We ninety-percent (or less) wraiths

People believe they are living in the “here-and-now.” Or they are told that their not being in the here-and-now is a factor in their psychological problems and that mindfulness is the technique that will bring them into it. The facts are: We are not in the here-and-now, and mindfulness has no capacity to send us there. The only technique that could remove the past as our first and abiding nature – the legs on which we stand – is the fire of radical feeling-centered depth therapy: Only that could burn away our past and leave us gutted and in the emptier present.

 

The present is our illusion, a good illusion, but nevertheless an illusion. I am in the illusory present when I do therapy with clients and when I am with my wife. “Somehow” (which could be explored), being in their presence brings enough of the right chemistry that doesn’t merely hide the past, but obliterates it seemingly. Casual glance says this is because the past is immanent in these rich present moments and transcended in their richness.

 

But all other moments of my life, I am a ninety-percent wraith floating in my childhood. When I’m petting one of my cats, a different, older cat is in my lap. When I exit my car and walk to the staff entrance of my counseling center, I am a six-year-old acting big. When I take a walk at night, I am really my unfulfilled youth.

 

When I write an article – that’s slightly different, a nontranscendent fusion of past and present. Same when I listen to Chopin or Rachmaninoff or Bach or Percy Grainger. Trying to fall asleep? I’m trying to put the past to sleep.

 

I am absolutely certain that this is the state of most people, but that they don’t think about it, or if they do, they don’t dwell on it.

 

My clients are – with no words spoken about it ever – helped to be more strongly here-and-now than they have ever been, and less bogged down in their past. This is because we aim hot flames at their inner baby and inner child, at their childhood parents. We’re burning away some parts of their past (maybe even more than the ten percent that I've burned away).

Asperger smarts

Life is looser at TPS blog these days. Here is an observation based on three clients, ages 23, 21 and 21. All are male, bi- and hetero-, all qualify for Asperger’s Syndrome (or “high-functioning autism spectrum” or whatever is the delicately correct term today). Two of them have a strong intellectual bent, naming highfalutin solid and abstract ideas. The other one produces endless thoughts about his personhood and history but no worldly wisdom. Perfunctorily humble, he says “I don’t know” a lot and shows no interest in challenging that status quo.

 

All three are minute variations of what is called the “know-it-all.” They either know everything, or they know all they need to know. They are complacent, wise, glib speech-giving. They all pause zero milliseconds before rejoindering to me with their concurrence, the truth or a truer truth.

 

One would think they are Narcissists. One might fantasize: Are all young twenty-something Asperger’s men serene, bloviating, full-of-themselves, omniscient? Of course not – and neither are these three clients. Their fragile identity is clear to see. Unlike Narcissistic Personality-disordered men, whose disintegrative lost-little-boy interiors are deeply hidden, these three old boys are somewhat more inner child than surface lie. The Narcissist’s shell is seamless, polished, hard and brittle. The young men’s have hairline cracks, are smooth and slippery like thin ice.

 

Yet the surface lie is quite jazzed.

 

Here is today’s casual theory: They have to “know” – that is, to be buoyed by their head – in order not to feel. Feeling dire historical pain is anathema to most people. But to someone with Asperger’s, dire historical pain is their bedrock of lava. Bettelheim need not be right about “refrigerator mothers” to see that autism spectrum individuals were repressed from feeling at the earliest stage of their lives. This concept is evidenced by the minutely gradated continuum of out-of-syncness with self and world on which countless repressed people lie. I, for one, am far from autistic, but when I’m not knowing and talking and delivering therapy, I feel a recondite disturbance among people. As do many of my clients outside of their own medium.

 

Asperger’s is like the big personality disorders – Narcissism, Borderline, Antisocial, Schizoid, Dependent, Schizotypal – in one main way. James Masterson discovered the infant stage – separation-individuation – origin of Borderline Personality, its cause in “maternal unavailability” and the “abandonment depression.” The infant, avoiding rejection pain, must adapt to the immature mother’s extreme oscillations. For that adult, years and decades later, to re-experience that pain – by therapy or abandonment – would be, essentially, to be killed again. A similar consequence would happen were someone with Asperger’s to be thrown into his abyss of infantile buried feeling. The cause of early pain need not be an analytical or neurotic mother. It might be any birth or pre-birth force that led to pain and its chemical repression. Janov wrote extensively on birth trauma and the nine months predisposing the fetus to it. There’s some interesting (if overly creative) information at the defunct Primal Psychotherapy Page regarding birth trauma (http://primal-page.com/birthart.htm).

