For the new year

Never, until a moment from now, have I paused to consider how there can be such a contrast between the bleakness and fatalism of my psychology and the positivity and sanguine warmth of my sessions. It’s not as simple as someone’s “knowing we’re all going to die” yet being high on life.* I believe our psyche is essentially a curse, where the inevitable early injury is almost never healed and becomes the crooked, painful ground – the feet – of our adult life, our significantly pre-determined adult life. Whenever we cease to muscle ourselves forward – cognitive and physical muscle – and away from our deeper history, we are again in touch with our incomplete childhood, all the losses that leave sadness, fear, anger, craziness and emptiness in us.

But I believe we don’t need to make up bright thoughts or appeal to some truistic realism (“it’s not all bad”) to lighten depression or feel a clear, good path. Instead, we can reclaim the deepest, and maybe smallest, indestructible kernel of love-force in us, inherent in our first cells. This is something all people – but for the born psychopath – have. We start out “pro-life” – a fact, sense, and the root of hope that can’t die, most evident, paradoxically, when we suffer the deepest existential pain.

What “spooky action at a distance”** can reach that kernel? It could be smelling a flower, music, feeling love, sometimes just waking up and the kernel has floated to the surface during the innocent night, before it descends again. For me, one source is the presence of a person who wants help in my room. That’s a personal thing. My entire childhood, after age eleven or so, was anxiously, dissociatively shut away from people. For decades after, I was never present with anyone. Now, broken out of this shell, to me people are a startling phenomenon. It’s as if one has given a child a pirate’s treasure chest of absurdly magical toys and a map to Neverland. Almost as if I were born at each encounter, I am jolted by the existence of another human being. And while being jolted is not entirely positive, my room is made to receive only the best part of this “birth” experience: the hopeful, the caring, the mysterious, the tangible and intangible.

This is how “the pessimist” rolls.

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* Bertrand Russell quote: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/28449-i-believe-that-when-i-die-i-shall-rot-and.

** Einstein’s objection to quantum mechanics – https://www.technologyreview.com/s/427174/einsteins-spooky-action-at-a-distance-paradox-older-than-thought/.

There are few songs

The last song on Phil Ochs’ final album, 1970, is No More Songs. “Once I knew a saint who sang upon a stage / He told me about the world, his lover / A ghost without a name / Stands ragged in the rain / And it seems that there are no more songs.” It may have been an early suicide note: A few years later, Ochs hanged himself. Or possibly, a related epitaph: Disenchanted that his beloved 1960s peace-and-crusades movement was fading from rainbows to dust, slipping into a workaday world, he could no longer write.
 

Similarly, but without the moribund factor, I’ve lately been thinking there is no more psychology. Human existence has its two spheres: our living of it and our detachment from it, traveling and adventuring versus introspection and insularity. We are blind to our inner workings and believe everything is on the same life plane: happiness and suffering, successes and mistakes, wayward dramas and peaceful endings, passion and indifference. That way we may fly, or flail and spin in circles or crash and burn, but it all seems like the juicy stuff of life. Or – we stop, turn inward and realize there is a genuine conflicting force, a malevolent force, the anti-life. We are not just interesting or eccentric or moody, we are sick. Our lost love is not melancholy, is not a “story,” it is sabotage planted by our parents thirty years earlier. Our personality is not our self, it is scar tissue over injury. Seeing this, we are no longer traveling, adventuring. We are in the prison of consciousness, no windows out, wondering about causes.

Some of us live in one of these places, some in the other. I think most people are probably eighty-twenty: not too aware, just going about on their surface. Therapy messes everything up by making the mirrored prison necessary and respectable, when it is the worst of the two ways.

