Fantasy impromptu #9: Are you lovable?

What does it mean to feel lovable (alternate and equally correct spelling "loveable")? Or even to believe that you are lovable? I do not know. I do not know it at all, because it’s never been a feeling I’ve had or a belief that reaches some "place" inside me (despite the evidence I receive). I’d say that it’s the same feeling, or problem, of “feeling loved.” I don’t know that, either. I question my clients who say “I know that my parents love me. . . .” because they are likely saying they never felt their parents' love. But I am in the same, or similar, boat: I "know" my wife loves me, but I don’t know how to feel it.

 

This is preamble to my asking a client recently: Do you feel lovable? He’s had dreams in which his wife is leaving him. When he wakes up overwhelmed, and through the day, he asks her: “Do you love me?” We pointed out the obvious: If he felt loved, he wouldn’t feel the need to keep asking, irrespective of whether she actually loves him or not (she consistently and probably wearily says she does).

 

Many of us don’t feel good when complimented, when feted, when given love. Now, I have an almost orgasmically wonderful feeling when I know I’ve done something to make my wife feel happy or more secure – such as bringing home a really good paycheck. It’s a fused feeling of “good about myself” and “love for her.” That’s different. To feel lovable and loved requires something in childhood that many of us never received: the specific ingredients of love. Parents' inexplicable feeling of it, which is selfless. Calm and caring touch in babyhood and throughout childhood. Feeding on time, congruent empathic responses on mother’s face, parents’ respect for our self, their interest in us, positive words, absence of malign or benign neglect, and many other factors. Not to receive these gifts is pain, pain that keeps us frozen in need, need that hurts and which we must bury. And when buried, difficult to find, difficult to feel. The only way we could ever have that mysterious feeling of being loved would be to regress so deeply and powerfully back to babyhood – only in therapy – that our therapist would become the healer, the lover, the parent we never had.

 

Easy. Not easy.

Manifesto: The new Republicans

I picture a new kind of virtue, created by today’s Republicans not from inspiration but from their progressive, collective disturbance. It is a virtue where lying is diamond-strong and radiant. It creates a new world they want to live in, minds and mindset that can’t be moved by reality. It makes them men and women of perverse mystery, eliciting the other side's secret impotence and awe and the sense that the world has become fantasy, that reality has failed. We can't grasp how M.T. Greene speaks pure gibberish and doesn’t collapse altogether in her fake life. We don’t know how George Santos the life-faker lives, an exotic new breed that thrives without oxygen, on an empty inner core, something that should be impossible. We know that people deny all thirty-thousand-five-hundred-and-seventy-three lies* that Trump told over his four years. We once thought that being earthbound, honest and decent in the world was implicit. This may have been the child's bedrock assumption, but it held through time the way bedrock holds beneath skyscrapers. We “sane” ones can grieve this loss, but ultimately we may need – to co-opt Greene’s dream – a “national divorce,” not a political or geographical divorce, but a psychological one.

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* https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-false-or-misleading-claims-total-30573-over-four-years/.

Human side of therapist #1*: People with anxiety annoy me

Notice: This little piece is tongue-in-cheek, but not really, but maybe yes. It is dedicated, for some reason, to my sister.

 

A fair number of clients present solely with “anxiety.” It may be pointed out later in their therapy that depression is obvious, too, but that’s not their primary concern. No – it’s having the heebie-jeebies, the willies, being frightened of nothing and scared shitless, worried about the real, the rare, the remote and the ridiculous. They are on fire, walkin’, talkin’, flexing it up on my couch: panicky loosey-goosey and jackhammer dance-o-rama.

 

They feel jittery on the inside and then believe their life is jittery. Freaking out “to the manner born.”**

 

It is always serious. And it is a blockbuster. Some big study, back when I took a few psych courses preparatory to my Master’s program, said that anxiety – not depression – was the “number one” mental health problem in the United States. That still startles me a little. It seems so much more natural to picture the whole world depressed rather than skittish.

