Intervention tidbit #8: "Boring"

My teenage years were as gauche and out-of-body as Asperger’s, but for my ability to fake intellectual passion.  This was, I know, the reason I was gut-averse to seeing adolescents when I started doing psychotherapy.  Some of you will know the complex feeling of inferiority and fakeness among your own age or sex.  Women clients have told me they are not at ease with other women.  I felt like a shell-less egg around boys.

But now, many years on, I feel gut-right and spirited to work with teens, and see wide-open potential (though also farcical failure) in them.

There are words that people misuse because they are not in touch with their own natures.  “Love” is a major one: The real experience may be desperate need, or sympathy, or obligation, and of course sex.  “Honor” and “pride” and “self-respect,” needs that criminals and fanatics kill for, are their sense of disintegrative shame.  One of these words in the adolescent lexicon is “boring.”  A tough and sullen boy may claim that therapy is boring – yet he is talking about himself.  He really means that it is disturbing.  A different definition of the word is found in boys whose colors of life have been drained through years of lovelessness and hard labor.  Father and stepfather hit, desert, shame them.  Mother is a deflated balloon who clings to men, and then to her son.  The boy doesn’t announce stages of giving up, but they nevertheless happen as he withdraws, not inward, but to nothingness.  He discovers first that one enjoyment has become boring, then another and another.  And one day it occurs to him: Everything is boring.

What has happened inside that uses that word?  We can’t take it at face value.  He might be at a rock concert or party, or at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, and find them boring.  A mountain camping trip may be the same.  We must realize that this is not attitude, but an actual state of being lost in an empty place inside that can no longer reach with hand or heart anything outside.  The word “boring” – an unaware projection and euphemism – comes to his mind because it’s the kindest way of knowing his disconnection from the world, right at the time he should be jazzed and teen-narcissistic about it.  This feeling of non-feeling – “That’s boring” – can sometimes include the suicidal sensation.

One young man’s loss-emptiness also leaked into his thoughts: his “anxiety about his own mortality, his place in the world.”  But that was “psycho-logic”: derivative dysfunction.  We needed to focus on the feelings of loss, dullness and decay, but also on what had preceded them.  Do you remember enjoyed things as a younger child, before the curtain started to fall?  He answered in the present tense, hopefully a good sign.  He liked to build things, liked “nature.”  Can you feel them still?  Is there something of timelessness to them?  I believe these interests – scraps of gold, one might say – can be re-captured if too much time and depression haven’t overlain them.  The therapy must be both hopeless and hopeful therapy, then: grief over failures that had happened and were still happening, and the encouragement to hold onto things that remained alight within.  We watched Steve Jobs’ Stanford commencement speech: find what you love; don’t settle; connect the dots; “stay hungry, stay foolish.”  We had a serious hour.

The adult notion

A high school senior’s only question, during one of his first few therapy sessions, was: What is it like to be an adult?  He was very worried about having to become something bigger and better, stronger and more thoughtful, more competent and complex, responsible and goal-oriented and stuck in the maturity treadmill, than he was, and of course – having to be that way for the rest of his life.  He was feeling the failure of himself – nothing less.  Because only that feeling can provoke the dread of losing oneself, leaving one’s chance to be a child behind.

An earlier blog post – “Being 18” – addressed this problem: the inability of some or many youngsters to ascend to psychological adulthood.  Here I just want to review my peculiar response to the young man.  I suggested to him that adulthood is essentially a societal-cultural construct and a psychological strategy or defense that helps us live on despite the unhealed injuries of our past, and that gets us to do the “right thing” for self, family and community.  I told him that most “so-called adults” are not: They are children wearing the stiff clothing of pretension and action.  Inside they are just themselves, without category or definition: souls carrying ten billion idiosyncrasies and childlike feelings, and confusion.  They now have the benefit of being seen by others as arrived, but inside they are still smoking pot, eating ice cream at midnight and drinking beer in the morning, watching Saturday cartoons, masturbating and having regressive fantasies, dreaming they and their world will be transformed by love.

