The chair at the beginning of the world (with Update)

This was a 16-year-old tall, strong young man who cut himself sometimes, overdosed twice and whose head was weighted down by dark, deathly thoughts. He was growing up with no father, an angry and brutal older brother, and a mother who apparently lived on the sidelines. Otherwise the brother couldn’t have gotten away with so much bullying and denigrating.

The young man “spaced out” quite a bit, which got in the way of school performance and even sports: intermittent focus. On the couch he looked serious, and half there. He described, or rather labeled, the brother with one- and two-word terms: “dick,” “real bastard.” These were his known, established facts. When he said them, I had the feeling of a betrayed person, the sense that he was visiting a neglected basement room of his museum, with a treasure ignored, his past now gauchely in the present.

Then I asked him to put his brother in the Empty Chair.

Silence, heavy stagnant silence.

Therapists have to see this wasn’t being resistant, tongue-tied or in a “bad mood.” This was sudden merciless history: the weight of twelve years of suppression, fear, grief, and the more recent tragedy of loss of himself. To talk to his brother would have been to say: “Everything failed. I am still there.” Or actually, it would have been facial expressions and tears: five-year-old’s tears and 16-year-old’s tears together: tongue-tied, body-tied, time-tied.

I probably wouldn’t have asked him to go there, had I known how truthful that chair was.

So we can picture what his here-and-now is: Pure burden with no good reason. His voice was stuck in the past. His attention gone, and when it was here, that was painful. He would need to regress, with me and his mother, who herself would need to be enlightened.

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Update, June 7, 2020. This young man continued in therapy for another eight months. He turned out to be one of my most serene and pretty much happy young clients. And I’m not sure what happened, other than “the relationship.” His mother never joined his therapy. He became a strong, almost laughably extremely strong confronter of his brother. He never became a high-achieving student, by intent (!). That is, he knew just how much work to put in to get by. Because he had other plans – two-fold plans: have fun with his hippie van, music, friends and travels, and learn his uncle's solid trade. I smile just thinking of this kid.

The perpendicular Narcissist

I remember encountering a second diametrical opposite to the Narcissistic Personality disordered man. The first opposite would be, casually speaking, a saturatedly depressed person with zero self-esteem and no ego backbone. The man I knew was a pure parallel (or perpendicular?) universe to the disorder, and illuminated a lesser studied aspect of it.

Like a Narcissist, the client never did a job for the sake of the work or the money, but for the “supplies” he would win. “I need constant praise and adoration,” he said. “I need to feel I’m doing something special or changing the world.” If no praise came after some felt-appropriate period of time, he would quit the job. This had happened a number of times. He had dreams of New York City stardom as some undetermined sort of artist. His ego was Masterson’s “inflated balloon” of Narcissism: It had to be constantly filled else he felt empty and wrong. He needed to be up, happy, loved at all times.

But this man was also Alice Miller’s searcher and struggler for “admiration,” which “is not the same thing as love.”* He never felt good enough; felt like a jack-of-all-trades, master of no competencies, though I had no reason to suspect he was not good at his technical job.

See the primordial strands of Narcissism. The childhood aborted self, ego. The need for glory to bury pain and emptiness. The inner childishness (cite: Trump the “man-baby”): Remarkably, he knew he prized his ingenuousness and immature style, like a more pathological version of “boys will be boys” men. But that was all. The remainder of him was down to earth, humble and fragile. He knew he had depression and anxiety.

I believe that the true Narcissist is much more similar to this man than he or we would believe. A primary difference – that he needs to believe in his perfection and transcendence while my opposite man wants to own these qualities – is not that big a difference. I’ve written elsewhere** that the Narcissist doesn’t wake up in the morning feeling good. First consciousness is blankness, emptiness, his real self. It must be inflated quickly. This is done by a second primary difference between them: the alienation and anger that accompanied his losses in childhood. We can say that contempt and fear must raise him above others. Need and fear made my client seek others.

Contempt has given up on love. The struggler remembers it, or the shadow of it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_bq5mStroM.

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* Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child, p. 35.

** https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2017/08/mini-statement-don-one.html.

The pap of teenage mental illness

A comment on Amanda Mull’s Feb. 25 article in The Atlantic online, “A New Sign That Teens Know They Aren’t Struggling Alone”; subtitled “Their worries about mental health might have a bright side.”* The author squeezes some conjectural good out of a Pew Research Council survey result, that “70 percent of teens see mental health as a major struggle for their peers.” Amanda wrote: “Even though it’s troubling that so many teens worry about their peers’ well-being, it might also represent progress in how Americans relate to and empathize with the mentally ill.” And, “. . . having friends who are attuned to the commonality of mental-health struggles – such as the ones in Pew’s new survey – can be a big first step to getting help.”

Mull’s ideas are depressing and angering to me. In her stereotypical thinking, teens’ understanding “that they’re not struggling alone” may be a good sign, along with its benefit of moderating the “stereotype” that teens are “cruel to one another.”

The unsaid in this article leaves some powerful implications or, I could say, makes some powerful statements: That teens are set adrift in their own world with so many adult-level troubles; that they have disease-like “mental illnesses”; and that they are left to caretake and guard each other by observing their peers and pushing through “stigma,” by availing themselves of governmentese information from the social media.

Where are the parents, kids? Where do you think your problems came from? Do you think God or genes or your own faults fated you with depression, chronic anxious distress, suicidal feelings? And where are the parents hiding? Long before your children got depressed or anxious (F32.9 Depressive Disorder, Unspecified; F41.9 Anxiety, Unspecified), they were lost or invisible in their own home. Parents, encased in the prison of their own childhoods, their “unfinished business,” were blind to most things but their own rationalizations, defenses, their need to be powerful. Years later, to see their children as a population unto themselves, burdened with life distress, existential emptiness, fear of life, is redoubled neglect and abuse of the highest order.

What a world! Where a sociopathic narcissist has enough blind followers to make him president. Where children are allowed to feel they are defects – because their caregivers need to forget.

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* https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/02/teen-mental-health-worries/583531/.