In twenty years I’ve taken around sixty “continuing education” workshops. Not one of them has had the slightest value but for some facts about professional ethics. Beyond that, I sink deeper into a unity or nihilism. I don’t see diagnostic categories anymore. A person is depressed. What does that really mean? Look for where in his deep past the life force got buried. A woman is anxious and depressed, one state. In what scenes did that chemistry happen? The prodigal son in a celebrity family binges, like a vortex, on dough, sweets, junk, alcohol, speed. What did his parents deprive him of? A woman hears command voices day and night. What was the slow boil that caused her to leave reality? In fact, people have no labels. My client feels all sorts of emotions but has no sense of agency or identity. A woman can’t identify what exists inside, other than feeling naïve, but she continually moves into needy men’s homes. There are no labels. One can’t paint the ocean.

Psychology, I’d say, is just holism. Mind and body and time and never-healed injury, all one. To “heal” is to change. One might doctor a seed with chemistry, an embryo with stem cells, graft parts of two saplings together, and the end product will be a new life form. But people, a sort of balanced holism, can’t change significantly with all the coaching or tampering or purging in the world. We are already alive.

There is little psychology.

Fragile bags (this would be the cup-half-empty perspective)

The closer I get to a client – I mean literally closer: inching forward on my wheely chair – the more I feel and care about the humanity, feelings, meaning and history of him or her. If I’m at a clinical distance, five or six feet, the interaction may be too intellectual except for occasions when we’re deep into emotive work. But whatever the distance, I always see people as fragile bags, fragile bags waiting (sometimes their whole lives) to explode or implode, shake apart, rip, melt, go crazy, become gibbering insensible vacuums of a non-existent Self. I see them as untenable chemical solutions poured mindlessly into a test tube, with eyes attached to a deep fire, hearts attached to twisted gear systems run amuck, minds running from early nightmares. I see people as absurd unfortunates, entities barely holding themselves up, trying to create a homeostasis of viability out of some unrealistic supposition.

This is what childhood does to us.

We are made to become a paradox: anarchy and multiple pains wanting to have meaning and a positive identity. We have stopped and do not move on when we suppress ourselves in childhood. Our mind, now braked by suspended animation, destroys itself by pushing us on. Our ideas instantly become and remain nonsense: gaseous escapes that are not – were we to feel deeply into them – us.

The body is roiling sludge on fire, and that’s what the mind should be.

Even the most outrageous berserker patient or criminal out there is a held-together, false and censored person, still following rules, talking in mature sentences, sitting upright with his hands in his lap. But the bleeding out-of-sync energies within him want to bash against walls, lacerate them, scream every muscle, vein and organ projectile-wise out of his body or drown him in his tears. Our pain and wrongness want to scream and explode. But we don’t.

Here is the person: Picture a landscape ablaze, a great country burning, all of its history and loves destroyed. Now see it from afar, as in a movie, and hear sad or heroic symphonic music in the background. The scene is poignant now, meaningful, it has the contour of life, and we can accept it. But walk into the landscape, stop playing the music, stand there. You have the person in her natural state.

Imagine sitting two feet away from her for the hour.

In-house #7: Late thoughts on therapy

I have realized that lately, I put no effort into my work, into the hour, other than what the situation-at-the-moment calls for. This means rarely a technique, such as Empty Chair, sentence completion, Death Bed Situation, other feeling-reaching process, cognitive therapy procedure. I feel almost tabula rasa with each new person, and almost tabula rasa with regular clients at each new session. In the old days, I might see a client in the third session or after and assume he or she is already on a train of momentum: We are working on something, we are in the theme of healing. I do carry a knowledge base into each encounter, which is the knowledge that depth is true and the here-and-now is false. But after the person is shown this, it is applied only as it is workable and useful at the moment. The one energy or atmosphere, maybe, that is pervasive is the sense that the client needs some relief, and the kind that human communication can bring.

I have become less hopeful of great change, and thereby more compassionate, and my clients stay longer – long – and enjoy our times almost consistently.