I proposed that adultness is like sexuality.  Once generally allowed to be a duality (hetero- and homosexual), there are now other entities like bisexual and asexual and transgender, aromantic and bicurious and gender fluid.  In fact, a microscopic continuum made of one’s full – not merely sexual – identity, where virility and femininity fade imperceptibly into and fuse with each other.  Adultness, similarly, is a continuum where some healthy few grow and individuate through the psycho-developmental stages, their interests sophisticate and complicate; others feel no individuality whatsoever and crave symbiosis and pleasure, but must fake it; others who finesse child and adult parts.  An old college friend is a well known cartoonist of cats and sex-obsessed geeks and pixies.  His daughter is a professional puppeteer.  Where does the child leave off, or get stuck, and the adult begin, or merely appear?

My practice has shown me that children who “grow up too fast” are unnatural beings, with a shell of worldliness or toughness under which is a left-behind continent.  This pulls them to be the child.  They have blind rages and disturbed dependencies, secret craziness,* gastrointestinal ailments that mean their childhood fears, “strength” for others that wears them out, urges to “succeed” or saboteurs to fail.  But these folks can seem to all the world to be top-notch, the full adult.

This information (or theory) was meant to help my young client drop his fearful urgency to, in effect, graduate at the doctoral level without education or diploma.  We’re just struggling youngsters carrying our heart, our needs, our losses into a wider open space.  You are un-judge-able, valid, private (unseen by others), the world is yours not a standard to adhere to, your time is easy not rushing.  In this context I urged him, with some humor, not to commit to a relationship precipitately.  The felt need to be aligned with a friend or savior will be tremendous – in the very midst of basking in your freedom and independence.  Watch out for that.

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* See footnote *** at -- http://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2014/05/what-joker_17.html.

Ramblings #1: Looking back

How did I do with my Ohio clients over the past five years?  I tried hard, always.  This does not mean that resignation never ruled the hour.  There will always be individuals who cannot get into “therapy mode,” by which I mean an existential not a circumscribed state.  They would have to see themselves in a crisis life where change is ineluctably happening, or had better happen.  Those who don’t own this state (more often than not the personality disordered) will, after a while, receive a different kind of process.

When therapists look back on a period of their work, do they see a sea of change: frowns turned to smiles, sloth turned to energy, brighter ideas implanted in ripe or rotten brains?  That would be startling to me.  And, they would be wrong.  People are like the ocean.  Therapy is a drop of heavy, alien water in it, containing a disturbing kind of life.  Many oceans, touched by it, will keep rolling on, or remain still.  Others will be changed.

Imaging the people-scape of these years, I get a warm feeling with disturbances.  Some of the disturbances are feelings of futility, and those can be further parsed into what might be called good and bad futility.  The good may happen when hard work “wins” against a client’s obdurate blindness: She deserves to be discomfited, and I brought it on.  A teenage girl struggling to excel in high school, with two jobs (including “closing” a restaurant late at night), over half-a-dozen extracurricular activities, church and community volunteer obligations, adventurous crowd-fun in the mix including over-sexing and -drugging.  She was glib, chipper and burning herself out.  Confrontation of her global escapism was bound to create a sinkhole.  She slipped into it briefly, launched herself out, and roadrunnered into the horizon never to be seen again.  Good futility.

I believe we therapists have to acknowledge that for many clients, we putter at the low end of the continuum of conversation to inspiration.  Maybe adolescents are more inspirable, but that is questionable considering all their counterweights – neurosis, parents, ego-identity, friends.  And many of the adults who act inspired by us are, in fact, adolescents.

I know surgical processes, such as Focusing and Primal-centered information and grieving.  But these live best in a field of conversation.  This is friendly, warm and respects the client’s defensive personality.  The danger of giving this respect is that over time the personality becomes harder to undermine.  We may give up trying: bad futility.

Some clients are radically changed, are radically grateful.  This evokes an underground rainbow of feelings: makes me anxious, jealous, happy, disturbed.  Is this change real?  You are moved, but I remain.  I have helped someone but maybe have just complicated their defenses.  These are obviously the best cases.  But I feel too humble or weak to have done it (yet I did).

In sum, I believe I helped, in one way or another, a good amount of people in Ohio.  Mostly, I will never know – and this even about those who say it is so.  Maybe therapists ultimately have to be inner-dwelling in our rewards.  Not that hard, for such a neurotic group.