Sensitivity alert: Don't read this if you're a baby

Congratulations to my three clients this year who have disowned their toxic parents and family or are “in process.” Yes, this sounds ugly. But look at the alternative: those who remain stuck in their childhood bedroom in spirit. It matters not that they have careers and partners and children and friends. They have converted a sordid past into the rotten present, despite what bells and whistles and nice rationalizations they have attached to it. None of them has the feeling of being their own person. Part of them is always sitting, unmanned and soft, on their father's lap. Giving parents money, listening to sister’s terrified beg to pretend to be a happy family, “needing” their children to have grandparents, malignant as they are, having an “adult” relationship now with an always cold, intellectual parent, taking their money, caretaking them, telling yourself your childhood was great, remaining afraid of a Nazi-like father who should spend his life in prison, contemning while catering to them.

The one, single, only, unique factor that differentiates psychic adults from psychic adult-children is this: Have they put their parents in their place or do they drink from the empty teat of neediness. All else may look the same about them in the outer world, but in therapy (and in their own constructed family), their depression, anxiety, failure to thrive permeate the air in the room and all come from one source: their family that didn’t live and won't die.

My first lazy post of all time: Mid-life crisis

In response to today’s Washington Post article, “Middle age shouldn’t be a drag. How a 'chrysalis' mind-set can help.” Subtitle: “Author and hospitality guru Chip Conley wants to replace the midlife crisis with a midlife renaissance.”

I’d recommend not listening to fake-happy fools who tell you how to goose your mind into feeling better. If you’re facing the ‘crisis’ of being 50 or 60, it’s likely to be an identity issue – a dormant depression issue – that has roots all the way back to childhood. Many people wake up in middle age and realize they ‘don’t know who they are’ or feel like imposters or lack a sense of meaning. It’s not because half their life is over or they’re spooked by a number. It’s mostly that by then, the big challenges of life (college, career, marriage, house, kids grown, savings) have been met or normalized, there is no next-big-thing to distract them, and they’ve plateaued. The past is opportunistic: Without distractions in its way, it will percolate into the brain and materialize its dormant depression. A good time for therapy.

The past is opportunistic. It will always catch you, despite your aluminum foil hat, your Cognitive Therapy, your halcyon here-and-now life. Face it or be replaced by it.

Sniper shot developmental dynamic #1: For those to whom this hasn't yet occurred

Adult clients say that their parent was cruel or neglectful to them but warm and benevolent to friends or needy strangers. My first wife would be abusive to her teenage daughters but empathic and delightful to her daughters’ teenage friends. Clients tell me that their mothers, hospital nurses, were doting on their patients but monsters and starvers to them.

Don’t be shallow, my peers, and think this is duplicity or hypocrisy.

What you are looking at (or hearing about from your clients) are parents who are still children. This isn’t the “inner child” meme, which is an old and fallacious concept. The true concept (which I’ve explicated in hundreds of earlier posts) is that people don’t have an “inner child,” they are their inner child while the adult character they cherish or deplore is the façade, the mirage.

These parents did not become adults. They did not succeed the psycho-developmental stages owing to the thousands of possible influences that shut down their feeling core in childhood. This includes abused children and those who “grew up too fast.” Now, thrust into the permanent masquerade of utilitarian adulthood, they are nothing but starved, empty vessels of need.

From this perspective, what may seem like inexplicable or sociopathic hypocrisy makes perfect sense: The child-mother can’t mother her own children: She is too young and needy: They are there for her. She is enraged. But the child-mother must supplicate and impress and seek approval from others, who unconsciously are her betters and superiors whatever their age.

My clients see this quite quickly when I describe it to them. I can’t say that it makes them feel better, as the knowledge leaves them even more unparented than they had been. And yet it helps them grow.

The strangest Mother's Day: Follow-up to a pathologically existential client (see previous post)

Adapted from progress note:

As my client has been working on, or at least thinking seriously about, his existential distress – identity and personal and career meaning – for several months with no relief from its desperate poignancy, it seemed necessary to dive into the radical ends of intervention. Intervention #1: He has remained toxically regressively attached – in slavery and hope – to his shaming and physically abusive (and complicit) parents and cannot feel himself, cannot feel free. His starved bond with them has served as anchor and quicksand, making him incapable of feeling, in his bones, autonomous. He would have to “say goodbye and good riddance” to them, reject and disown them, turn away. Only that could make him feel that he could make a clean, fresh start, breathe the air and see a horizon not polluted by them. Intervention #2 was the exact opposite, contingent on the nature of his relationship with his mother. (Father is understood to be a lost cause.) If he can remember any moment from his childhood where he felt his mother’s selfless love, and can remember her clear expression of it, then going to her, in regression and a child’s need, for a re-supply (as it were) of it, could enable him to move on into his adult life. “If it exists, you would need to rejoin your mother’s love.” Internalized, late but forever, that love would make you free.

