Ramble #4: Various

What should we like?

* Small children are jazzed by, stuck on, the phenomena around them. Old people are moved not by the world but by their thoughts of it. They are inner-dwelling even though they talk about things. Their landscape is memory and the philosophy their body has produced. Imagine the opposite: Lying on your death bed and becoming preoccupied with some unfamiliar insect crawling on the sheet, you lose your last three minutes on earth and are gone. It seems like the most ludicrous waste, the comedy of death by banana peel. Yet new experience – a bug, a grass blade whistle, a sliver of a moon – is the meaning of life for the child.*

Is it bad or good that we gain a self but lose the world along the way?

* Following all the politics and pundits today is a substitute for being alive. We have become “social metaphysicians,”** Nathaniel Brandon’s term for individuals whose ground is other people not the ground itself. We are built into the attitudes and delusions of movements and alarms, not personal loves or creativity. I saw the embodiment of that in a twenty-year-old girl (it must be said) who lived on the bobbing heads of friends, false friends, acquaintances of friends, gossip and fears of opinions. She didn’t see herself apart from them. Ambition, absorption in an object, doing something with her life, had never entered the scene. Maybe the youngest children are a healthy blend of realms. Saturday morning – plans on what to do; afternoon, they’re playing ball or swimming, nighttime they’re catching and inspecting lightning bugs. At school, they are learning the world they are in abstractly; recess, they are swimming in the hive of community, personal prestige, victories with and against others.

Is there some right point on our timeline when we should have finished picking up tools and started building something? Or, stopped being mesmerized and started being galvanized? People who want to only study and get more learnèd, people who want to read and read and collect books, knead thoughts into pies in the sky – something is wrong with them. I really wonder: If you’re living in ideas, are you really living?

New elevator speech

I always continue to try to be a better therapist. Part of this urge is, admittedly, my fear that there are either some elemental truths or some next-evolve insight of therapeutic relating that I consistently miss. For years I have oriented new clients to what might be called “injury psychotherapy”: The deepest and most enduring help comes from finding the poisoned roots of our dysfunction and getting the poison out. This is done through knowing, expressing the internal, sending it to the perpetrators, cutting the umbilical cord to them. These processes make us be less poisoned and feel different, and that means we’re a different person.

But this speech doesn’t address the close, caring, even parental and loving relationship that actually becomes the atmosphere and yes, often the fallback of therapy. Is there a way to incorporate that into my basic introduction to – pardon the hubris – their soul?

The client has described some of “what ails.”*** I’ve asked several or many questions. Then –

I hope you’ll come to see me as a different kind of friend. That’s because therapy helps when it’s a different kind of natural: a truth-finding and truth-sharing beyond where people normally go. All the things you have never said but needed to; all the feelings you kept inside and didn’t get to live and breathe; the past lost or never known, the now you’re afraid to say: All that is good and right here. The one predetermined part of this endeavor is that you’d need to decide it’s important to you. I’ve seen people do not nearly as well if they just come on a lark, here and there, or when some troubling feeling presses them. I really think therapy should be a meaningful part of your life.

I might try that speech.

What should we like? part 2

It’s possible that the best way for the old man to spend his last three minutes is to watch that insect. He began in the world, and ended in the world.

- - - - - - - - - - -

* I mean, in an atmosphere of love. If love is missing, it will be a prepotent need that blanches or kills interest in worldly things.

** Nathaniel Brandon – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmQAnVh6K-4, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKfESlnzUjc.

*** Probably in the popular Love’s Executioner, Yalom says that “What ails?” is his opening question to the new client.

The defense mechanisms of "weak" and "strong"

Here are just a small couple of points that I’m sure most therapists have grasped. But they’re worth making explicit and adding to. We have a lot of women clients who are very confused about themselves. They say they have always been strong, or were always “the strong one” in the family. But now in their thirties or forties or fifties, something has happened: This strength has suddenly disappeared. They don’t know where it went, they usually don’t know when it left. Some of these women feel they are now falling apart. Others find they have something similar to the PTSD “foreshortened sense of the future”: Their hope and energy have gone; life feels that it is essentially over, there is nothing left to want or accomplish.

