Diary entry

I believe I haven’t had a new insight coming out of a client interaction in a long while. Most of my two-hundred-plus blog posts have reflected, each, a new idea or mystery for me. But the brain has faded, the posts have dwindled. I’m in a more conversational, mundane, clueless, even potboiler phase with most clients. There’ve been slight ruffles of interest. A young woman couldn’t understand why she’d have, when drinking, ugly thoughts about her father, when sober she knew her life was tv-perfect and he was as white knight as possible. I revealed, with my old flashlight, a series of clues that pointed inexorably to a troubled childhood (tattoos, sudden transition away from church to a druggie crowd in high school, the family’s moral straitjacket of a gung-ho religion, a criminal goof-up, alcohol, briefly heroin-addicted brother, “good-natured” wrestling with siblings, absence of post-high school goal, enduring a few years of an abusive relationship), though they may exonerate her father for the crime on her mind. She hadn’t seen any of these clues, but now it was she herself who excellently suggested the deep cause: lack of being a child, being “little mommy” taking care of the younger kids. Loss. I had never seen a client, in over twenty years of individual sessions, uncover this invisible and global loss of identity on her own.

Then there was the man in his sixties who presented with three problems: a bipolar diagnosis, and extreme psychotic episodes but which occurred only during traumas such as seeing a corpse or having a life-threatening illness. It was like a dormant schizophrenia, showing up once maybe every decade. After forty years of lithium, we pretty much ruled out bipolar, but then just faced the phenomenon of crazy-when-overwhelmed. My diagnosis was basically “it’s just one of those things”: A series of childhood traumas (coincidental, or gravitationally pulled by a toxically parented life) featuring horrific sensation and dissociative refuges made him susceptible, later, to weird collapses.

I have never wanted to be formulaic about my work. I’ve always wanted to reinvent the wheel of revelation and abyss-descending for each client. But I’m closer to seventy than sixty now, and maybe there’s a kind of burnout that just happened. Fortunately, there’s a part of me, a stubborn sliver, that is entirely unrealistic hope. I know it’s from my childhood when real and baseline despair was sabotaged by some unknown sense of positivity. It wasn’t a good birth: I was premature, incubated, never bonded with mother. Where did this stupid positivity come from? Whatever its nature, it insidiously finds its way into hope for those deep, rich moments with a new or old client. Fine! I’ll be working ’til I’m 92!

Mini manifesto

I wrote to my scarily suicidal young client this:

Another day, another dollar. And more. Please please please, see beyond family to your own self, adventures, new coffee shops, the bat bridge in Austin, Texas, the "whitest sand beach in the world" (past winner) of Siesta Key, Florida, Baltimore crab cakes, mountain retreats (my old friend Al), Kripalu (https://kripalu.org/), Royal Gorge (http://royalgorgebridge.com/) in little Canon City, Colorado. And the ever exotic Etc. Must take steps.

Writing that, I realized that I rarely attend to, feel the good things in the world anymore. That would be a matter of “dropping” the self and being jazzed by big juicy things out there, with utter relax in one’s gut and chest. For me, it’s very hard to do. I have tremendous debt and little power, and chaining-down obligations. But the essential error is falling into the musty cell of self-consciousness, which is where I think most people are in their middle-and-beyond years, be they “intellectual” or not. Can we get back into the world for a few minutes? Can we do it thematically – a sea-change in our approach – where now we’re back to where we are supposed to be: connected to life by our eyes, not by our folded-back-in-on-itself mind?

This is just a question to myself, to which I don’t have the answer now. I do know it’s the best way to live. And that as long as you stay out of a real prison cell, it shouldn’t be impossible. Most all of us embody injuries that – as psychic ones do – warp our spirit and paint it “condemned” in ineradicable ways. But we’re not just that. Somehow, we can be both trapped in our self and live beyond it. That’s the birthright which is always there, an irreducible kernel from our beginning.

