Thoughting #4: Don't believe what you think you feel

A middle-aged man, no intimate relationship in all his years, no longer comfortable with loneliness, said he feels “worthless.”

“‘Worthless’ isn’t a feeling, it’s a judgment, a bad metaphor. Go inside and see what is the feeling that you label ‘worthless.’”

One wouldn’t expect someone so shut down to have quick access to his body feeling, but he did. “Shame. My mother didn’t love my father and I felt ashamed of him. That turned inward.”

Therapists have enough to do even while accepting the client’s self-descriptions. And they have too much to do if they accept them, because they won’t know the person. It’s important to take the extra step and question the nature and validity of “believing” and question what clients claim to feel.

“I feel guilty.” You said this guilty feeling started when you were young. Did you do anything wrong by getting a D in science in fourth grade? “No. I was a depressed kid.” Then you don’t feel ‘guilty.’ You were made to feel inferior and bad about yourself.

“I feel proud of my husband for not drinking over the weekend.” He’s stopped drinking a dozen times this year. You feel ‘proud’ of that? “Maybe I don’t know what I feel.”

“I love my mother.” Why? “Because she’s my mother.”

I wrote this comment to a recent New York Times op-ed:

It bothers me . . . that big thinkers live on the plateau of ideas, which can’t explain themselves, rather than in the inferno of those ideas’ cause: visceral feeling that is rooted in the buried history of the person.

Adults don’t seem to know or care that ideas can’t explain ideas, that there is something literally deeper than a thought or a belief. Plumbing ideas’ origins leads to reductio ad feeling. “I like Trump.” Why? “Because he’s strong, and he owns the libs.” What do you mean by strong? What is good about ‘owning’ liberals? “Strong means he takes charge. And squashing liberals’ bleeding-heart ideas is good.” Taking charge of putting children in cages? Taking charge of colluding with dictators? Disliking immigrants? “The country has too many immigrants.” There’s no fact behind that. “It’s what I feel.”

And of course, that’s enough for many people – “it’s what I feel” – but it shouldn’t be for therapists. “I want to forgive my brother, who sexually abused me for years.” Should we accept that? or should we see if this desire, and this capacity for the emotional suppression that is “forgiveness,” are a weakness or false charity or religious imprint that could lead the woman to harm for the rest of her life?

Feeling-centered depth therapy isn’t just another paradigm of what goes wrong with people, of how to help. It’s the only approach that reaches the meaning, the actual truth of the person, the feeling beneath the thought.

Accessing the "felt sense" by the Focusing process

A client was thrown, unmanned and regressed, into an inner room of panicky despair by his mother’s three words: “Are you sure?” Twenty-eight years old, he had lived in the family-of-origin home his whole life, as had his several siblings. This, by cultural impera­tive and years of his parents’ mental and physical abuse. Now therapy had helped him know and touch his feelings, some deeply. It had encour­aged him to care for himself. He made a decision and conceived plans to move out and live with his girlfriend. Two months passed – work, therapy, silence at home. The day came when he informed his mother of his intention. She replied with that simple question. At our next session, we looked for what unearthly content inhabited those words that had so trans­formed him into an egg without a shell, sent him to a zone of terrible lostness. We saw that had she said the expected: “I don’t think you should leave,” or “We don’t want you to leave,” he would have stood tall. Some long-dormant defiance – real-plus-therapy push-back – would have activated, and he would have said “I’m going to” or “I need to.” Had she cried, he might have felt outrage, or sadness, or dazed, or even some unkind victory after all the abuse. Had she been angry, it would have fed his mettle. But she said “Are you sure?”

How did that unravel him?

It took some time and a confused searchlight, but we saw that she was setting him free. By her question she was assuming what she had absolutely no right to assume: that he was an indepen­dent person who could deliberate on his own, whom she hadn’t neurotically bonded to herself his entire life.

What she had done was to summon the impossible paradox of a child who needed the parents he had never had, and now had to leave. What she had done was abandon him by respecting him. Why was he now in indecision? Where was the strength of the past four months up to a few minutes prior? Where most of our strength is, in our tragedy, in our adult knowledge, need and resolve. I believe that most strength, after most childhoods, is girded by our head. Who we were in the past, what we needed, cannot really change.

He is moving out. Over time the umbilical cord will weaken further, the adult mind will grow more accustomed. There may be a time, after reaching his higher plateau but still on the journey, when he returns to the Empty Chair, his father sitting in it. It was too much, the last time.

The child as physicist, the oldster as psychologist (a recurring post)

Let’s say there is actually a smallest particle or component of nature – maybe the “string” of string theory. Let’s assume this even though the human mind would have to be especially stubborn not to imagine that any physical existent could be halved, quartered, etc., to infinity. We have this basic particle. What is it made of?

What is its ingredient?

This obviously is an absurd question. But we are compelled to ask it. One moment our mind says: This particle is not made of anything; it is only itself. Being is just being, whatever that means. The next moment we say: But it’s got to be something.

I recently wrote to an “Ask a physicist” online column. My question had to do with the strange (seeming) fact that everything is composed of the exact same-sized, same-natured particles. In my got-a-D-in-high-school-geometry mind, this seems the height of absurdity. Either the Big Bang produced nothing but countless one-sized smithereens (very suspicious), or all these identical twins were already immanent in the First Moment. In other words, existence was predetermined. Unfortu­nately, I didn’t save the physicist’s response. But that was because she didn’t answer my ques­tion. I even doubt she grasped what I was asking. So I still wander the world wondering: What is, whence comes, the quiddity?

What is time without a beginning or an end? Or with a beginning and an end? What is space without a limit, or with one? What is matter that keeps regressing to tinier pin­points, or that stops at a certain point? Why is there something rather than nothing? And why is something inexorably everything? And what is our plight that we must always live on the surface of our ever-deepening knowledge and never grasp what’s underneath, what’s the real nature of things? What makes us even suspect or wish that there is a real nature beneath phenom­ena? Why must the universe be limited to its eyes? What if everything is eyes?

And why would anyone think our life is in the present (the here and now) when Every­thing else is the past merely aged, the Bang still reverberating in the darkness?