 

Somehow – and you know it’s true – depression seems like a legitimately stuck disorder, embedded deep and long, even as the depressive character; while anxiety feels like it should just be momentary, PRN to an occasion then passing. This is affirmed in the existence of Depressive Personality Disorder*** (DSM-IV axes for further study) and the absence of Anxious Personality Disorder. Actually, I have proposed an AnxPD, which I established in individuals who never grew up psychologically as they lived under the thumb of sick caregivers and remained fey dependents through their adulthood.****

 

The rest, though, normal people with jobs and families and mundane ADLs*****, and trepidation (a client’s favorite word for it) running on the inside. “Oh, come on,” I want to say with sweet sardonicism. “Can’t you take that sensation, see that it applies to nothing in your life now, and construe it as some residue of past crap, like indigestion from last night’s dinner?” Or: “Can’t you get angry at it, tell it to eat shit, over-power it because you are more powerful in your life?” This should be a rock-paper-scissors finesse. Depression covers anger like a thick blanket, but anger should cover fear. You hear a bump in the night and you ignore it or intrepidly check it out with a big knife in your hand.

 

But no. The person is beside himself: He is not all there. The understanding I convey is that this anxiety comes from childhood, when it was still fear and fear prevented identity******: I have no one to lean on – the crux of anxious insecurity – so I can’t grow a self. There was not a formed person yet because he had no purchase in a bond. Fear became his nature, and that led to self-soothing, the only bulwark against sensing his identity flaw. All the self-soothing behaviors found to stave off identity panic: obsessive-compulsive rituals, music, masturbation, school, imaginary good parents, thinking, alcohol, cigarettes, jobs, attitudes and philosophies, hatreds and other delusions. They are very versatile, because we use them for depression, too.

That is my understanding. But I realize that if I really understood anxiety, I would know why I was a vessel of anxiety throughout my childhood but do not experience it now outside of brief, instant situations. Somehow a steadfast theme – of Edenic goodness or confidence or some other molecule? – replaced it. I recommend that, but can’t explain it.

 

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* Actually, probably #346.

** https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/to-the-manner-born.html

*** https://courses.lumenlearning.com/atd-herkimer-abnormalpsych/chapter/depressive-personality-disorder/

**** https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2013/11/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none_22.html

***** “Activities of Daily Living,” one of the drabbest concepts in the mental status exam.

****** https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2015/01/idiosyncrasies-2-storm-of-eye.html

Soldier for life

I have an intuition about why a 34-year-old client dropped out of therapy after three sessions. Though young, he had served more than ten years in the Army where he experienced excruciating moral injury, near death and witness traumas. His life was changed for the negative by these crises while he “loved” the “feeling of Iraq, where I mattered.” The client did not join the military after high school. He had experienced more than ten years of physical abuse in his childhood home and his first escape was to sex, “narcissism” and alcohol in college. Then it was time to fight.

 

“Broderick’s” presenting problems were Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and anger, which would manifest in spontaneous black-out (or “red-out,” citing the domestic violence literature) blow-ups. He wanted to know how to prevent these berserker explosions that happened at the speed of heat and light. Third session, we had digressed to a discussion about his pervasively cynical view of life and people. In the last few minutes, to redeem the hour, I brought up the anger issue.

 

From the session Progress Note: “Client wants to return to work on his ‘anger’ and the near-impossibility of intervening before it carries the day destructively. I provided one point of view, having to do with allowing oneself to be vulnerable. That is, to feel hurt rather than rageful in the face of an insult.”

 

In the previous session, I had cited a case of mine, twenty-three years earlier, of a domestic battery client in mandated group counseling. I told Broderick that the man, a Viet Nam War veteran, had cried when he described the physical abuse he had suffered at his father’s hands. He cried but did not rage, though rage had long been his medium of exchange in difficult situations. Rage would have seemed natural, because he could now feel the power of his adult precarious status and of his broken childhood and all the years of loneliness that followed.

 

But being vulnerable to the pain of loss beneath the rage of injustice was what saved him. Collapsing in his child grief, head on his arms in the middle of a group of ten other tough and injured men, gave him the voice and the listeners to his life. Collapsing gave him strength, the strength of his true self.

 

This is what the last three minutes of my client’s third session was meant to convey. In the infinitesimal fraction of a second before hurt turns to blind, destructive fury, fall. Be hurt. Weep. Bleed thirty-four years of pain. That is the cure.

 

The cure he didn’t want to know.

The very important concept that I hate: "Boundaries"

A client recently brought in a book on “boundaries” by two Christian psychologists. The book is very meaningful to him and I listened to his enthusiastic testimonial. I didn’t want to say anything because my client enjoys talking with me, and because I have never been happy about this Special Deluxe Meme of Psychology.