Put down the ice cream

It wasn’t until I was forty-two years old that I came to ask myself, What’s wrong with me? The ride had stopped. I had left my eleven-year first marriage in cowardly fashion – leaving work early before my wife got home from her job, packing some clothes, six hundred dollars, my electric razor and my mini-Schnauzer, and scramming. ‘Where do I know no one?’ was the impetus that sent me from gulf coast Florida to Ohio. After a couple months situated, taking temp jobs, living in “Uzi Alley” (a bad part of town), dealing with loneliness by hanging out nightly at a quaint bookstore-café, I found myself face-to-face with the extreme cavity of my life. I sat down, with coffee, and proceeded to write my self. When you do that the very helpful way, you are casting the clouded light of intellect into your depth, your past. I found truths that were always there yet covered over by decades of repression. A main insight was knowledge the way a still-healthy child experiences it: a full-body epiphany that makes everything different. If not for that descent into my core, I would assuredly, now, be a sixty-five-year-old typist, only a terrible nighttime walk-taking emptiness too wan to even coalesce into a question, a thing that had never grasped his lifelong death, and too ignorant to make it final.

So I appreciate the work of psychology.

There were at least three earlier occasions when my feeling might have brought me to therapy. A brief breakdown, just a moment or two, at age thirteen, when my mother asked me if something was wrong. I remember being around twenty and telling my new brother-in-law that I would never care to learn to play chess, because it wasn’t “the real world.” And freshman year of college, the most uncharacteristic thought and entirely out of the blue, that I would “need a tragedy” to dislodge me from whatever unnameable momentum I was captive within. But as is true for most people, the pull of now always had hegemony. What psychology shows us is that “now” is the wrong way created by our then. “Now” is looking at something and feeling the past, and not realizing it. “Now” is running away from our problems.

You will never get better by clasping the now. You may feel better for a short while. But age, in our human nature, seems to inexorably pull us to find our self, which has a child’s face.

Addendum to a progress note

Question of the moment: If a client is nearly dying (chronically suicidal) because she has never detached in any way – emotionally, developmentally, behaviorally, geographically – from her unloving, torturous and incessantly denigrating parents, is it sensible therapy to ask her to consider that she might have to give up on them? The client believes, in her lifelong bunker of misery, that the only surcease will be if they let her go, not if she lets them go: She has no power to do that. We have worked deep, maybe too deep, into this. I suggested that even if her parents did come clean and state their real feeling – or actually, the feelings she believes they must have – “We don’t love you, we let you go” – this would be a false epiphany: Her parents are so dumb and blind and repressed that they cannot know the truth of their real feelings. Their reality would be in their “inner” child – hurt, bitter, needing love. That corrupt state doesn’t grow into lack of love for their daughter. It grows into lack of all love, any kind at all. So the young woman would hear an abandonment that was the final knife in her soul but that wasn’t even real.

Such a question! I was so certain about this that I had to allow a “logical” contradiction to it – “Other therapists may tell you that somewhere deep inside them, your parents do love you. They just may never know how to show it.” Would this be right? To be encouraged to believe something that was belied by every feeling and sensation in her, every behavior – past to now – in her abortive, solipsistic and passively homicidal parents? Recently, her mother smirked as she said, “I had an abortion before I had you.” The clear message my client heard: I would rather kill babies than be your mother.

I know one therapy – Levenkron’s “nurturant-authoritative” approach – which claims to “re-parent” many young adolescents who have detached – anorectically, obsessive-compulsively or self-injuriously – from their parents. How blasé and fabulous! In a moment of deep care, impulsively, I had offered to be my client’s “father.” This struck her in a terrible way, as craved but impossible. When I said it, she must have had the feeling of all that loss telescoped into a moment, and an impossible moving on. The offer continues to float in the air above us. But it would take a breakdown to accept it. Would it be sensible therapy to work toward that?