We have men and women clients who do not want to cry in session because they know it is “weak,” and they could not stand to feel this worst kind of weakness. Women are often in this place, too, usually the ones who became “strong” through their adolescence. In a world of coldness, parental immaturity and neglect and abuse, they became the toughened and suppressed carrier of responsibilities, the guarantor of the family’s or the siblings’ survival. Or in Child Protective Services and foster care, batted from place to place, they shut down but for anger and self-medication and a wounded form of selfishness or selflessness. They lost their child feelings, their silliness, hopes, they lost their ability to breathe easy or excitedly like a kid and now breathed with tension or deliberation. I’ve read (Dutton, I believe*) that men in Domestic Violence groups often look like sitting corpses. One can’t see their respiration. Beaten and debased children, they came to hold their feelings of fear, betrayal and rage inside by tightening their chest muscles and suppressing the “breathing of their emotions” in the moment when feelings would be the deepest weakness: the collapse of their heart, their death by shame.

Of course, the women were never really strong. They were just tight, lost, and they pushed themselves. As Claudia Black observed,** they had diversions and struggles through the up-slope to middle age, but then when the challenges were met or had burned out, they “plateaued.” The emptiness they’d lifelong been trying to both fill and run from re-materialized. Mother-naturely codependents become angry then. Selfless women become incompetently selfish: They can’t keep serving entitled people, but there’s not enough self to do for.

We tell the men and women that what they call “weakness” is just touching the truth of who they are, the deep pain of themselves. That’s theory and fact, but it’s not the reality in their bones. That says to cry is to break the shell of their adult, to lose themselves, become the child who is no longer there. But look: Since that’s their singular roots, and because it’s to face the pain of irrevocable loss, to cry is the most astoundingly brave, strong thing they can do.

I rarely think of strength and weakness in myself. I would cry as much as possible, knowing that if I were to break through the deepest barrier I would become the infant who did not survive for the most part. I’ve always been too weak to save money. I am so terrified of the fast-skittering, translucent-brown roaches and water bugs that prowl the sidewalks at night that I do a pink-out*** sissy-dance when I see two or more of them. But I own tragedies that I fear will still kill my mind in the last moments of my life – a really terrible fate – and I contain them with a terrible acceptance. I’d protect my wife from all danger, and perversely enough would relish it because I disdain my old cowardice. I accept that I may be working into my eighties, still five days a week. I believe I have no false hopes. For me, strength may mean nothing other than facing my oceanic flaws and injuries and finding, by luck, some good feeling nevertheless. And choosing that.

When we have a client who decries her loss of “strength” or who avoids feeling “weak,” we may say you shouldn’t have had to be strong like that. We may say it’s not weak to be real. It is true: We are asking them to become different from the person they did become. This is why therapy can be such an absurd adventure.

- - - - - - - - - - -

* Donald G. Dutton’s The Batterer – https://drdondutton.com/portfolio/the-batterer/.

** Claudia Black’s It Will Never Happen To Me – http://www.hazelden.org/OA_HTML/ibeCCtpItmDspRte.jsp?item=100.

*** A legitimate variation of a dissociative black-out or a domestic violence perpetrator’s “red-out,” as cited in Dutton’s book.

Ripped from the comments section of The Atlantic online*

Sam Smith –

The problem with abortion is not whether a human being in the womb is a human being. People who believe abortion is moral and proper have a time and place dysfunction.

In the womb a human being is a certain age. That is a time function. There are no differences between a young human being and a newborn other than growth and development, a function of time.

In the womb or out of the womb is a place. There is no difference between a human being in the womb or out.

Adoption is the only moral answer to an unwanted pregnancy.

The Pessimistic Shrink –

No, Sam, it’s not that simple. Let me entertain you with some psychology (borrowed from a Canadian psychotherapist).** Child, home from school, tells his mother: “Mommy, mommy, the teacher was unfair to me today!” Mother responds: “Now dear, the teacher was only trying to do his best.” She likely believes she is trying to soothe her child’s feelings. In fact, she is not. She is soothing her own feelings and ignoring her son's. The boy is on fire with humiliation: The teacher, let’s assume, laughed at him and the class followed suit. He needs his mother to take his pain away. Instead, she doesn’t hear his message, his feeling, and replies with a parental platitude. The child now has nowhere to go with his pain. He must shut it down (repression and suppression). This burial of his true feelings is the beginning of the depressogenic process – the loss of the “real self” in childhood. The lesson here is that parent's lack of empathy is one of the most injurious kinds of parenting: A child will disappear in the face of this blindness. And yet no one would be foolish enough to call Child Protective Services on this mother. “CPS, you must investigate. There’s a mother out there who lacks empathy!”