Neither intervention would apply to individuals whose self-esteem was highjacked but not killed by their parents: Those who live and struggle for the smile of contingent approval their entire lives. While much more successful in prestige and material, these individuals won’t be helped. They have survived on false love while the others have survived on no love. They could only fall and crash, in therapy, the latter could only climb.

General and specific observations in retrospect

A surprising number of clients say they have no identity, don’t know who or what they are, lack a sense of self-meaning, have not the slightest feeling of a true or right occupation or career. None of them could be helped by Existential Psychotherapy – Yalom or any of the others. Presently, one forty-year-old man is in a state of depressive panic about this. The others say it but don’t feel it deeply. I could throw a hundred college catalogs at them and they would find not a single subject of interest on which to build a next phase of their life. Though I do try this, and think of various approaches to stir their potential or their original core, I know I am not a good inspiration for them. That’s because the profession of psychotherapy was not a true north of mine but was the unexpected heroin – self-medication – that saved me and replaced me, thirty years ago, at the very moment of my crisis of being. On a walk, I had found self-awareness for the first time in my life and saw that I was nothing. Rather than collapse in the truth and in help, which would have been right, the idea of helping others as unmade as I was struck me exactly as God suddenly appears to the most wretched of souls in their despair. It was my salvation. Becoming a therapist became both my forever meaning and my forever self-loss.

I can’t wish this on any of my clients, and none have found it on their own.

Theory and practice have proved very divergent. The way of healing is not to make yourself think different or to open your eyes and see a truth. People love to, need to, believe that a new idea or fact will change them, will rewrite their chemistry. It can’t be. We need to return to our sick roots in childhood, grieve that pain and give it to a parent-figure. True therapy is reparenting.

I don’t know anyone who has done this.

I recently asked a college senior to stop smiling and being her snazzy bouncy self when we both know there is a dark underground in her. How can such a helium-filled persona feel right? I asked. She gave me an explanation having to do with women’s debased status in specific sciences. My oafish reply was that most young people already have to be fake to convince themselves that they want to be adults with forty-hour work weeks and a level of initiative and unsupportedness that will never feel right. Why add another layer of unreality to that? Then I remembered that reality would have killed me at 22.

We let the matter rest.

Adapted from a Progress Note: “‘Sal,’ a pleasant, intelligent client of four months, actually exists on a different plane of reality that completely blocks emotional awareness and the reception of psychological information. He provides copious facts of the world (religion, sociology, etc.) for unknown reasons and acts as if everything introduced by this clinician is something he already knows. The different plane of reality was forged in his pathologically adultified childhood, where he was both hard worker and caregiver to almost a dozen children in his blended family. He has grown, self-medicatively, a mindset and philosophy that knows nothing of children’s reality but is goal-, work- and spirituality-centered, which he has instilled in his children. Though they are hard workers and players, “successful,” there are apparent flaws in his system. As examples, he acts as wise guru, not victim, to his Borderline Personality-disorder wife, does not let himself feel her poison which has pervaded the family for two decades. His daughter ‘doesn’t care for’ gay people, but has been inculcated to have rote respect for their rights as individuals.”

One of my most decent and engaged clients who will never be reached.

Why do these clients keep returning, week to week, month to month? One might think they’d be scandalized or too bored. I believe they feel the warmth of my optimism rooted in the pessimism of human nature.

What's with grieving?

There can be a number of reasons why a person can’t grieve well. Many people are emotionally repressed and they can’t break through that repression. A feeling that should be poignant – tragic or sweet – remains dull, stifled, dissociated. Another reason for poor grieving is that the expression of dear feelings – what the griever wants to feel – is sabotaged because those feelings are chemically tied to negative (even angry or hateful) feelings that are more hidden and that the person would rather not feel. The negative taboo feelings hold them all under water.

Another reason for aborted grieving is guilt – valid or false guilt. One middle-aged woman was able to pour out a lot of grief pain, love, need when she could acknowledge and express her mother’s abusiveness. What kept her from successfully grieving was her sense of guilt for having taken her mother out of the old family home so she could caretake her better. It didn’t work: Her mother never got over losing her house, being removed to a bedroom, being disliked by her daughter’s husband.

One more preventive of grieving that I’ve never seen described anywhere may be called “temporal resonant grieving.” When my mini schnauzer died in 2002, I was living alone in a state (Colorado) I had moved to to get away from a sad relationship. Alone after midnight with my euthanized pet, I knew – knew to the depths of body and time – that I would never get over her death. What I felt was Loss itself, all my critical and unfair losses through time, feeling lost in the present day, the state of never-had from my beginning. The loss of childhood, the loss of love then, the loss of youth. Simply because I can’t be the only “resonant” person, I believe that our deepest truths may return with a present death. We are holistic in mindbody and time.