We are the depth, always, but it’s not always good to re-experience it. After the beginning, I never go there again with some clients. Occasionally, someone is saved, and I mean literally saved, by knowing that the roots of her addiction and self-destructive life are her childhood with imperfect parents. It is not her fault. But mostly I have changed from militancy to the serious touch of affection, opening up, and insight.

I don’t really know why this has happened, but that it’s either that I’ve grown up (my parents always said I was a “late bloomer”) or that experience itself has evolved.

It’s true that real help will sometimes have to go to drastic depth. One elementary school teacher, after giving the brief history of her teen rape trauma and her derailing after that, talked mostly about her oppressive work with difficult students and their disengaged parents. One session, eight or ten in, I said, “Last time, we’d agreed to focus on you.” And she fell into old grief, revisited and relived this disaster to her heart and her feeling of being alive. So directly broached, so directly done.

Another woman, after a couple months we stared at her perennial tight fake smile, partially disabled it, then went into the feelings and internal map that life with a confusing and blood-sucking Borderline mother caused her, which that smile had always held under. What a good session. At the end of it she deceptively asked, “Do you think I should come every two weeks, or stay with every week?” How could she want to detach now, when we had finally reached a good place? As it was obvious what she wanted, I lied and said every two weeks would be fine.

We are “working on something” with some clients, but the fact is I can’t think of a single one, right now, whose theme is their past injury or even the solving of a current life problem. The “presenting problem” may have been depression or anxiety or bipolar or methamphetamine dependency, but what happens is that he or she just talks about serious things and fairly often becomes tearful, feels a little better, and talks about something else. Carl Rogers thought (if I remember correctly) that clients, doing this, were working out their conflicts. I don’t think so. I think they’re connecting to themselves in a place where they can put the brakes on their life, and so feel like the owner of it, and be seen to be the owner of it. For some that will be a good feeling, for some it will not.

Follow-up to 'Where is the answer?'

Though no one has asked, I want to address the “other shoe dropping” of my suicidal client. She does have this seemingly immutable identity of a death-waiting, death-needing-to-happen person. But she does give out the impression that were she to lurch over the Rubicon of symbiotic dependency with her mother, that may just bring her to a new world, one whose horizon wasn’t sick and stuck inside her. But there’s the additional sense that such a leap could be the death blow itself.

We had a session with good, relieving tears – that’s how she felt. Following those, her problem – somehow never yet stated – was: Do I exist if I’m separate from my mother? Everything is ripe and ready for her to move in with her boyfriend, who is seeming pretty good lately. She named self-deprecating obstacles to that. We shot them down with reality and humor. Seriously: We all laughed heartily. Breaking these objections, what she was left with were sanguine possibilities.

Is she a person if separated from her mother? I don’t know. How many of us are? Real “separation-individuation” is easily botched so early. I believe that most of us, children, are shoved to a distance from our parents rather than grow with then separate, like an acorn, already itself, falling from the tree then becoming more of itself. In this forced separation we are left bleeding out and in endless loss. It’s exactly that, see it or not. And unlike the physical, psychically one can bleed out for all the years of a life.

At this moment my hope is that she will push beyond the gravitational field, move out, live like a couple and endure the tragic, and the bleeding, and the incompleteness with mother. I think our inner life is so complicated that essentially we have to be diverted from it, while knowing it. That way – diverting while knowing – we can distance it with some unsatisfactory care, just like a parent does.

