Fantasy impromptu #2: Stages

I have always had a visceral revulsion to the pap concepts always – always – found in the nose bag of Intro Psych courses – operant conditioning, reinforcement, “learned helplessness,” Erikson’s “identity crisis,” Adler’s “inferiority complex,” Gestalt psychology’s figure-ground, Piaget and his cognitive stages and Kohlberg and his moral stages and oh horrors, Wolpe’s “systematic desensitization” and Maslow’s hypocritical hierarchy (look that faker up).  Even writing these terms now, I hear my gut yelling at the universe, “What unusable bilge!  Who in the name of the God of Trite Oleaginous Shit gives a damn?”

Nevertheless . . . I glance at Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development (that include “basic trust versus basic mistrust” and the famous “identity crisis”) and am reminded that there are indeed different psychological stair steps in life, and know that they require different therapeutic approaches.

This isn’t just that a thirteen- or seventy-five-year-old shouldn’t be led to primal scream, descending into her childhood unfulfillment and horror.  It’s that a 22-year-old adolescent-man will have a different quality of existential distress from a 28-eight-year-old.  The 26-year-old still living in his parents’ basement will feel different from the 29-year-old in the same place.  My client, 43, who is depressed that her medical records job is a dead end is encouraged to see her life as young and consider returning to college.  One with similar fears at 48, might see and be seen differently.  Their place on the timeline is not nuance, but number as dread, and I have to be there with them.

Age itself may not be a determiner of therapeutic moderation.  A 54-year-old man with a very toxic ADHD syndrome* has, through aggressive psychoeducation, slammed on his brakes and slid over the cliff, crashing into his childhood invisibility and expelling the rages of his injustice.  This great shock – My parents, it was all about them! – is the one thing likely to bring him peace, and quiet.

I see in my stage – sixty-four years – a future that can’t be described; where there’s a kind of “hope for hope,” but the material of it will still have to be discovered (I don’t believe in “inventing” oneself).  Aware, thankfully, of the fundamental flaws of my roots, upbringing and entire life, I have to be mired in them while searching above the waves for mountains.  Where I will soon be living, there are some small ones.

Were I to see a psychotherapist, I would want to treat her like a god, or the Mother, in this way: a person before whom everything can be revealed, who understands and accepts it.  The child always present; futility with no redemption; my sense of my goodness; the unusual marriage.  The self that no one has ever seen.  I’d make her my friend, knowing she’s not.  And leave the office feeling more substantial, no longer just a mind-dwelling person.  That seems to make for hope: leaving the nest of oneself.

What is there about one’s ages that makes psychology different?  While I will always believe that real therapy is a grieving of the timeless, there is the simple fact of death that shapes each age, curving, like space-time, the flat plane of our pained existence.  Death differently immanent in each age, clashing with life, forces us to be creative or desperate (maybe that's a kind of birth).  Psychotherapy rides the curves, looking for life and desperation, and offering friendship.

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* By this I mean the features of inattention and chronic tension in addition to related developmental aborts – lost-boy immaturities including naïveté about life and self-sabotage.

Pessimistic Shrink's second anniversary

Writing these little articles is, more than it is psychologizing, my way of doing poetry and joining human drama.  I’m following a similar neurotic symbolic dream of twenty-two-year-old Borderlines and my seventy-year-old father, who felt an internal something that told them they wanted to be writers.  I believe my father (who said he would like to write stories in his retirement but never did) felt that he had not touched earth, as closet Narcissist who could never speak like a man or just live the real emotions.  The Borderline never-aging girls seem to want to have a real ego – impossible to these early separation-individuation flaws – but that fuses with their adolescent-escapist intellect defense.

Probably everything I write comes from my ephemeral bursts of spirit, which then subside into a dysthymic inert land.  The bursts are wonderful – like a piece of music that just by sounds opens up Universal Harmony and Meaning to us.  That’s what all meaning to us is – a feeling.  It’s not at all some idea of “importance.”

I know that like all neurotics I embody the conflict between detachment and symbiotic need, which produces the absurd kaleidoscope of deadness, exuberance, fear, hate and love that runs our lives.  If I have the slightest advantage – which really could be the most moribund disadvantage – it’s that I know, have gotten used to, and have compassion for my losses and the death they’ve produced.  My fruit is therefore organic and knowing pessimism, along with organic and knowing optimism.  Many clients learn both from me.  I've come to believe this makes the best music.

Intervention tidbit #6: Anxiety

A woman in her early thirties has continuous anxiety, often “like an out-of-body experience.”  “I break out crying hysterically, more in the evenings as it gets darker.”  She has a solid marriage, a baby who’s just left nursing, is a well established middle-school teacher.  She is in constant fear and smiles – a rigid but pleasing and infectious smile – most of the hour, every session.

I’d like to fire any therapist, endorsing the here-and-now, who believes that mindfulness, reframing, de-catastrophizing self-talk, rationality, autogenic relaxation or regulated breathing would help this woman’s problem, even come up to its ankles.  Open your eyes and see the past:

She was the disliked stepchild of her aunt.  She was almost three years old when her mother died.  The aunt was a raging Histrionic who broke tree branches on her head, “screamed and threw things” if there was one lower grade in a superb report card.  Age ten, she had become characterologically a vigilant and tiptoeing and strategizing girl, manipulating remote factors, distracting her aunt’s mind away from her crazy thoughts and punishments.