Point is – There is an eternal conflict between a person’s legitimately living her own life, with her own errors, and another person's legitimate judgment of that person. Knowing what a mother’s or father’s lack of empathy can do to a child, I’d hypothetically like that parent to be strung up by the toes for an indefinite term, or be required to be monitored by some overseer – from the same moral urge that would cause you to threaten or prevent a woman from having an abortion. Here psychology fuses with philosophy: Each of us is a solipsistic universe who can only live, for the most part, by his own lights and flaws – the imperatives of his or her unique energy – yet each of us judges the other person’s flaws and resultant behaviors.

Knowing the harm you are doing, should I be allowed to send you to prison for slapping your son on the face or for shaming your daughter with crushing words?

Sam Smith –

Sorry you had to write all of this but of course it is that simple. Everything else is just your justification for supporting an immoral action.

The Pessimistic Shrink –

Sorry, Sam. What is simple is you.

*       *       *

I believe morality can never be an objective fact. We can only have individuals trying to make their life work: That is all that human motivation can be, whether the result is altruism or selfishness, self-sacrifice or violence, adopting a child or child neglect, narcissism or obsequiousness, drinking or suicide, making money or giving money. If there will ever be a consensus “good,” sometime in the far distant future, it will only be when love is ubiquitous and all acts are linked to it. There is, though, a “catch” to this love: Its definition comes from psychological knowledge more than from any other domain. It requires one to have been loved for being his or her own unique child. It requires foundational respect for one’s child’s mental processes – thinking and feeling. In that place where life is valued for itself, where pain is not injected deep within children to come out later at the world, each person’s “natural solipsism” will be trustable when the most difficult decisions are made. I will understand that you simply cannot afford to give to that helpless person, but I may be able to. You will accept that this woman is too emotionally fragile to give birth, though she loves life, and new life. We won’t have reason to judge anyone, in this future time, because people will be fully human.

- - - - - - - - - - -

* My sections edited for improved clarity and civilized talk.

** Vereshack is quoted quite a few times in these posts – http://www.paulvereshack.com/.

Rage's roots

There have been occurrences in my adult life where I have been “triggered” to a lightning flash of nihilistic, helpless, abandon-all-hope rage. It has (not surprisingly) always been my loved one who, without realizing it, had pushed some inner death-trap in me. One late evening, I forcefully threw a plate of food on the floor, stormed out of the house and ran to my office. Once I destroyed a good laptop.* Gone it was in a moment of ultimate powerful powerlessness.

Our feelings are not equal to the words we use to describe them. We say “anger,” though it’s not too difficult to feel the flowing identity of anger and frustration, frustration and hurt. But these are still just words. Our feelings are our life. Our feelings are our history. What if our history – our earliest infancy and childhood days – is so precarious, frightening, painful and wrong that there’s no capacity to absorb experience – the fusion of good and bad – or the nourishment to a sense of self? What if we remain the thinnest two-dimensional thread, or actually a two-dimensional plane that can blink out of existence when turned at a certain angle?

I believe these facts and images apply to many individuals (and not just men) when they are inwardly swept to rage. What is really happening is something that sparks that deepest fragility, which is where our birthright of need and promise was thwarted. Add many years upon this ground, through many probable struggles. We have become substitutes for self and self-esteem, upon this cosmic unfairness, this failure to be given love. We seem sturdy, but psychology says we are standing on miles deep of transparent ice. A trigger – “you must have taken the extension cord,” when I didn’t – denies my value, like at the beginning of my life, denies my sane grasp of reality, which is the entirety of my two-dimensional plane’s stability. There is no choice but to not die, and that takes an extreme, that takes an explosion.