Solipsism #2*: A less made-for-tv understanding of teen suicide

I could ask hundreds of parents of clients I’ve seen: Are you lost in yourself? Are you self-absorbed? And they would be puzzled, would say “no.” But they would be wrong, and absolutely clueless. These parents are the solipsists for whom the ultimate meaning of every thought, every feeling, every perception and every consideration is Self. They are trapped in a world of Self and do not know it. It is a trap that pushes reality over the horizon, never to be reached. It doesn’t matter that they have relationships, pet the dog, “love” people, go on vacation and see new sights. They can never throw themselves beyond themselves and land in the arms of the strange world, of deep experience. Their need, their soothing and their value are their only path and destination.

You are their child. They have never seen you, but possibly in their last minute on their death bed. They have never known that you exist as a separate person apart from their demeaned property, apart from their idea. If you were your own person in your own world, who looked down at them like the sad, lost, bunched-up souls they are, they would be all alone, with no one to be better than, no one to consume. They would feel like children. You have never been touched by them, you have never been loved by them.

You have no parent, but this is the parent you crave, the one you cave into. Mother is the center of your life. You pay regular visits to father’s house to look after him, bring him his grandchild. “I forgive, but I don’t forget,” you declare solemnly, but you actually have killed the feeling in the memory, because it killed you.

In your desperation, you are competing with a child to be the child.

It may seem impossible to finally blink these parents out of existence, but I have seen a nineteen-year-old young woman do it. Her parents produced not one, but two suicidal teens, because all the critical years they only had mocking contempt and dislike for the strangers in the room, their own children. She doesn’t need them, really. I don’t know how she doesn’t, but I can only smile sadly with her.

- - - - - - - - - - -

* A more in-depth look at solipsism: https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2013/10/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none_20.html.

Curmudgeon #2: Forgiveness*

I practically get hives when clients tell me they “forgive” their parents or others who were mentally, physically, sexually abusive to them. I know I’m looking at someone who has not only exited the world to a place of dissociation, but someone who has landed on a fantasy planet and is riding the imaginary rides. And not only that: someone who has bought an empty idea she did not create or critique but learned at mother’s knee.

This is a place where people believe in magic, actual magic. What do they think happens when they say “forgive”? Do they grow a warm, gracious, benevolent feeling from nothing? What feeling do they imagine they experience? Or do they convince themselves that such a gift (to self or other) can exist solely as a thought or a decision, a “commitment” without emotional value? Uncanny to me is that people act for all the world as though the word is the deed: Just say it and it manifests. “My adoptive father forced sex from when I was twelve to fourteen, and my mother actually believed his lie that it was an ‘affair.’ They have never apologized to this day. But I forgive them.” That is the most stupefying feature. Is there any other incantation in modern history that somehow creates the reality it invokes? Does someone despise a person then say “I love you” and it is so? Does someone state “I am cleansed of disease” and it is believed? “I forgive” is unique, I think, because it is the great placebo of healing whenever therapy is not done. These – forgiveness and therapy – are the two continents in the world of the hurting, with forgiveness the preferred home by far by most people. It is a way to imagine we have moved on when the body remains sickened by its poison.

Forgive me, but forgiveness is simply the repression of true feeling, with various thoughts mixed in the anesthesia, and a determination to feel a noble or healthy or moral sense. Some individuals will enrich the thoughts with biblical citations or New Age wisdom or scientific evidence. There will be Cirque du Soleil-level gyrations of delusion and argument that swoop in at light speed, because forgiveness must happen: It is the dream rock that an adult house is built on. But it is a belief in magic and a denial of human pain and injury. Magical deniers have a very sticky time in a therapy that deals with the truth.

- - - - - - - - - - -

* See Curmudgeon #1 if you dare -- https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2015/03/curmudgeon-1-thoughting.html.

