My book, dedicated to Karen and Vanessa

Many of my bad habits are still in place from around age seven and later. I can’t justify foisting the mature discipline on myself that would stifle these self-soothing behaviors. I do mean “can’t justify.” I don’t believe the imperatives of adulthood – earning a living, not hitting people, not making excuses for everything – include being in unnecessary pain. Eliminating my tics, my sweets, my curmudgeonly attitudes, would cause pain. I could say that it would also cause me to be not-me: My sense of self requires self-medication to exist. Without it, I’d quickly regress to the flaming baby in the incubator and crib whose parents were nowhere to be seen.

I am like most people, possibly like everyone but the few entirely healthy souls that developed by the luck of the generations. We are all injured child and coping adult blended in one body and one psyche. We are that for two main reasons: Help did not come during our childhood, and adults resist returning to the “scene of the crime,” which is the only place where healing can happen.

All of our psychological problems come from having moved on, during critical times, without healing. One definition of childhood could be having to move on without a voice and without empathy. I know thirteen-, fourteen-, fifteen-year-olds who remain frozen in depression and anxiety and time from some life-changing loss – call it trauma – that happened years earlier. All of my adult clients are people who are frozen, deep under their multifarious surface, in losses that couldn’t psychically be survived.

We cope, we forget, we explain away reminders that appear in our disorders and rage and relationships and self-sabotage and dreams and success. Adults are the most delusional people on earth, because they believe they are essentially OK and they believe they are adult.

There is no root-level healing of psychological disease. That would require a time machine into the past. The notion is as absurd as spending time wondering how we would have turned out had we been born to different parents. We wouldn’t exist. What we can do is get a caring bond where we never had one, with a loved one at the best, with a therapist at much less than the best. We can have the despairing blindness fall from our eyes: What seemed like our defect, our self, is just injury. We can “grieve like a child,” meaning with someone who truly sees us. Grieving critical losses in solitary fails. With good grieving, we find that we change: Our birthright of love and purpose and empathy, to the extent that it existed at our birth, returns.

I live a certain irony where I had been ill for my first four decades and was not good for anyone. I then grasped myself, did brutal work, and changed deeply and widely, a new continent for myself. But this hasn’t helped – can’t help – the two young people I co-raised. I can’t expect them to appreciate my improvement, despite my sincere (and educated) apologies. In fact, I believe they despise it. And I can’t respect their comprehensive rejection: I couldn’t heal quite that much. And I need my curmudgeonly attitude. It’s medicine.

Idiosyncrasies #3: A kind of eternal aloneness

Many people know that it is good to have someone to tell our thoughts and feelings to. There’s the sense that the more intimate material we share, the closer the bond we’ll feel. Also, the deeper we reach within ourselves and express personal truths to a caring and accepting listener, even those truths that feel shameful, the more we’ll feel free, the more we’ll feel proven human, the more we will realize we are OK and not a bad person. Paul Vereshack describes the defense mechanism of “avoiding negative self-belief.”* Avoiding what we feel is the worst about ourselves leaves us with malignant ghosts in our dungeon. Opening up to even the most shocking feelings and facts – even, as his example goes, murderous feelings about one’s children – will enable us to descend to the earliest hidden pain that formed those feelings. And in touch with the pain, we’ll see that instead of evil, we are simply injured and lashing out in ways that are not our truest self.

But there are questions: Is there a limit to how much personal, arcane truth we should reveal to another soul? Is it possible to expose too much and by doing so, undermine some critical sense of privacy or integrity of self?

I know my own answer: There are one or more secrets I will harbor ’til my death. This is not a matter of shame, because I have seen the worst and have accepted it with what may be called self-enclosed grace. The essence is an awareness of organic failure at the beginning of my life, a rudimentary wrongness, something that no one could ever see and few could imagine, but whose reveal would make me sound like the irredeemable. Exposing it to another person, I could no longer be its sole owner. Somehow, then, that privacy would be my necessary gift to myself.

So I suggest a principle that there is a limit to the power of the oceanic deep confession. Some disclosures pertaining to early development would injure a bond, a unity. The Existentialists, of course, have written about “our ultimate aloneness” (I. Yalom). But the way they mean it, I don’t believe is true. Some of us can feel completely one with a loved person. It is the kind of understanding that I have found, and that others might find were they to look at their blueprint, which ultimately separates us.

There would be another question: Does this separation exist between people even when they have no grasp, no glimpse of a fundamental mistake? I would think so. People can sense an obscure alienation from themselves, some impossible-to-describe remove from their life. That would have to be a barrier at the ready when another person comes too close.

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* Vereshack’s on-line book, at – http://www.paulvereshack.com/helpme/chapt20.html#9.

Mail this to your Trump-admiring family and peers (but include a return envelope)

There has been so much said about the diagnosable psychological illnesses of the president. In his case, we have the necessary exception to our culture’s worthy destigmatizing of mental illness. Trump’s ignorant narcissism and destructive sociopathy deserve all the stigmatizing that can be gathered.

Here I want to ask Trump approvers to look at themselves in a way they never have, as this would be undermining and threatening. But undermining one’s defenses, or status quo, is one of the most courageous and powerful actions a person can take for health and self-improvement.

You hear a man demean individuals he does not know, trash vast groups of people, entire countries, and this gives you good feelings and positive thoughts. You experience body sensations that you would identify as the chemicals of happiness, but that you would know, were you to sit with them alone in quiet, ruthless awareness, are not healthy joy, love, respect or benevolence. They can’t be: You cleave to a solipsistically, narcissistically uncaring and self-enclosed person. Every human being in his world is or would be only a supply to fuel his self-regard. Picture those extremely troubled women, those attorneys and police­women and guards who fall for serial killers or other imprisoned psychopaths. You are their bedfellows. There is no difference between you in your attachment to a malevolently, deliberately toxic person.

If we separate from the consensus and from the auto-pilot emotional attitudes that comprise our beliefs, we may realize we have anger or a sense of critical wrongness that sits more or less quietly at the foundation of our life. This is the damage of childhood – whether we recognize it as damage or not – that bends the path we’ll travel through our years. Splinters and anchors in our heart can degenerate love to need or anger and alter what we hope for. We lose justice and substitute revenge. Our sense of morality changes. To see real love outside of ourselves makes us feel alone. To see anger and accusation is to equalize the pressure of our internal terrain, especially in the web of the clan or the false nest of a rally.

True admiration and love are not inspired by hate or by a sense of superiority. What you think is your fondness for Donald Trump is only your childhood pain sanctioned. I know. For years I was a Republican, a libertarian. In those days, my heart would have swelled at any bully who had contempt for the gentle, the kind, the caring bond. I felt strong and happy in the cult of the bitter.

If I could grow up, so can you.