My hippie moment #2

There will always be someone coming along who changes the world. Whether an Aristotle or a Hitler, Einstein, Gates-Jobs – somebody will change the channel of the river we flow down, though the destination will be the same. Actually, some changers will create a different destination – one’s inner sense of meaning that travels on through one’s years. Hitler changed meaning for many people. But I doubt that the invention of the computer or smartphone or automobile can change any person’s fundamental capacity for happiness or unhappiness, her deepest center. Idea systems – Platonist or Marxism or Christianity or Ayn Rand’s Objectivism – can alter an impressionable person, but not someone who thinks on his or her own. I was once a Randian capitalist-egoist-rationalist, but it faded away decades ago.

Mostly we are each alone in a populated world of objects and events, discoveries and wars, politics and the great classics and popular songs, colored lights and news stories and the millennium, where all of it is just the dim backdrop to our own life. None of these fantastic things gives us meaning. We have it from other sources.

Music is deceptive. I can listen to some classical piece and while it plays I’ll feel like a different person, from ganglion to soul. A Gershwin turns me into a worldly New Yorker of the 1920’s. Rachmaninoff’s Second Concerto puts me in a universe where a celestial choir does sound and reveal the noble meaning of everything. A Grieg Lyric Piece or folk tune and I am a poetic peasant, Norwegian mountain variety. Chopin, and I am the drastic child who was ahead of his time in neurotic feeling. But end of piece, these changes evaporate immediately, completely.

I may be less susceptible to internalizing meanings than many people, partly because of my dysthymic placidity, partly because I no longer look for them. The dysthymia means that baseball or travel or possessions don’t give me a powerful feeling. Only two things do: my marriage and my work. When I’m sitting with clients, though, an instinct always kicks in that says benefits like a relationship, a job, a relocation, a hobby, a pet, a clean bill of health, are good meanings. I know these are right, though they are better than I can do.

I think one thing could give me another piece of meaning. If someone were to invent a personal starship that traveled with the “spooky action” Einstein abhorred: vast distances instantly, or pretty much that fast. I think that would do it – seeing new sights and always going toward the mystery that no one will ever solve. But . . . .

I doubt that I’d be able to leave my wife or my work.

The Lady Shop*

Part I

Is there anything we can make of the fact that a counseling practice I have joined part-time** has an overwhelmingly female clientele (maybe ninety percent) who want to see a female therapist? I am the one man at a Lady Shop that is quietly Amazonian in feel. I believe I have an attitude about this, thought it remains unplumbed and open to reason.

Life coaching, EMDR, womanly empathy, sisterly encouragement, motherly-like love. The natural camaraderie. The comfort of not sitting with a male therapist while opening up about sexual abuse five or forty years ago. Pretty offices with imperative-inspirational slogans on the walls (“do what you love, love what you do”; “yesterday NOW tomorrow”; “You are worth your weight in [gold bar image]),” and many pillows. Where are the floaty go-nowhere music and aromatherapy?

One of my big ignorances about the history of psychotherapy is: I do not know when the drastic surgery of psychoanalysis and depth therapy turned into happiness promising and quick-fix making. When did shrinks in their cloistered offices turn into sunshine and lollypops, smiling ads, “strength,” “solutions,” numerically measurable “objectives” and “goals,” cookie-cutter “trauma” techniques, guarantees of joy, twenty-four-year-old Social Workers with gentle empathy and 10-oz. CACREP theories under their belt, life course redirection and better thinking inserted into malleable brains?

I wonder but do not know: Is there a causal link between the two – the rising of the sea of female therapists and the sea change to love and positivity? Is it therapists’ competition with psychiatric drugs, like Hanukkah competes with Christmas?

Part II

I have for once held a deliberately depressing session. The client, mid-forties, had been adequately successful, worked as a handyman, had many abilities. He would also periodically lose what he’d gained through neurotic relationships, becoming bored with a town and moving on, sabotaging himself in small fry ways (hobbled by warrants after failing to pay parking fines, for example). One day he got in an automobile accident that caused him some mild-to-moderate neurological problems – decreased alertness, iffy depth perception.