 

My feelings about it are slightly sick. There are various facets of this sick. One, the concept is shallow. “Put up a wall” of sorts, is all it says. Two, it is negative. Rather than the positive “have good self-esteem so you care about yourself," it says “wear armor.” Plus, the whole self-helpy tone of it, such an adolescent-sounding slogan that never quite grew up.

 

Not to ignore the other side of the wall: those peremptory sorts who don’t recognize other people's boundaries – where they leave off and the other person begins. We had an Asperger’s apartment-mate for a year and some months, 25 years old, who would skip up to me while I was writing Progress Notes and Assessments, stand at my side with a silent deer-like stare, assuming that I was permeable, that I had time and attention to give her. My wife, a social worker and nurse, gave her lessons in boundaries, probably a hundred times with many different blunt and nuanced speeches, some louder than others. But boundaries was not something that she couldn’t do. Boundaries was something she couldn’t be. And that is my main problem with the concept.

 

A person doesn’t “have” boundaries: She is emotionally aware of her self as a person of value and therefore others’ selves as persons of value. She feels her own privacy and peace, her own difference, and others’ privacy and peace and difference. Without the first feeling there won’t be the second. Someone with no self-esteem will be intruded upon and is likely to intrude upon others, a fact that may be missed as she is likely to be afraid of the other person. She will timidly and ignorantly step into their space as she doesn’t know integrity in her bones. (This will include, paradoxically, the Narcissistic or Antisocial character, who has only prosthetic self-esteem and fear at the deepest base of his psycho-history.)

 

You can’t teach someone boundaries, many books notwithstanding. All these blessings to be strong, be courageous, say ‘no,’ be assertive, love oneself, stop apologizing, set limits, sung by television stars and girl singers, deflating the currency of psychology to sweet nothings. What therapy can do is change the person’s inner weakness to strength, her fake smile and numbing and compromising to real feelings and armed guards. That’s not establishing “boundaries.” It’s growing a whole person.

Ephemeral post: My simplest parent statement ever

I've recently worked with two teenagers, a girl and a boy, whose parents punished them for feeling bad. Bedroom doors removed – yes, taken off the hinges; video games and cell phones confiscated; friend visits prohibited. The girl's bedroom door was removed and she was forbidden from seeing her friends after she made a suicide attempt. The 16-year-old boy, parking his father's manual shift vehicle, didn't know (or possibly didn't remember) to put it in first gear. It rolled back and bumped the car parked behind it and got a minor dent. His father, furious, prohibited him from driving for a year. Worn down by years of similar punishments-by-neurotic-revenge, the young man tried to hang himself. "My parents didn't actually care, it seemed," he said. He called 9-8-8, an ambulance arrived and took him to the hospital. When he came home a week later, his parents locked him down.

 

In the news today, one reads about several high school bullies who drove a 14-year-old girl to suicide.

 

I tell my clients that "therapy is a non-judgmental process. The rationale is that everything that comes from the person – their thoughts, feelings, words, behavior, their nature itself – is valid. There are always legitimate reasons – not necessarily socially acceptable ones – for any behavior. The reasons have to do with pain, sometimes deeply buried pain, and my primary job is to find it and help mitigate it."

 

I don't tell my clients that I don't judge their parents. I do judge them. Parents who are bullies and whose children are bullies should be in jail or should be court-ordered to counseling, at least half-a-year of it as adjudicated Domestic Violence perpetrators are. The only exception is for the most part fantasy: The parent comes to therapy because he knows he is a problem and wants help. I’ve seen that happen fewer than half-a-dozen times in twenty-four years.

Interpret a dream by feeling

I do not analyze my clients’ dreams. Or rather, I don’t think I do a great job of it and offer more humility than answers. I accept the theory that the feelings in a dream are entirely true, are splinters of the sun, epiphanic fires of meaning often embedded in childhood. The scenarios are legitimate in ways that the brain uses our countless experiences and bends them to the feelings. For example, I’ve learned, from one dream, that far below my conscious feeling of pride about my work, there is a sense of being a human failure, behind all of humanity, a person who never really became an adult. In the dream, I am in my mid-forties (I’m 71), wandering along the downtown street of an unknown city, desperately begging strangers to help me find a job or a career. I am always an extinct typographer – my former profession that was replaced by desktop publishing in the 1980’s – never a therapist. It’s as if my solid present and future life never existed.