With this being true, we would have to grieve everything sad and wrong, from beginning to now, at any given death or abandonment. To do that, we’d need to be very in touch with our unity in our time: certainly not something most therapy clients will experience until they’ve been talked to for a little while.

Then they may be able to move on.

"How do you solve a problem like 🎵 --" (The Sound of Mucous, starring --) with Addendum

This article is a divertimento about book formatter Word-2-Kindle’s endless chain of snafus perpetrated in the interior production of my book, “I Forgive” and Other Delusions. This post would be twenty to thirty inches long were I to catalog all the indicators of ignorance presented to me by W2K over the past several months. To simplify, following is my most recent email to Nick, principal or assigned torturer of the company.

🌒         🌓      🌔   🌕   🌖      🌗         🌘

Nick –

It’s a fail. And while I hate to sound (or become) paranoid, I have to assume that either your formatting staff are complete morons, or they are toying with me, like fun sociopaths, at your behest.

I told you that starting with the article I mean you, little one, the Index page numbering was off. I gave you a representative list of examples of this: articles on page 105, 114, 115, 175, 198 and 328, which are assigned incorrect Index page numbers.

Well, your pathetic or sociopathic staff apparently manually fixed just those page numbers I cited, when it was perfectly clear that I was indicating that Index page numbering was globally flawed from page 105 on.

Looking at your latest revision file (W2K-_I Forgive_and Other Delusions-Reformat-Rev1.pdf), I checked a few articles at random and their corresponding Index referents:

Bad Supervisor. It’s on page 121 and the Index says 119.

Son of Bad Supervisor. It’s on page 126 and the Index says 123.

Inner child deluxe. It’s on page 324 and the Index says 311.

I hope you are not AI, Nick. If you are a person, then I figure you are either laughing at me (which I assumed during our previous era) or are eye-gougingly exasperated by your staff’s incompetence (not as much as I am, but some).

At this point, Word-2-Kindle’s advantage is that I have too many difficult-to-swallow grievances to put them all in a critical review. I may have to use my writing skills to condense them into an Absurdist play or similar, published at The Pessimistic Shrink blog, Yelp and others.

-- Fred L.

- - - - - - - - - - -

In fact, W2K has exceeded a dozen revisions to address its own errors. Most errors were small irritations (deleting line spaces above and below indented quotes; inexplicably shrinking the size of running heads, etc.) as opening acts to two major ones that have occupied my psyche since last year. (Here is one of them, the margin disaster, all pages off-center and pressed against the spine):

The present Index numbering fiasco may be the final blow and the final mystery. In Microsoft Word, one embeds codes throughout the book to generate an Index. The result should be a flawless correspondence of book page number to Index page number. And yet somehow, somehow, W2K has managed to dishonor these embed codes part-way through the book. I’m stupefied, and at the end of my energies and patience.

My book remains for sale at Amazon. The ebook, produced by a different formatting service, is serviceable; the paperback by W2K looks amateurish. I would still recommend either for those interested in feeling-centered depth therapy that respects, uniquely, the holistic person as body, mind and time.

- - - - - - - - - - -

Addendum and finale, March 16

Word-2-Kindle provided me yet another revision file, this one meant to correct the book-wide discrepancy between articles’ page numbers and their corresponding Index page numbers. The revision file looked good: perfect sync between text and Index pagination. They did it, presumably by reactivating Word's Index-generating process. But then I began to scroll through the articles. What I discovered to my stupefaction was that Word-2-Kindle hadn’t corrected the Index. It had reduced the number of pages in the book to adapt to the flawed Index by digitally compressing letters and words, their escapements and the space between words. Articles that had occupied two pages now fit on one.

I revealed my discovery to Nick, the head man, describing it as the apotheosis of "ass-backwards." His response:

“It's important to note that our team does not directly update the index as it requires the use of MS Word, whereas our interior formatting process utilizes different software. Consequently, updating the index must be handled on your end.

“Here's our process: Once you approve the formatted PDF that we will send for the Print interior, we will provide you with a Word Doc version of it so you can update the index according to your specifications. After you have completed the index, you can send the Word Docx of the Index back to us and our team will then apply the index to the Print interior.

“Regarding the spacing of the articles, I understand your concerns about the tight spaces and the appearance of the articles. Please be assured that some tight spaces are intentionally incorporated by our formatting team to ensure proper placement and alignment of the articles within the manuscript.”

I replied:

“If you had informed me of your limitations regarding Word (a program I assumed "Word-2-Kindle" had great facility with) at the beginning or early stages of this labyrinthine and exhausting process, I might have either given up then, or tried to work with those limitations. As it is, you have worn me out. Like Rachmaninoff, who was plied with requests to encore his famous Prelude Op 3 No 2 in c-sharp minor so often that he sickened of the piece, I can't stand to look at my book anymore. As said, it is time to part ways.”

