flops: Gently cut loose by three women; repeated on-line dating rejections and fading-outs?  The flesh-and-blood women found him “too affectionate,” clingy.  His perspective was: He put “everything I have” into the relationships.  From this, the categories that come to mind are Borderline Personality first, Dependent Personality second.  The adult boyish immaturity seen in many ADHD men doesn’t apply.  We ask and learn more.

He “understands,” accepts the explanation given by the woman he’d dated for six months, though later it seemed to him implausible.  That is, he had no abandonment crisis or fury.  Or maybe this is just how he can present himself in therapy.  For he’d also named “anger” at slight things: a woman's "saying something the wrong way.”

More signs came up in the conversation: It would be nice to just sit around and play fantasy board games all day, and ride four-wheelers.  He works in the family business but is given a make-work position.  He lives with his grandmother.  He needs the comfort ritual of midnight snacks, the old childhood goodies.

Is this Borderline?  Yes.  Without cutting and the masochistic lifestyle, without the zombie-disembowelment-sexual fetishes, without the hospitalizations.  His theme, his root, is youth, and infancy-gone-wrong – though I didn’t learn anything about his parents or his childhood.

There is also the requisite dissociation from all real feelings, and of course from the deepest furnace of mother-child failure (as Masterson describes with his picturesque WORU and RORU concepts).  This is evident in his smiling responses to everything immoderate that I hypothesized: identity absence; self-canceling nature; still the child; a cloud not a man to a woman.

What will help him?  This is the part that separates the men therapists from the boy, and the former will say: Not a whole damn lot.  When you are this much a needy child, too late, how do you grow up?  When your being has been a smile and Boy Scout air your whole life, can you discard them?

My goal, for the moment (and “his” “client-centered” goal means that I offer to take his blindfold off) is to show him the ocean beneath his flip-flops and at the same time describe what so many of us, with an adult in tow, do to live well in the world.

- - - - - - - - - - -

* Christine Ann Lawson’s term, in Understanding the Borderline Mother.

The worm turns

I have heard many times throughout my life, as I’m sure we all have, the bromide that surviving a major illness or an intractable disease has made the person appreciate his or her life for the first time, or with greater clarity.  I have never denied that, but have never understood it at the feeling level.  They really feel different in a psycho-spiritual way, awakening into a new world?  But I have now suddenly, in a moment, developed an infirmity that is never terminal but feels life-changing, and something has indeed happened inside.  And it is complicated.

Physically, there is a mild, omnipresent ache or pain and the knowledge of an ugly imperfection, and these bring me a sense of mild, omnipresent anguish.  The anguish is delicate – ultra-sheer – yet terrible, almost end-of-life suicidal terrible.  At the same time it seems to contain – not accompany but contain – its opposite: a vitality that may be escapist yet is real.  It helps this problem to walk, and I am walking a lot, and briskly.  This gives me a sense of strength and, from the slight euphoric momentum a bit of magical thinking that the problem may just disappear.  That thinking contains its opposite: the knowledge that it will never leave me.

I am bowed, disturbed, moribund, energized, vital, quickened: I have written two of my most pungent and effective client advocacy letters ever, and done some of my best therapy, since the problem occurred.

I cannot tell if there exists some underlying psychophysical theme – transcendence and renewal? dread? gratitude? anger? pro-agitation? strength and resilience? – or only the complexity itself.  But clearly in some way I have fulfilled the bromide.

Questions arise: Wouldn’t it be interesting if – to universalize my experience – we got better when we got worse?  If there were something about extreme reality’s contact with the body’s brain that dislodges depression at some level, wakes us up?  And . . . Aren’t many of the “awakened” normal folk, not depressed?  What if anyone can be so changed?  Would that mean there is a film that covers all of us, that crisis punches holes in, letting in the sun or a new dimension?

If so, what does this say about human life in even the best circumstances?  Of course, I shouldn’t generalize.  I only know that this disease has screwed me up for the good.