He never worked again.

In sessions, he sullenly described his incapacities, the unpayable warrants, his helpless attorney, the Disability Income litigation limbo, his failure to get a break of any kind. I listened, offered encouragements and empathy. And when he finally asked – with masked frustration – for some feedback, I said:

‘People such as you and I came from a depressive home that blocked and bled our natural energy, our capacity for a passionate true north. So as adults we carry within us an empty anchor. We are held back at the root. And this root makes success feel subtly tragic, some kind of wrong. Now you have gotten hurt, and the early injuries of your childhood have been re-proven. Once again no one is there to see or care. You can no longer move on. You “can’t work,” though I am sure you could if you could ignore your inner truth, as adults do.

‘I think we have to know our anchor, and how our range has been narrowed by our childhood. If you then have compassion for yourself, you can look outward from the lower hills and valleys. You won’t be punishing yourself for mountains that don’t exist. You can then find smaller gems. You’ll be in your own world, not the one that was supposed to be.’

My client fell into this session, participated at a deeper level than he had in the months before. I’m not assuming, as we exited the office, he was happy. But he seemed to have something new moving inside, something brighter.

What do you think, ladies?

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* This is Dry humor, or wet seriousness #3.

** I have since resigned.

Negligible #1: The superior white men

We’d like to be able to find some statement of such great power that it would stop these universal haters and ungrown white men in their tracks and turn them from sickness to health. Acknowledging the magicalness of that thought, I guarantee that therapy’s words can at times give a person a sudden new awareness of himself, altering his inner landscape and his approach to the world. More often, though, we are only a hand shaking the topmost leaves of his tree and the trunk remains unmoved.

It feels almost compelled to insult and have hateful contempt for these desperate, rageful adolescents. Their greatest agony, which they project into the atmosphere, is that they were punished and love-starved children who had to grow up. They were crying, brutalized infants and youngsters who were taken from themselves: They had to get older. Hurt, they needed to be helped in the crib, held by mommy in their childhood bed. But they had to grow up, leave their true but invisible real self behind, and live like adults. The pain of this discongruity is a death that goes on forever. It may as well be the eternal hellfire of the Bible.

“Strong” men need to become weak to get better. They need to have their pain touched by a father-figure, a mother-figure, so they’re not carrying their burden by themselves. I’ve seen this happen in therapy: a solid man – a medic returning to Afghanistan – whose face transformed to his six-year-old when he remembered the compassion he had missed, the coldness he received, a little boy. But I, like you, can hardly imagine that happening to the members of the masses in their camo and gear, raging together, feeling the womb-like warmth of fellow haters. They don’t want my warmth.

So we see around us as much pandemonium and failure as there are atoms in the world. Man-children carrying into the grim battle of job or rally hundred-pound loads of their closed past; those who live on poisonous ideas – hate blacks and immigrants and Jews – as if they were the green ground and clean air. I wish there were a way to broadcast to all of them the truths of being a human being, truths that struck each one personally. I know there’s no such way. But this world could use a little magic.

Returning from El Jobean

Thirty-five years ago, on an evening in an early year of my first marriage, my wife spoke a four-word sentence that I believe is a key to Borderline Personality Disorder and other global warps of the self, including the peculiar problem of our president.

“E___” and I were driving back to Sarasota (FL) from a visit out-of-county. There had been a gathering of her friends, fossil hunting aficionados, at one member’s house. As usual, I’d been carried along by my neurotic passivity, sitting politely without identity, ignoring others’ enthusiasms. Suddenly I was jolted into a feeling of “queasy alarm.” E, engaged in the show-and-tell revelry, had tossed an autobiographical claim into her presentation. The discussion went on. I, however, could not return to my quiescent state.

As we drove through the night, I found that I had summoned the courage to say: “E, why did you tell everyone that you have a Master’s degree? You don’t have a Master’s degree.”