There is really no choice in that moment. This is the other primal scream** – not the one of grief, loss and need, but the one that insists on living.

- - - - - - - - - - -

* See post “The psychological symbol” – https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-psychological-symbol.html.

** https://www.amazon.com/Primal-Scream-Therapy-Cure-Neurosis/dp/B000WMOGEM.

If you don't know what's broke, you can't fix it

It is time to “psychoanalyze” a fellow therapist based on only five biographical facts. Though my means seem catty and low, my ends are high: to open the eyes of clients.

The five are: He’s going for a PhD at age AARP. He drives a Mercedes. He was in the military, assumedly his first and main career. With a one-in-a-thousand exception, every time he opens his mouth to initiate or respond to me or to someone within my hearing, shooting the breeze, talking clinical or with a client or administrative staff, he mentions that he was “in the military” or references “the military.” Really – steadfast as the loon’s throaty song, reliable as the hands on an atomic clock. And, he loves President Trump and clearly has no ability to see (diagnose) the man’s Narcissism or to grasp his stunning lack of adult-level acumen and president-level breadth of knowledge. The placidity with which he goads our psychiatrist about Trump’s sterling qualities is an emetic waiting to happen.

So beware. If this is true, then it could happen over and over again: Your therapist may be blind to himself and to grave disorder. She may be neurotically self-enclosed, which is what you are seeing in someone who chronically talks about herself. And you may be sitting before someone who remains, in his hidden engine, a child, despite his medals (if any) and years in the rugged death-kill, deferential and duty-bound terrain of the military.

Why a child? It is impossible to like this president with his global self-loving immaturity unless your own caregiver (when you were a child) was an immature authoritarian at some level and you were stripped of your own power and submerged under his. Look at Trump’s adult children. They “chose” to become capitalist Midases, have the emotions of a predator-lizard, and do not notice the poison or the razor’s edge of their father’s character disease. Shadow souls.

This is similar to the millions of Germans who saw a right-thinking, heart-warming father figure in Adolf Hitler. There is something very wrong with people who cannot feel the pain that a toxic person radiates.

It is not hard to be a counselor. This is because there are many kinds of touches that can help a client feel better short of – far short of – getting better. Pleasant, humorous conversation. Advice and a knowing air. A genial manner that seems caring but isn’t too empathically intimate (which would threaten one’s defense, one’s child’s heart). Asking questions. Providing personal experience or book-based insights. Intent eye contact (which, as I believe Jeffrey Kottler points out, can be maintained even when the therapist is falling asleep). Many therapists don’t help a person change. They just throw a little pink cloud under her ass for the session.

This could be the case of my peer, here. I cannot see how someone who lives on the psychological defense of dull-axe dogma can be adult and “empty” enough to contain a client’s burden, transparent enough to know what she says. That his work, and many others’, endures shows that people do not ultimately know what is wrong with them, and may therefore accept any candy or band-aid that’s offered.

Poem: I can't really call this a poem

When I’m 87 I will move to Key West and be a shell

burning on a lounge chair, under the blue sky, feet

spread in the ocean. I know I’ll still have shit to be

burned away even then: thoughts, any thoughts,

which have always been the way the brain dances

around truth. I’ll be tired of all thoughts by then. I’ve

already felt all my feelings. What will come then will

be a mystery, maybe even a rebirth, something new.

Something will come, because the burning will

happen, the days and nights will flow.

Doing my work of therapy has mostly been further

and further self-awareness. This has taught me

that I became other people in childhood. Ego

doesn’t necessarily happen as a positive. I’d like,

then, to be stripped of all the pollution, this history,

the false ego that is stupidly proud, and in a place

where the world is sweet, healthy, even benignly

dangerous: I could be extinguished by the dark

ocean.

I’ve long seen that nothing in our adult life is

right: grabbing a beer, having a job, liking music.

Lost, we passively take these things from the

ground or the shelf. (Drive by inner fires, we move.

Drive by inner frozen earth, we are still.) Who are

we really?

Remember there’s Key West, where you may just

have a glass of water, not a beer, watch people milling

about, finally ignore time. You won’t need to get on

a boat and sail out into the sea for the final adventure.

You will be the boat.

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.