Unpleasant questions #1: Maestro masturbator

Is a predominately sensual life regressive and neurotic?  If a scholar were to give a Ted Talk on his lifelong passion for masturbation and the varieties of subtle sensation possible to it, would we consider him a sophisticated aesthete or artist, a highly self-actualized person?  I think we would not.  Yet how could he be distinguished from the epicurean, the lover of books or the connoisseur of serious music?  All of them are basking in chemical and neurological sensation while enhancing that feeling with intellect, discriminatory powers and breadth of knowledge.  How could one be higher or better than the others?

This appears to be a question of psychobiological development.  Once an individual reaches then transcends one developmental plateau – baby’s sensation-feeling-based life; latency child’s emotional and concrete thinking status – on the way to the pinnacle of adolescent’s and adult’s “formal operations” conceptual thinking, it would have to be regressive pathology that causes him to be weighted down to a penultimate level.

Individuals, in other words, who are dedicated to sensual delight are masturbators, whether the passion is Bach, crème brûlée or Jane Eyre.

What could be the value in dethroning these spuriously higher enterprises?  Doing so helps us see more clearly – or see at all – the self-medicative nature of so much human life: We are seeking solace, cushions, distraction more than we are jazzed by challenge, mystery, the future.  Of course it is true that intellect itself can be masturbatory.  Just today a client, who knows she grew a fake-happy persona in childhood and has never lived a real self, said that “thinking” is her peace and pleasure.  Any thinking, all thinking, is her distraction from her missing life.

Now, is there any use in trying to distinguish masturbatory pleasure either from the organic imperative of human good feeling – our birthright – or from more developmentally arrived, outer-focused pleasures?  An astrophysicist is more interested in uncovering the cosmos than in feeling good, let’s say.  Richard Dawkins tells of a famous scientist whose pet theory, fifteen years cherished, was disproven by a younger researcher, and who congratulated him with pleasure for discovering the truth.  I think we should know that being connected by awe not ego to the world is better than being self-enclosed.  It’s a fine goal for psychotherapy, though terribly difficult to win.

It happened one day

I have committed to memory a future date that I’ve determined will be the day of my demise.  It is not a suicide day, at all, but a goal to reach, a daring and lofty horizon beyond one-hundred, giving me forty more years.  If I make it to that day and am still ticking, I may have to sheepishly (if that emotion remains in my palette) ignore the majesty of my predictive reification and keep shuffling on.

I do not believe in magic or in the lasting effects of positive thinking (cognitive therapy with the emperor’s clothes off).  I don’t intend to change my lifestyle, exercise, eat better (I’m already a moderate health food nut) or act more cautiously – do anything specific toward my goal.  And, there is no quality of either hope or faith in the determination.  I don’t believe it is true; it just seems very likely now that it’s mine.

So what is going on?

Maybe it is magical thinking, of a sort.  How the idea happened, I don’t remember, but I know it came to me as a holistic creation rather than a cognition.  It featured a dual feeling of strength and happiness at the molecular level – deeper than gut level – a feeling that my life had changed from the inside.  When I remember it, there is an instant transformative sensation, as if some longevity power is happening now.  And yet it is so thin and transparent that it disappears most of the time, is forgotten and doesn’t undergird feeling or experience in a day.

This is not spiritual, but is it like religious feeling, without religious belief?

There is an inkling of holistic sense to this.  Psychosomatic (mindbody) psychology knows that pent-up, pressurized emotional pain makes us sick, damages the body.  Repression and denial are integral to this process, because feelings that are aired, at least to the mind, are not stored underground.  Years ago I ceased to be a represser and denier of at least accessible depths.  The resulting emotional news, over two decades, has sharpened my mind and what might be called my sensed philosophy.  From there, I’d say, came the unique declaration.

Once this came true, I felt both relief and challenge.  I’m no longer stumbling day to day, assuming the final pothole could open under my feet at any time.  On the other hand, I’ve never been ambitious, with far-reaching goals.  Now, I may have to think of the long run.

Another way to look at this is – What a chicken!  Shouldn’t there be enough value in each moment – life itself – without coloring it with a guaranteed long future (or afterlife)?  That’s the non-religious person’s belief.  But the non-religious dysthymic* person may like a bit of self-made magic – add some sugar to that tea.

- - - - - - - - - - -

* See earlier blog post -- http://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2013/09/800x600-normal-0-false-false-false-en.html.