Her reply is the material I’d like you to consider. I will admit that I am only considering it now, first time, in any depth beyond its occasional usefulness in therapy sessions.

“Pardon me for living!” was her retort, intoned so righteously that hearing it, I felt the kind of innocent and stupid confusion only a young child can experience. I don’t remember, these many years later, if I rejoindered at all or what I might have said. But would any, or no, response have mattered? Could there be any answer that would join a shared reality?

Look at Trump and hear the man’s continual lies, which obviously feel as true to him as anything could or need be. Hear my ex-wife assuming – assuming – that her lie is valid and unquestionable. We could easily judge her as immature or as casually insane. Instead, let’s see her remark as literal. Pardon me for living. This is what I need for life. This is what I need to not disintegrate. We’d been married for over two years, yet I had never heard her say that phrase, so I don’t think it was a personal mantra, as was her over-worn “rude, crude and socially unacceptable” or “incest – it keeps it in the family.” It was sparked afresh by my throwing a terrible reality at her: a knife to her siege ego.

She was telling me that she had lived in fire and that oxygen would only make her burn up more. She was telling me that the way you are born is the way you live. She was angry because anger comes from being painfully bent, childhood on, and that’s who she had always been. “Living” meant struggling against the enemy, which was the strange present that had no love for her.

Borderline Personality, Masterson says, is the “deflated false self,” while Narcissism is the “inflated false self.” False is false, though, and when parents make this falseness live in the real world, it or the world must lose. A shadow doesn’t want light; a person on fire can’t be held and loved. Pardon her for living alone among us, in a different, darker atmosphere.

Don One

The narcissist wakes up in the morning and he doesn’t feel good. There is no automatic sense of glory, there is no basic happiness. His bedrock is not made of bright material. A troubled feeling – which he will either not notice or will misinterpret – sparks his self-medicative regimen. Thought (“I am perfect,” “I am uniquely special”) may precede and trigger a chemical sensation-emotion which is interpreted as superiority or powerful expansiveness, or the sensation may come first – triggered directly by the negative fog at waking or one later in the day – and bring some warm reminiscence of being admired recently or winning at something. These are chemical and ideational reactions not to the outer world: They are reactions to the deep self, the historical self that is a dark and unmade child. To escape, the brain and all systems have created an internality that is a perfumed bath, and that colors, uses, bends reality, makes it his name. That is to say, it is delusion, between orange and yellow on the spectrum of insanity.

This is what has duped its way into the White House.

When "strength" is impossible

Here is a fragmentary idea, vaguely described and hypothetically explained. It lingers in my brain and wants to be better understood.

There are adult clients who, during work on more fundamental issues, complain and grieve about their abuse-of-power parents or ex-spouses. A session starts off with actionable energy, or it seems so: Alarmed and insightful, they detail one indignity after another: divorcing husband calls Child Protective Services on his wife for malicious purposes. Parent treats live-in thirty-year-old son like a humiliated prisoner of war. Father forbids forty-year-old opiate addict daughter, who lost everything and had to crash at his home, from taking medication of any kind including her antidepressant. Grandfather sues his daughter for “grandparents’ rights” or custody, treats the little boy like a king, the girl like baggage. Mother slanders her daughter to their friends. Father restricts adult son’s use of toilet paper and doesn’t let him sit in “the master’s” easy chair. New stepmother barges in and harps every time son phones his dad (who probably colludes in his own pussy-whipping).

There is nothing suspect about these complaints, on their own merits. Fairly early on, though, I will get the sense that the client is in narrator mode. He has one predominant tone throughout the speech, an inscrutable one that brings to mind humorist Dave Barry’s compliment to readers who sent him grist-for-the-mill anecdotes: “alert.” There is no anger. There is no sense of resignation, victory contempt or rolling of the eyes. There is not a sense that this is a problem to solve. And it may be just when this mystery strikes one’s awareness that two equal but coup de grace ones appear: The client has chattered his litany for the entire hour. And my interventions have been unheard; they have had as much effect as a leaf flittering down upon a charging bear.