The girl never expressed a thing, never breathed a word of anger or unhappiness.  Childhood-to-adolescence became a play of fake smiles and life, a secondary circle of existence orbiting her scorched world.

By age thirty she had never said a single word of anger or grievance or serious feeling to anyone.  She emailed her friends and husband because she couldn’t talk to them, still lived the play-act with her stepmother.  She sat ten minutes, twenty minutes in silence in therapy, and no word could come out, week after week.

Strength-based, here-and-now therapists, picture someone holding in mountainous anguish her whole life, walking on with it, smiling over it, speaking pre-made lessons through it in her classes.  Always having used the mind to figure out escapes and the best unreality for the moment.  There was one thing she needed in our therapy – to find her tongue, her words; meaning: the strength to exist, the strength to be devastated.  Anxiety ends when it turns to grief-rage and tears, that finally water her scorched home world.

Beyond the emotional, the existential

In the ocean of a woman’s malaise and weakness, she may cling to her mother who is nothing other than a cement lifesaver.  Sometimes she’ll say: “Mom always made me think that every decision I’d make would be a reflection on her.”  Today we need to think of what this means, because one doesn’t need any more trauma than this to become the floating lost: to exist secondary to life, and as the fodder for someone else’s ego.

The same spell lives in these words: “You’re not good enough.”  Set aside the obvious shaming here – making a child feel he will never possess goodness.  Look instead at the existential gift.  The parent is really saying, “It is meaningless that you are you.  You have to be me.”  That is precisely what this statement means: “You are not living according to my sight, which I require.”

The parent who requires her child to be a virtuous “reflection” is beyond ill.  She is the religious zealot who murders his daughter because she “shames” him by not living his life.  The root cause of this disease is the complete absence of a capacity for, and awareness of, individuality.  The person who does not have a self, cannot see one in others, especially in one's children.

I existed in this phantom zone for much of my life, starting at the beginning: the void of self and the consequent angry mystification that another child could exert the power of initiative, make a decision, go against anyone.  Later, when a married man, it simply galled me, in disbelief, that my adopted daughters could have opinions of their own.  This body-mutilated logic is a symptom of a never-made person, and I guarantee you that such an anti-human instinct resides, though unspoken, in the bowels of any parent who needs his child to be “right.”

The girl who grows up being a reflection of her mother; the boy forced to be a role model for his younger brother, may not gain the feeling of a self.  Nothing will be for him.  All body-feeling will be poisoned: He will have been taken over by what seems to him a real person – the irony, because the parent is emptiest of all.  We wonder at all the depression, anxiety, lack of meaning, empty jobs, dependencies on people and substances in the world.  Does a person with an individual self assimilate others, become assimilated, drift here and there and nowhere?

Raw #1*

What is so special about a psychotherapist that he or she can take someone with totally ruined self-esteem, self-blame for everything in his life, failure to grow an inch beyond his childhood feelings of humiliation and errancy – and make him into a person who feels the hurt done to him, clears himself, and can now see the world not through childhood pain and adult rage at others, but from injustice, justice, and peace?

I don’t know that I have that skill, because this client continues to see himself as a botched being from the start, a child awkward and ugly and ridiculous, and needing to try to be “cool” like his brother and father, always inferior.  He earns eighty-thousand a year, does humanitarian works beyond any norm, but is still this child.  He is a macho dude by job, but still the class clown, still the wannabe.  How can a counselor fix this?

These questions point to an ultimate problem with therapy.  Or actually, with people and with therapy’s pretensions.  We can’t make someone grow in the true way, as if we were the first twelve years of good parenting and a time machine.  We can’t make him grow.  Most people’s adultness, or even their more-or-less stable adolescence, is unreal, it is their necessary delusional place, their numbing of the truth, their scar-tissue ground of required maturity.  But that is what we think of as the adult.  Underneath most of our surfaces is the screeching child, lost beyond any known meaning of the word.  We grow a veneer of conduct and rationality and see things the way we are supposed to see them.

This client did not comport.  He remained the boy fully accepting he was the self-destructive garbage his terrible father made him see he was.  In third grade he already hated himself, tried to be some other.

Therapists learn about the quality of empathy, and hopefully really feel for the other person.  We should believe in the existence of the inner child.  But our natural instincts – codified in and blessed by all psychological teaching – say this inner child is a germ within the adult, a germ that we work on with the adult.  Oh, how placid!  How convenient.  What if he is our real soul, hidden or not – as with my client?

Picture being with, sitting next to, holding, the fully regressed man or woman, frozen in fire and unable, needing mommy, the apotheosis of pain.  That would be frightening, wouldn’t it?  But I need to ask all therapists: Why wouldn’t that be the best?

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* A single Bell’s Two Hearted Ale was enough to get me to write more from the heart, or the id.