Trifle #2: Sigmund Fred, or Freddy Krueger?

Here is a mystery I may never solve.

I am, as one would expect of a therapist, “color blind” to new clients: All receive the same good will, interest and help-offering manner. By this control group-quality consistency, I can definitively say there is one cohort that predictably rejects me primarily on their own account not mine, and in a special way: They quit therapy following Intake or after the first couple sessions, hide behind their living room couch and call front office to be transferred to another therapist.

Youngish single girl-women age 22 to 27, I say . . . “Boo!!”

You are wanting a magical answer. You are wanting a simple instruction list to solve your morbid grief or your ADHD personality or your trauma. You are wanting Girl Power warmth. You are dishonest when I ask your reason via text-message, if you offer a reason at all.

Alas, caught up in work, binge tv and bitter bile, I generally do not follow through with their request, and they fade into the sunset.*

One effervescent tongue-wagger decided she might prefer someone with an LGBTQ specialty. But she didn’t know I didn’t have that specialty. Two others were mum about their displeasure.

You are not wanting an earnest, sensitive, aesthetic-looking old nerd man. You are not wanting someone who intimates that your family may have anything, any little thing, to do with your problem or pain. You may not like that therapy has to do with change. You are frightened, thin-skinned, possibly promiscuous, possibly party drinking too much. I’ve worked with fifteen- and sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girls who are tougher than you – meaning: more willing to feel the truth.

What is there about that female zone – 22 to 27, single – that is ready to run? I would be pleased to hear theories from readers. I can only guess that this is a precarious plateau. Earlier, they leaped into adult life with a certain energy, including exploratory energy. The adolescent persona was dissolving. Later, 28 on, they’ve steeled themselves with the mature lobotomization of adulthood. But in that long middle crucible there are pulls back to father and growing alienation with mother, misgivings about sexual behavior, questions that should have been answered when younger that leave fear residue; identity invisibility and a sense of directionlessness. I’m a man, but 26 is when I had my one and only molten-hot depressive anxiety existence attack. The only answer for me was to blink, get oblivious and move on. Maybe the last thing these young women should be doing at that moment is questioning themselves. I believe there is such a thing as unraveling. They may sense it if they stayed in my room.

I have to assume that most clinicians keep this group for natural terms of therapy, that they have the tendency to not ask the wrong questions. I don’t know.

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* This is technically allowable. Given no reason for seeking a transfer, I can’t know to whom to send the client.

Ramble #6: Ship of Theseus, abortion, the same river, and identity

“In the metaphysics of identity, the ship of Theseus* is a thought experiment that raises the question of whether an object that has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object” (Wikipedia). If, over the years or centuries, all the parts of Theseus’s ship have been replaced, can it remain the same ship? Many deep thinkers (including Heraclitus, Plato, Hobbes, Locke and Noam Chomsky) have conceived their own very different answers to this “paradox.”

My best idea is that we, humans, have a need and conceit about identity. We feel the ship is itself even if it’s blown apart and half of it is replaced. But at sixty, seventy, eighty percent replaced, we’d fear that its identity, its “spirit” if you will, would be extinguishing. I’ll bet that we more sensitive folks might mourn its disappearance and extinction.

But a person – wouldn’t we always see him as himself if everything were replaced but his brain? We’d see that soul, or heart, or I, or we’d cleave to his own sense of being himself, and that would be all we’d need to know it was he.

Consider, though, that a person’s sense of self-identity consists of his own desire to see his changeable thoughts and transient feelings as unified or coherent in some manner. Without the glue of that desire, which could be called ego, doesn’t the paper bag containing Self get wet, weak and somewhat fall apart?

Isn’t the flowing river never the same but a name, never itself, while the riverbed holds onto its identity a little longer?

When I take my walk at night, I may have the oddest awareness: My identity is primarily amorphous and largely insubstantial. I have never not wanted to be alive, but I’m aware that I’m limited by my history to a narrower range of emotions and a scant capacity for ideas. Weightier would be my bounty of felt-sense nuance, the body’s probably countless hues of feeling. This really helps me in my therapies.

If we were insular persons, if our minds had never been imprinted with consensus and lessons from our history, there would be no morality but the sense of love and care on a sub-molecular continuum. Some of us would love the lives of all strangers, some would care only about their neighbors, others about their families or spouse, others only about themselves. Some about no one. Many women would think: “There is a precious human being in me,” five hours or fifty days after conception. As many or more would not. Identity would be in the eye of the beholder, reified according to the infinite gradations of heart.

This wouldn’t eliminate problems: Because those who love and care less would not leave these women alone. Those of moral death would legislate their bodies.

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* Thanks to my highly alert and smart teen client who regaled me with this ancient thought experiment that, in all my sixty-seven years up to that session, I had never learned of.

Choosable you

A client and I agreed that owing to birth- and child-level loss and sadness, “the heavy curtain is always slowly descending” in our psyche, in our inner future. Every moment, the stage is moving but the curtain is always inching downward. We also realized that knowing this can be incorporated into a good life. “Good,” of course, has to be defined in very idiosyncratic ways. As does just about everything in a person’s life.

Most therapists, I’d wager, believe we can choose what we feel; for example, to be happy. From the “Cognitive” perspective, they’d say this comes from deciding to think in a certain way. But it’s possible to touch and be tinctured by a feeling in our deep stream, have it be primary, without thinking. We have a smorgasbord inside, and each sensation is valid in its own way: serenity, desolation, pleasure, anhedonia, fear or expansive bravado, love and hate and the rest. Any of which we might touch and choose.

Still, this is sick valid. Children don’t choose a feeling. Feeling chooses them. Feelings are first primary colors, and then when in time they become more blended and complex, there is an overriding one, or there is an underlying one which is in effect the child’s theme. A happy-jazzed kid may have some trepidation about whitewater rafting, but the overriding feeling is the happiness. A bullied child may have just gotten straight A’s and been awarded Honor Roll, but the victor is the underlying fear.

It’s when we are older that we may no longer have a theme, when everything has piled in and nothing stands out, when so much quotidian repression of feeling and sensation has left us without a meaning. Then we may think we can choose what to feel, the death instinct or the life instinct, the strong or the weak, the affirming or the moribund. To not choose, to sink into the unnameable color of our ocean, would be to reach our history that is hardly useful now.

That is, I don’t mind admitting, where I prefer to be. I have never been able to stand Cognitive Therapy’s notion that we can think and behave our way to being. For Christ’s sake! Picture how much work that would be if you actually tried it day after day! Nor can I feel real to summon, to be, a specific feeling for any length of time. So I recommend relaxing in the ocean: You won’t drown. And in moments of worst darkness, you can hold a magic clam, or a mermaid.