 

My Asperger’s young men found necessary refuge in their heads, in knowledge. Doubt and openness mean feeling, which they must avoid.

"I Forgive" and Other Delusions

This is to announce that Kindle (Amazon) is now carrying my ebook (and soon in paperback) selection of blog articles. I’ve titled it “I Forgive” and Other Delusions – feeling-centered depth therapy and psychology for adults and their inner baby. The book is significantly easier to read and search than ten years of links (in addition to having a table of contents). I’ve also “adultified” much of the content, mostly to embarrass me less. Writing in the pregnant atmosphere of active therapy tends to feature a bit too much adjectival and acid attitude. The ebook strips most of the purple icing from the cake.

 

The older I get and the more I watch, hear and read, the more I see that almost every form of psychological healing today is thought- and hope-based, shallow manipulations of mind, brute-force “intention,” one-a-week techniques, and the hell too much Carl Rogers’ passive-unaggressive approach. I am not unique in pointing out (with a flaming sword) that healing has to address deep wounds by staying with them and leading pain out. Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy has done this with wisdom, widespread success and popularity since 1970 (until all the alarmed, upstaged psychotherapists trolled it back to Santa Monica, France, England and South Africa). My approach has always been more down-to-earth than radical Primal as it is based in the realities of the human persona – the adult that must remain itself despite deep, sometimes epiphanic work. This may be less obvious in the book’s articles than it has always been in my therapy sessions. There, profound empathy for the invisible child runs the show while birth trauma may be given just a passing nod. Articles present more of the oceanic idea behind the fluid act.

 

While not everyone (I can’t believe I’m saying this) will want to own a copy of the book, I invite you to look at the Kindle page and “read a sample.” Preface, Introduction and a few articles (including the eponymous “forgive” one) will be informative of this radical but all-natural approach. I say “all natural” because real therapy, healing therapy, is simply the caring and human acts that our child self needed when it was first hurt. We therapists are just a bit late.

 

https://www.amazon.com/Forgive-Other-Delusions-Therapeutic-feeling-centered-ebook/dp/B0CM82WK28/ref=sr_1_1?crid=CYFC26VCAX9U&keywords=%22I+forgive%22+and+other+delusions&qid=1699145060&sprefix=i+forgive+and+other+delusions%2Caps%2C125&sr=8-1

There is no equivalence

[Note that this article ends with a longish link. I've published a Kindle Reader collection of those blog posts that I consider most impactful and useful. The link leads to my "author's page" and to the book, a sample read, and other information. While it may seem a bit silly, redundant, narcissistic – whatever – to put a price ($9.99) on blog articles that have always been and remain free to read, I think a more easily accessible grouping has some value. The day may come when I can afford to make a paperback version, which will be even more "user friendly."

Professors of clinical counseling and psychotherapy: Get your students to acquire this collection. You know their thinking is generic and safe. Give them some real food for thought!]

My family is Jewish, or was Jewish, as the only ones left are my sister and I. I attended Sunday school obliviously from first grade through 10^th grade Confirmation but didn’t learn a damned thing other than that the Jews are the “chosen people,” they don’t eat ham, and there are a lot of holidays. I was bar mitzvah’d and mouthed the haftorah Hebrew passage without understanding a word of it and never asking the meaning. My ceremony-culminating speech (in English) was so clichéd and fake-intent that it must have embarrassed the temple audience. In my Confirmation paper I declared my atheism and floaty ideas for my future.

 

I haven’t been to synagogue since around 1982 when my first wife dragged me there three or four times after she converted from Baptist to Jew. She was fanatical; I was an empty head floating in a pool of rancid memory-sensations.

 

I don’t have any beliefs that could be called “religious.” None, nada, nix, nihil, zero. I don’t favor Jewish people over others, though I have nothing against them. But there are millions of people – Muslims, Arabs, Palestinians, neo-Nazis and probably some Christians – who think I should be dead or killed because I didn’t convert out of my family heritage.

 

Let us judge these pathetics in a different way than we would judge bad Israeli settlers and those wreaking over-wide retribution for Hamas’s terror attack. We are judging them for a specific psychological problem: the ego-syntonic ("I'm dysfunctional and proud of it") fusion of projection (of their individual childhood-based pain, debility and misery), delusion and destruction.