The leaf, though, eventually takes a stand. “You are naming all these crimes,” I say, “but I get the feeling that you are somehow one with them, are not really ready to do anything about them.” The client’s response is: “He drives me crazy! Sometimes I just want to sit in my room and be left alone, but he stands at the door yelling about how much gasoline I used or that I ate some leftover he wanted. And my mother doesn’t believe me: She and he are a perfect team, though she sometimes listens. When my sister visits, she always takes their side. I try to be as polite and reasonable as I can be. Sunday night I listened to him pacing – or marching – back and forth outside the bathroom door as I was doing my business. I guess he wanted me to know I was taking too long. . . .”

If only these clients were as single-minded and driven in their health as they are in their misery, their chains would be broken. Or it seems so.

What generates this reportage, this constant list of small rapes and murders and abandonments? How does the client say them and not revolt against the saying? Is there an unspoken feeling within him that I am not grasping? I wonder if it’s the feeling: “Daddy, mommy, please love me, don’t hurt me!” In these jeremiads, I have never heard that feeling, but is that what is left when all the other expected expressions are not there – anger, humor, strength, futility? If this is so, then therapy would have to reach that need, and help (frankly speaking) a pitiful client be more pitiful, a childlike client become the child. He or she would need to grieve past losses dug up and snarling in the present. And I would have to put aside my own sick need and not push the client’s anger and resolve and rejection of the parent. Strength is not what I think it is.

Onward and upward: Beyond our self and the world

A person can be born in trauma (soaked in mother’s depressive chemistry, ripped out by caesarian, shut away in an incubator); have no bonding; grow up out of sync with his age, with his peers, with life; repress and lose his feeling core and real self in his childhood; live an anxious dissociated then manufactured persona; grow a warped ideational field that covers just about everything; live an ambition or a momentum that is entirely non-real – not based in a core organic person who never existed.

And we will find him a normal, standard-issue person, like you or me. He may feel something wrong, but it won’t stop him from moving about in some mundane direction, and he won’t know it’s this wrong which is getting in his way. Or he may be bizarre or berserk or personality disordered or a comedian. But still, we’ll think this is just a person with flaws, a guy with some challenges.

He could be a malignant demon, and be Mr. Rogers.

What keeps us unreally stable is our mind, which lies on a bed of repression. Picture this simple fact: Assuming we are troubled anywhere close to the person described: If we lived only our feelings, were lost and mutantly made as can possibly be, we would be a ball of acid on fire, rolling like the apex of torture crazily through a hellish life. It is thinking and ideas and mental attachment that create the anesthetizing, counterbalancing stability for us. Pain and loss become “understood.” A completely absent sense of self (and self-esteem) is replaced by belief or hope or narcissism, or by perceiving – our cognitive eyes – the outer world not the inner one. A sense of never having been fully human (Modrow’s* idea about the disintegration leading to schizophrenia) is saved by delusional ideas. Serial or seamless tortures in childhood are Band-aided by inspirational sayings or crusades or by having the identity of PTSD.

The mind of thought and word comes in to give us a false stage, a dream that seems real. And a bonus value: Thought makes us feel mastery, feel powerful. We’re now in a place different from our pain, from our roots, from the rolling ball. The thought occurs that this deception is related to the phenomeno­log­ical problem: our adherence to a universe of surfaces, of appearance, with no capacity to know the essence. But it’s only a parallel, that we live an illusion of ourselves and see and think only an illusion of the world. There is little choice about the first, none about the second.

Psychotherapy, on this plane, helps us find some happiness or peace by mixing our need for the self-medication of thought with our need for organic feeling in a way that “works” for each person. It doesn’t know how it accomplishes this (and probably most often doesn’t know that it accomplishes this). Our work is noble and blind.

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* One of my favorite books, John Modrow’s How To Become a Schizophrenic, quoted elsewhere in this blog.

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.

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* 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.

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* 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.