And his rejoinder:

“We apologize for the inconvenience and for the short notice regarding the process we follow on how we deal with indexes.

 

"Should [you] have other concerns, please don't hesitate to contact us. We are always here to help.”

 

Nick has been consistently polite, in a lobotomized and possibly mocking sort of way, from start to end, and as consistently unforthcoming about his company's technical deficiencies and poor quality control. Note that my back-and-forth emailing with Mr. Caya (and for a short while, his Bahamian accomplice “Krizia”) began in November of last year, most of which consisted of my requests that his staff fix their errors.

Sing a paean to Singapore and, well, Hallelujah to Hong Kong

This is to express my quiet appreciation and louder bemusement to the people of Singapore and Hong Kong who have been clicking on this blog two hundred to four hundred-plus times each day for a while now. (Google Blogger provides stats per country.) I don’t know what it’s about as, per usual, no one ever – and I mean evvverrrr, sends me comments about my articles. The mass click appears to happen during my bedtime, which is awake time in Singapore and Hong Kong. My guess, which is wishful thinking, is that these are Psychology classes (with brilliant professors) that have grasped the iconoclastic and food-for-thought nature of many of my pieces. Congratulations! You are right. I have been applying acid to scar tissue and nutrients to sick Cognitive Therapy bodies for ten years. I’m glad someone out there is appreciating my contribution. However, a client to whom I mentioned the mystery suggested that “classes” may be right, but thought they might be for ESL (English as a Second Language) students. In that case, the articles would be held as examples of purple prose poison which students would be taught to avoid.

If my hypothesis is right, I would welcome Singaporean and Hong Kongese comments, critiques and questions addressing specific posts or general ideas described. I appreciate bright students who are willing to face heresy and consider its value.

"This is what I believe!"

A 43-year-old client says that he has found a way to “defuse” conflicts with his wife. He’ll say: “I see what you’re trying to do. I’m just going to step away.” His ten-year-old daughter is distracted when he is trying to teach her math that she didn’t grasp in school. He believes there should be “consequences for her being disengaged.”

A 54-year-old client states that he accommodates his mother’s self-centeredness because he wants to be “a good son.” He can’t bring himself to criticize or get angry with his torturously mentally abusive father because “he’s not here to defend himself.”

A 35-year-old man asserts that his parents had “a very good divorce” when he was five years old.

I described my socially-incorrect ideas about “forgiveness” to a 58-year-old client. He said that “there’s nothing to forgive” because his father’s domestic violence and alcoholism didn’t affect him.

A 21-year-old Asperger’s client says “I hate myself.”

Let’s pour some acid on these clients’ custom-made beliefs.

The 43-year-old believes he has “defused” incipiently volatile conflicts with his wife by accusing her of being sly and manipulative and walking out of the room (Gottman’s famous “stonewalling”). He’s actually made the conflicts worse. He believes his daughter should be punished for not being able to focus on her math and on him. She may have ADHD, may be depressed because of her parents’ continual sniping, may be turned off by her father’s disciplinary “three strikes” mentality. Punishing a child for being hurt or injured is destructive.

This client's beliefs are just threadbare clothing over feelings of revenge for a childhood which he perpetuates by remaining in thrall to a pathological, authoritarian father. Beliefs are adamant, until they crumble into the greater hurt that formed them.

The 54-year-old believes that he must be his mother’s doormat, her eternal accommodator to be a good son. Does it make him a good son not to have any self-care, to back himself away forever? He has adopted some strangely-derived justice not to criticize a father who isn’t alive to “defend himself.” What can that mean? Do we not condemn Hitler because he can’t argue back? Do I not criticize Trump the sociopath because he’s not in the room with me?

He believes he is a good son. What he means is: He is a good little boy.

The 35-year-old man believes his parents had a “very good divorce.” Can he feel what that divorce did to him at age five, how “very good” it was?

The 58-year-old has nothing to forgive as he has banished his real childhood with a violent and drunk father. Hovering above that, he may believe anything he wants.

The 21-year-old “hates” himself because it’s less painful to grow the callus of self-hate – more an idea than a feeling – than to feel the pain of being an unloved child.

I don't know if other therapists believe their clients’ theories of life. I’d advise them not to. A good rule of thumb is: “The feeling is the fact, the thought is the escape.” People will often cling desperately, time immemorial to a belief which could be some airy-fairy, cockamamie conjunction of words their humiliated inner child came up with. What they don’t want to do is feel. Feel the radical truth that defined their childhood. To go there would be to burn away the bland mantra in black, boiling tar. But the mantra is a straitjacket and the tar can be poured out. That’s when therapy happens.