 

It’s not hard to be delusional. Self-esteem deficit (which is nearly ubiquitous) can require people to believe nonsense in order to maintain a feeling of identity. A person may absolutely need to believe he is smarter than he really is or that his parents had positive intent despite all the harm they did to him. A Narcissist must believe he is perfect. It is too easy to project, blaming other people, the other political party, God and “life” for our failures (when we should be assigning first cause to our parents). It may even be a second-nature state in the human psyche, based in birth trauma or an instantly repressed infliction of soul murder in childhood,* to transiently wish the extremity of death on an animal or a person. It’s when that anti-life spasm becomes ratified as a conviction, religion or policy that we should call “evil.” It’s the converting of a mental negative – a feeling – to a mental positive – a willful delusion – that best defines evil.

 

I doubt that more than the number of Jewish people one could see under a microscope think ordinary Palestinians and Muslims should be dead or killed on “principle.” Only the minority of a species of fanatical Jews – that’s to say, the psychological complement to Jew-haters – might wish mass death on a culture. The majority are average people with a normal conscience, many of them stoked to fury, now, by instances and centuries of crimes against their name.

 

Condemn them and you have the disorder of laziness and thoughtlessness. Hate them and you may have the problem of evil. There is no equivalence between normal human rage and destructive, willful delusion.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/f.html?C=Z9SQXHR9LXA4&K=MLVRPRBZYQUM&M=urn:rtn:msg:202311010610006f590050ba27469f80c775960cf0p0na&R=1WCE5XI0R5TG0&T=C&U=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fauthor%2Flubin.the.pessimistic.optimist%3Fref_%3Dpe_1724030_132998060&H=DUO7FMZAMGSLUFMDNABUYPRDQE4A&ref_=pe_1724030_132998060

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* Leonard Shengold, M.D., Soul Murder.

"Afterword" of an unpublished book

Contemporary therapy is one of the greatest escapes and illusions available to the masses. If medical doctors were to say: “Our job is to make you believe that optimal health is but a logical, posi­tive, rational thought away,” or “We won’t operate on your damaged heart because it might hurt,” they would be like the majority of today’s therapists who believe our pain and disorder come from thinking or can be healed by thinking.

 

In a terrible daydream, I imagine the most destructive yet hidden conspir­a­torial movement, where demonic cogno­scenti have con­vinced the world that depression and mental agony and rage, existen­tial empti­ness and anxiety and trauma are dark matter that can be made light by thoughts and facts and yoga and a thousand behaviors that do not touch the source of disability: injury and pain. A tidal wave comes and we, surfers, smile as it drives us into the rocks. See what happens when we ig­nore early pain: We “forgive” parents who caused it and we perpetuate the damage into the future. We see the adult world as separate, an alien plateau above children. Children become minimized and invisible. We fail to know the source of crime. We live on momentary feel-good puffs of air.

 

See what happens when we understand that pain and injury built and bent us. We treat children with respect and they grow up to respect us. We improve our mar­riages as partners come to know each other’s fundamental needs. We may be cleared enough of our own pain that we see sociopaths for what they are, and don’t allow them to become our leaders. Empathy and care become the medium of exchange.

 

We become a place of living and feeling, not escaping.

Disconcerting tidbit #1: Do no good

This is a comment to a Washington Post article, “Helping others could be a cure to post-grad loneliness” by Renee Yaseen, September 14, 2023:

 

Helping others is a fine palliative in some cases. But it can have a psychological rebound effect. If a person was deprived of critical needs (love, empathy, respect) in childhood, needs which the present day can never adequately redress, it can feel strangely wrong to “be there” for others: The altruistic act will resonate inward and “remind” the person that no one was ever there for him or her.

 

This “reminder” is to return – like a time machine that has kidnapped you – to childhood pain that, were it to be read, would reveal impossible loss and would create the sudden awareness of an empty and never-had life.

Be careful.

Good enough

In the introduction to his book, Why You Get Sick and How You Get Well, Arthur Janov, author of the famous The Primal Scream, distilled decades of research and clinical practice: “Over the last thirty years I have learned a great deal about humans and what drives them. As trite as it may seem, what I have found is a single yet complex emotion called love. Not the romantic love of novels, but a funda­mental love – the love of a parent for a child.” I’ve seen this, too, all along, and still the fact struck me in a new way recently in a morning session with a 44-year-old client.