 

Here I wanted to describe one dream from my childhood. At most, it appeared four or five times, scattered about the years prior to my leaving for college. In the dream I am a child, no older than seven or eight, driving an automobile across a bridge over water, possibly an ocean. The bridge is nearly as high as the clouds, an empyrean arc. The far end of it can’t be seen or is barely visible. The primary feature of the dream is that the bridge is thin, fantastically narrow, exactly the width of the car. I am driving tensely, deliberately, but with helpless speed, and cannot afford to veer even a half-inch to the right or to the left. I am alone, a child in the driver's seat. The feeling I have is the most recondite chemistry. In quiet terror, holding the steering wheel tightly, I succeed, do not plunge over the bridge into the water. Yet the dream has always ended before I reach the other side. Each time, I negotiate the thin arc but not to any endpoint. There is a part of the feeling that must be described as perverse confidence: dread fused with, completely identical with, an odd certainty that I will survive by luck, not skill, by some uncaring fate that is nevertheless on my side.

 

This dream, which I had never thought to interpret, had remained asleep for decades. Only when a client recently related two dreams of his own that mirrored his mother's craziness did it suddenly appear, and with it, its meaning. I had never had an emotional bond with my mother, no feeling for her and possibly none from her. But she was "there," never rejecting, never holding, never cold, never warm. It was secure, but in the emptiest most meaningless way. I was made to ride along in my life, on no ground, an infant with the earth lovelessly out of reach, child's undesired adventure and terror in one, an impossible journey, with luck sadly preventing death.

A therapist trying to interpret the dream, without benefit of its complex biochemistry of feeling, might have construed the terrible narrowness of the bridge as my parents' control, the straitjacket of my upbringing. But there was no such control. There was only lonely freedom, emptiness and anxious security.

 

I don't doubt that dream could return, just as the lost man without a job could.

Micro-book: Pessimistic Psychology

Pessimistic Psychology

Part One. Introduction

Chapter 1: Old baby psych

All the psychology you read talks to the adult. But there are no adults. There are just old bodies that left their child behind. It has never died. Its heart is still beating from below, its eyes are still looking out. We, old bodies, live in a fragile dream of now, fragile because reality has more power than it. The reality that we are still our roots, our beginning. On our deathbed, we will remember, and be remembered by, our child self.

It is fine to throw away all the disorder labels, because they are just containers of injury, loss, soul death, pain, and our mind and body behavior that comes from them. The so-called disorders are essentially all the same. Anxiety and depression and anger, sadness and aimless energy and the false self that has covered us. You don't need labels to come for help. You don't need diagnoses to be helped,

You need your Rosebud. Your telltale heart.

Chapter 2: Come in

Most everyone is a lost soul. We can't live our rare childhood love anymore. It was taken from us and buried. We're older now. Time has jailed us. We may picture that distant Eden, but to go there feels like dying.

You may not know this in your therapy. Your therapist, believing you can retrieve your happiness from some magical source, won't know it either. Together, you'll be on the same blank page.

But if you come to depth therapy, what could be called time and space therapy, you'll be helped to see the cosmos whether you want to or not. Within it is the potential for contentment. You may quit, or you may stay.

Chapter 3: Stay

It's ok to be the audience for a brief moment, sitting upright, saying what you know or believe you know about yourself. Describing feelings you have or that you think you have. It is necessary to sit and listen to facts about psychological nature. But then you need to sit back, get sloppy, lie down on the sofa. Now you're adult and child, wide and deep like the ocean. If fortunate, you won't know what to say. How do you paint the ocean? So you say anything or nothing, or you cry. Even if you know it's your child that needs to be seen, you or it won't know what to say or do.

Part Two. Beginning

Chapter 4: You think you have a feeling, or you have an idea

You may say you're depressed, but since you don't know what that means, it would be better to say you feel bad and don't know what it is. In some hundreds of years, therapists will be able to pluck the childhood pain from your brain and from the cells in your body. But they will never know how to create the years of growth and maturity that never happened.