If all sessions could be as good as the first

I wish I had tape recorded this first session with a hopeless, self-hating, manipulative and drug-addicted twenty-year-old. She was so empty of self-worth, so poisoned by self-hate, she wanted to “run away” from herself. She watched herself demanding daily money from boys, for the privilege of dating her. There had already been a handful of psychiatric hospitalizations and rehabs. This was the rare diagnostic (intake) session where I skipped the childhood question: What situations, events, family atmosphere do you believe had an impact on you? (I rarely have to specify: negative impact.) This was because we started late – she was an end-of-day hospital referral – and because we were floating in an unusually benign and healthful mineral spring that was all the good we needed for the moment. I must admit that this was largely a fluke of good feeling I had Wednesday late afternoon, just before the office closed for Thanksgiving. There she was feeling denuded of meaning but garbage, and the atmosphere was friendly, even sweet. There wasn’t a miserable acknowledgment she made that wasn’t accepted, understood, OK in pretty much a dear way. A rare thing happened then, where she was anxiously sad that the session had to end. But before it did, I broached the subject of Borderline Personality Disorder and disorder in general, or in its cosmic nature. Borderlines and others are manipulative, because as my old professor said, ‘manipulation is the person’s effort to get her legitimate needs met in a way I don’t approve.’

And then I remembered a line that was made for this moment. “We are not defective. We are injured.” I’d like to think that if you say and explain this right, especially after proving that our strange character is a survivalist one, you will get a person with almost too much hope, but not too much that you can’t offer real assurance that it will be answered.

Sometimes the first session is so good that later ones can’t be that good, for a number of reasons. One is that so many clients are diving for hope and healing, and maybe love, into that room, into that therapist, and one can’t keep diving: You land somewhere. You land in defenses, in reality, in character.

In one of Lynn Grodzki’s books on starting a private therapy practice, the author notes that therapists should not give away essential goods at the beginning. The client will feel enlightened and won’t return for sessions. I believe that failing to do so is a sign that the therapist has no principle, no direction but the anarchic process of Rogerian being-there.

I hope very much that my client returns. I hope that she will dive for a long time.

I seem to have become meditation

Barring the occasional insight that strikes me in the client situation, I have no ideas. I’ve recently discovered this: My old ideas were just ego-clingers, or a desire to have a theme. But I’ve now seen that none of them can be valid. Look at some ideas that are nonsense: Life is nasty, brutish and short. Life is beautiful. People are good. I’m in love with love. Service to country is noble. Service to family is admirable. I am important. Liberty is right. Life is an adventure. Children are our hope. God exists and is moral. Each of these ideas can be found to have exceptions or to be unjustifiable.

I’ve also discovered that I can’t accept any identity feelings. I am not too much of any one: sad, content, happy, loving, wistful, angry, pathetic, anxious, afraid. They swirl in and out, like a liquid kaleidoscope.

And yet, there is a primary substrate of myself. It is a loneliness that started with birth and removal to an incubator and to a depressed mother, and that has always been the underlying axiom. Though needfully married, there is always a silent room between us. Sometimes the room is very thin. I have never in five decades sat in on an employee lunch or birthday party. I walk the dog at night, a car’s headlights approach from the distance, and I am angry. My two friends are states and many decades away. All my coworkers and neighbors are ships passing in the night. I’d say that is a feeling, but I’d be chary of calling it my identity.

So the upshot is that I am meditation incarnate. When I walk, or sometimes at the computer, there are no thoughts and no stories of mood, only the kaleidoscope, only silence. I have no ambition, which would be a sort of energy, but to do what I do.

An odd thing happens, though, sometimes. Thoughtless, and no spiritual goal in mind, I will press a couple of leaves on a bush, or touch one of the big rocks that are made into walls throughout my apartment complex. This gives me an odd feeling of reality, and the lightest possible feeling of affection, for lack of a better word. I don’t dare pollute that goodness with a thought. The phenomenon is the child that remains: He was once nothing but connection, or nothing but the need for it. Through neurosis and years, my eyes have become too distanced from things. But touch breaks through. If I had more ego or anxiety, I could turn that into a “truth,” a meaning. But there’s no reason to.