He was an extreme workaholic, over-achieving and over-perfecting at all moments yet never feeling he was good enough, never respecting himself as much as other people did. In his memory, his father was his hero. But after a few months, we discovered the opposite. Nostalgic love and pain turned to anger. From our observation that “not good enough” is not an emotion or a fact but rather a mental attribution formed by his specific pain, we realized that his father had made him “not good enough” by defining “good” as hard work and assiduous struggle. I had him imagine that he was at the absolute pinnacle of expertise, wisdom and conscientiousness in his job and career. What, in that place, did he feel? “I’m not good enough! Daddy, can’t I be good enough? For you?” Following, he said: “Maybe I was never shown love in the way I needed it.”

 

We may “believe” we’re good, that we have value, but we will never feel right without that earliest love, which must be “the way I needed it.” When a parent ordains a stan­dard of performance, he is saying “You are not enough.” He is severing the bond that should be there at the beginning, the loving bond that says “You are good just to be.” He, a heroic father, has cast away his child, and has no idea of what he has done.

The impossibility of respect

Adult clients, talking about their childhood, sometimes say that they were expected or required to “respect” their parent. This is typically described as an assumed feature of their punitive or unloving home. One “respects” one’s parents because . . . simply “because” the parent, or parenthood, merits it. This notion is almost universally internalized by the young innocent and carried into adulthood, where even middle-aged clients assume their parents deserve respect.

 

Heretofore, there’s been occasion to state the unpleasant obvious: Authoritarian parents may believe they deserve their child’s admiration or even hero-worship, but that would be a delusional belief in many circumstances: You can’t possess the chemical feeling of admiration for someone who hurts, disrespects or intimidates you. I will say that these parents conflate respect with “fear,” that it’s their child’s fear and awe they require.

 

As true as this is, a significant, outlier point is missed, a point I have missed until this week. It’s that “respect” is not a feeling a young child is capable of experiencing. It is a sophisticated feeling based on years of life experience, some depth knowledge of the proposed recipient of it, and a sense of moral value. It is a feeling about someone’s moral action or attitude or philosophy – something well beyond the ken of a child. A child doesn’t respect his friend for his football skills: He likes or admires him or envies the skills. A man respects (or envies) another’s integrity or courage. We don’t “respect” someone for winning at arm-wrestling or for finishing a crossword puzzle. We respect his losing with grace, his humble acceptance of his ignorance. By this understanding, we see that pathological parents are not just requiring something they don’t deserve: They are requiring the non-existent.

 

We also see that adults often live on illusory or brand-name concepts to which we attach misinterpreted and tendentious feelings. It would serve people well to drop some acid on certain well-worn assumptions.

I suspect this is the last post -- but for little dribs and drabs occasionally

I don’t know how many times I have prophesied (moped) in these pages that TPS blog was “winding down,” each death knell followed by second, third, and fourth winds. This time it is true. I have not had any new ideas in a long while, and by age or experience or fatigue, I find that I don’t care to. It is true that I have wondered why so few people want to honor, or cherish, their history by knowing it deeply. If one’s life “flashes before one’s eyes” on the death bed, that seems to suggest that a deep feeling about one’s unique history is important. Yet many people don’t want to “go there.” They would rather be a newspaper than a history book.

 

Another piece of shrapnel hit me recently: the notion of being a “disappointment” to one’s parent. I’ve heard this a fair number of times in twenty-four years of therapy. While we can see the direct problem inherent in this shaming – given to feel your soul is inadequate and can never be right or good enough – we may miss the other side of that coin. A parent who sees his child as a disappointment is saying that he owns the child, that he has a right to feel let down by her. Imagine going up to your neighbor six houses down, whom you have never met, and saying: “I am disappointed in you for failing to mow your lawn every Sunday. I am disappointed in your son for growing his hair long. You are disappointments.” You would, doubtless as the sun is big, either be insane or so copious of personality disorder as to overflow the banks of the Nile. Parents do not own their children, do not have a right to assume the child has an obligation to live their life according to the parent. To assume such a right is to be sick.

 

What I have been doing is compiling approximately a hundred of these blog posts into what may become a self-published book. I know that sounds egotistical. But from my angle, in the process I’ve perused the six-hundred other ones and decided they are not worthy. At their writing, though, I sure liked them! And there’s the fact that the four or five people who would buy my iconoclastic and rancid (clear-thinking and benevolent) thinking are those to whom I’d give a free copy anyway.

The working title is: The Pessimistic Shrink, selected blog posts. Acid and delusion. Which one are you?