Pure omniscience

I recently met an 18-year-old boy who was righteously certain that he knew everything about truth, love, the failure of people and the ugliness of the world. His logic of disgust was profound. He claimed scientific proof that human existence is garbage, and was so confident as to be magnanimous: “I accept everything you say, but . . .” A decent therapist should know that there is, on the one hand, angry-hurt attitude, and on the other, fixed, ego-syntonic, pervasive mind corruption. That is, a personality disorder. With such folks – I have seen it in other teenagers – I had never before gone “father superior,” but this situation felt different. Maybe I wanted to jar his mother, too, who had joined the session despite her son’s “adult” status.

“You are 18. I am 65. I have spent forty-two years accumulating neuroses and now for the past twenty-three years, every day, eight to ten to twelve or more hours a day I have studied my and other people’s and your problems and the thoughts and attitudes that are hatched in them. I advise you to park your omniscience. Your belief system is your alcohol, your self-medication, not what is true about the world.”

I am too old for this and just right for this, burned out but with the right simmering burn. I had just established with my therapy group that corporal punishment of children is shit, while they argued with me like good neurotics. With the young man, I had more hidden pleasures: I knew, because the theory is correct, that his personality warp started with his mother’s disturbance. And she, intrigued by my discussion with her son, asked for some leads on studying “personality disorders.” I did not give her any information on a depth approach. But maybe she’ll read further, and find where the mother has “issues” in the first three years of her child’s life, and continues to be an undermining presence.

The Attitudinal One and I got along. I acknowledged being aggravating, and offered my services. I’d like to help someone who wonders about suicide, so deadened to his real self, to the child who could still feel life, not end up painting the world rotting.

Walking therapy

We take a walk through the paths and woods of Park of Roses, Clintonville area of Columbus. The client is troubled. Walking stirs up positive (survivor) energy, contemplative energy, and feelings that have been buried. These energies make us feel viable, maybe more than if we sit on a chair or couch in the therapy room.

Client: I’m talking with you, but I don’t feel that I’m here. Of course I am; it’s nice to be outside, in the trees. But at the same time, it’s a bad reality. I want to grasp something – this branch – but I know I wouldn’t feel it. I want to feel great, adventurous, when I walk solid on the ground. But I’m walking in my mind.

Therapist: (a few more paces.) Let’s stop. Put that leaf in the palm of your hand. Quiet your mind. Feel, don’t think.

C: (a quiet moment.) I did have some feelings. A potpourri. But then a sad one. Why in the name of Crap would a leaf make me sad?

T: What would you feel if it was just you and that leaf?

C: (longer pause.) Oh my. I would fall into it, become green, drown in it. (A bit wistful.) Can’t I do that?

T: I would welcome it. Try it a little longer.

C: (client stares at the leaf.) It brings me back to childhood. (There are silences everywhere.) In all the soup of garbage, a few good moments. . . . It’s not a feeling – it’s being. Kicking a football ten times higher than the houses. Collecting a dozen honey bees in a glass jar then dropping it and running! Everything was crucial: looking at my friend’s face, burning in the summer day, walking to the far foreign end of our street where the strange kids lived. . . . But there was already something in the way, something that pulled me into myself. Anxiety. A kind of depressed fear. It made me pull back and leave things, leave everything, eventually.

This leaf is sad. Or it’s the past.

T: Allow the tears.

- - - - - - - - - - -

There are times when I think walking therapy is the best way to do it. The client can never be fully with you anyway, because she’s going to be lost in herself. If she’s going to be lost in herself, she might as well be there within the world she has to live in.

Recent observations

-- Several weeks ago a client, 25 years old, asked me if I could be her “dad.” This wasn’t frivolous, regressive, Borderline or romantic. There was a real meaning to it. This week, after a few months of stasis in sessions, I asked a client – also mid-20’s – if she wanted me to be her “dad.” There was nothing erroneous or unsound about this, either. You won’t learn anything in a clinical counseling program about being a client’s father or mother. You will mostly learn antiseptic stuff that, like loaded dice, is weighted with professional propriety: a big bland umbrella, over the client’s head, that has many holes in it. This umbrella is both respectful and a cop-out. It’s respectful to the client’s adult persona, and to her true self’s requirement to breathe alone, to be a separate person. But it’s a cop-out because people need someone. If we’re the helper of last resort, and maybe the only one in a long, long time, then we can’t refuse, or not offer, to be that person.