Mini-rant: These hibernated accusations of sexual abuse

The Pessimistic Shrink, hiding behind his wife’s name as a Slate.com commenter, wrote the following:

I don’t disbelieve any of these men or women (the latest accused, as of this minute, may be George Takei), but at the same time, my eyes are rolling. Every week in therapy, I see a couple dozen adults who remain emotionally crippled, in part because they have never held their abusers to account: parents, siblings, uncles, stepfathers, neighbors. Many adults would rather remain cowed, punctured “codependents” than own their anger at a physically or sexually abusive parent. Clearly the celebrities are relatively painless targets of delayed justice, despite the courage it may take to finally open one’s mouth about the abuse. To me, it’s real courage when the woman – ten, twenty or thirty years later – calls her father a pedophile, or condemns her mother for failing to protect her.

My argument’s best raison d’ȇtre is that it was probably these earlier abuses, in childhood and within the home, that created the teenager or adult susceptible, years later, to the wiles and pressures of an entitled bastard. It was these earlier abuses that created a quiet person who could not speak out for decades, who suffered the emotional problems that keep therapists working, that make such a troubled world. There is also the more exotic theory* (clinically evidenced though not by me) that the psychological origins of “stars” – those who need fame, power and the adulation of the masses to build a semblance of ego – is in homes where the child received approval** – for her looks and talents and ability to please – not unconditional love for her simple being.

Let these women and men continue to name their perpetrators, have courage, receive the stage and receive care. But maybe . . . maybe do not keep hidden the earlier, formative abuses and neglects that made you the person you are. To unearth these takes therapy, storm and stress, battle-like courage, not a microphone.

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* and ** – Arthur Janov, The Primal Scream and other books, and Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child and other books, have described the early dynamics and consequences of approval versus love.

A very dumb society: The latest shooter

One of the blindest and most contemptible features of present culture is our gaze at the adult lives and motivations of mass murdering shooters. Twelve hours ago, a twenty-six-year-old killed twenty-six people at a Texas church. Reports give us the news about his black outfit, his rifle, whether he got it legally, what he posted on Facebook and LinkedIn, how he walked through his spree, his dishonorable discharge from the Air Force, his domestic violence against wife and child. We may soon learn what jobs he had, a quick sketch of his personality at work, maybe the “human interest angle”: what some classmate or friend thought about him in high school.

Useless, stupid, useless.

What matters is who his parents are, how he was raised and treated during his elementary school years, if there are siblings and if they, too, have had problems. Was he a head-banging infant? Were there two parents in the home, were they immature, emotionally selfish, loveless, “working all the time,” jerks? Did they hit him? Was he bullied and did his parents have cruel or indifferent or weak ways to deal with it? Was he so cut off from them that it would never have occurred to him to tell them his troubles? Did an uncle sexually abuse him? It would be good to know what made him a misérable who dealt with pain by causing it in others. Do we want to know how these things happen? The parents would be interviewed, put through individual therapy. We’d know their incompetencies, because there is no doubt in the world that they dropped most of the balls they were thrown. Was the killer ever in therapy, and did it fail as it so often does? Therapists do have to be gullible for a few minutes, taking in information openly. But if they see a dysphoric young man who speaks anger, they have to work damned hard to find a buried scrap of heart and reach it. If the child is “callous and unemotional” or the teen is a pre-mature psychopath – these facts are observable and alarms need to be sounded. Of course, not everything can be done to prevent the youth from further corrupting. I’ve confronted the deeply injured, joined them in their misery. I’ve confronted young psychopaths. Sometimes maybe all we can do is call their bluff: “I see your game,” hoping to disenchant the defense of this personality.

Because of this Olympian-sized missing the boat, society often looks to me like a joke or bad theater: playing adult-land. We could see the child in us. Think of how strange that world would be! We’d be looking at parents and families and children’s lives, not “chemical imbalances.” We’d all know basic depth psychology and see people with standard x-ray vision. We’d see children as influenced – good or bad – every minute of their day. We’d morph schools into education and therapy. We’d absolutely kill the “stigma” of mental illness, which is emotional pain and what happens with it. I don’t know a single solidly sound person without this pain. Do you?