-- I have reached a next level of distrust in the power of Primal Therapy, though this distrust will rest at the theory level. It comes from a certainty I have about a horrific and blind epiphany that occurred when I was around twelve or thirteen years old. For the first time, and the one and only time in my life, my mother had come into my room, sat on my bed, and asked me if there was anything wrong. Why this had occurred to her now, in a family where nothing was ever right and nothing was ever wrong and where nothing was ever said and all feelings were fake and everything was ruining slowly but inexorably – who could say? But that question, the only intimate words I had ever heard from her, exploded and suffocated me simultaneously. I cried, tears of the deepest unconsciousness, of everything lost in me from the beginning to then. She did not help, had no capacity to hear beyond the din of her life. I almost immediately returned to the prison of “life goes on.” What I know now is that had my mother understood what those tears meant and held me close with that knowledge, I would not have been helped. I would have fallen into a regressive black hole that reached insanity – the traumatized baby in a precarious teenager’s body.

If a boy, with his mother’s history-erasing compassion and love, could not survive regressing, how, Dr. Janov, could that person survive it later, as an adult?

-- Are you schizophrenic if you hear voices? Hardly. Very anxious people, drug-addicted people, childhood-traumatized people sometimes hear voices. They may hear several, and often. But they are fundamentally down-to-earth and are not insane. Psychiatrists, though, will typically diagnose them with schizophrenia or another psychotic disorder. Stupid. There has to be a certain character that is predominantly and helplessly off-reality. The same, possibly, with visual hallucinations: seeing people, fleeting dark images, shadows. And with delusions. There are a lot of fragile folks who believe absurd things – about conspiracies, demons, energies, self-reference (e.g., strangers’ attention is focused on them), but they are not psychotic. And yet there is a gray area on the continuum where we’d have to say the person is more unreal than real. But who can always say who is there? Not the medically minded psychiatrist! A client with sculpted-wild hair said: “Life sure drags me down. I’m having a problem with radios, tv’s. People’s conversations are altered toward me. The demons are screwing with my eyes. Three years ago I began to believe that people could read my thoughts.” I was mostly certain that he was as sane as you or me. But he had come to be invested in psychotic incompetence.

-- With twenty-three years of almost daily psychological work, I have found some of myself and answered some of my questions. Two questions, though, I have never been able to answer, as simple as they seem: When a person asks: How are you? or How are you doing? And: Am I a good person?

I despise bromidic truths. They are emblematic of the blindness that made my childhood invisible and that makes people’s – including my clients’ – lives largely irrelevant to their truth. We live with answers with little depth, often those that live only in our head or on the surface of our tongue. With access to a fairly open history and to Dr. Gendlin’s “felt sense” – the body’s molecular treasure chest of emotional history – I am still dumb to any sense if I am “wonderful,” “fine,” “ok,” tragically bad, or even unhappy. I am not deeper than you (I think we are all made of the same earth). But I can get no answer to this question.

It’s the same with: Am I good? A handful-and-a-half of hours in a day I enjoy helping people. But I’ve had only two friends (with a few “friend-clients”) in the last forty years, and distance more acquaintances than I preserve. I don’t give to charity. Right now I’m growing a contemptuous disgust for a coworker who is an entirely decent chap. I don’t have a moral code, and my spiritual core is limited to Einstein’s sense of mystery during a look upward. Only in moments of their need do I feel caring toward people, with the complicated exception of my wife. I would give no one the shirt off my back, but would give them money or my best and most loved books. I have no family – something that probably angers and may hurt them. I believe my articles can be helpful to an honest person’s mind, yet they are disquieting. I know I never received, from a parent, what a person needs to feel wholly benevolent, complete: I remain a paragraph that ends with an ellipsis.

Am I good? You tell me.