You may say you have anxiety. You don't know why your body has dread, or why you worry and fear chronically. Lying down, you should shake, cry, moan. Then deeper, cry for mommy and daddy, need a hug and a hand to hold. Then deeper, you are drowned in the losses in your childhood, seeing your angry father, being completely alone and invisible in your family in a moment and in all the years.

You feel something else is wrong. You may not know that you feel out of sync with the world, embarrassing or invalid to be in the present moment. It would be best if your therapist could tell you this, which would be galling yet supportive. Therapy is not what people have been taught it is, a place to talk, to cry or name a feeling, get a new perspective on your life, people, the future. That's having a friend. Therapy could be defined as the penultimate moment:

The moment before it's too late.

Chapter 5: There is no here-and-now

To believe we live in the present is to be a person treading water in the middle of the ocean, sharks and other single-minded murderers swimming beneath, and looking up at the wide blue sky, thinking: “This moment is beautiful. The day is mine and it is unique. I am in love with life.” In therapy, you need to be in touch with yourself as your history, as a galaxy of feeling sensations that started in your childhood and that became you. Words are timeless: They completely exist outside of past time, moving time, and are barely your time. They are poor labels with little meaning. Neuroscientists don’t understand consciousness, and similarly our words are alien squeaks. People say “love” and they don’t mean it, they mean something else, a dozen somethings else. They say “hate” and they mean “I am hurt.” They say “I’m fine” and they say “thank you” when their history has made them incapable of gratitude. They say “I am sad” and in doing so, they ignore molecules of anger at their life.

 

The more you talk in therapy, the more you are incomprehensible.

Chapter 6: A human being is a universe of defenses

 

A person is a homunculus of defenses. There is hardly a thought that isn't an escape from a feeling. There is no belief system that is not a soother, a plush bed and feathery pillow, whether it’s a religion, a political party, a conspiracy theory, an intellectual opus, an advice book, a mantra or philosophy. If you are not writhing on fire and screaming until your vocal cords burn out of you, you can thank your thoughts, even the most truth-telling, anxious and depressing ones.

 

Depth therapy is a battle between fire and tears. Tears put out some of the fire, but you must be burning up first. That is present pain based in childhood loss, from which no one has ever recovered. When my dog died in 2001, I knew I would never cease grieving, because the feeling of her loss was one with all the devastating losses of my childhood. One was all, and could not be otherwise. I don’t know if people realize that’s what grief is: It calls forth our whole life, weighted to our beginning. If I could have cried, then, loud and long enough to honor all of my pain, I would be better than I am now. But it was just me, alone with my euthanized dog in Cañon City, Colorado, late at night in a room in a veterinary clinic. Alone does not work for grieving.

Chapter 7: False hope

 

Therapy is sabotaged time and again – time eternal – by birth. A child may be born in crack cocaine withdrawal, screaming not crying, in the pain and rage that prevents all bonding and human connection: the psychopath. He may be premature and incubated, too late for the beautiful bond, to become pure need and pure rejection crushed together. She may have that oxytocin bond to a mother who has no maturity, to form an unrequited love for the rest of her life. This is the one, this is the millions who will forever need their mother and will forever be starved by her. She will never separate and she will never join, never be held. She will wander yet never move. Where does therapy go? All her moods are blended with hope and starvation and will not be improved by techniques or advice. If therapy wants her to “individuate,” to cut the cord and walk away, she can’t. If it wants her to think positive, positive thoughts will be stillborn, and she will carry them precariously. If therapy wants her to regress to finally release her childhood pain, that is too dangerous: She is still too much the child, and process strips away the adult that has given her refuge.

 

And still therapy goes on. As far as you’ll allow.

Chapter 8: Therapy is too-late love that must be rejected

 

We are trying to heal our past. There are two real, and countless artificial, means of healing. We change when our whole life is suddenly stirred. But the stirring has to be violent or disruptive enough to pour some of the original pain out of our vessel. This happened to me, to a certain degree, when I realized that I was not a defective piece of life, an error of life, but rather an injured soul. After forty-two years, I was awakened. Some pain left me. Had at that moment I wept enough to flood the earth, I would be more healed than I am. The past was changed, because some chemicals of the past evaporated.

 

The second part of healing is to become the child again and finally be loved. Everyone can feel the truth of this if they want to. If we could only go back, return to that loneliness and those moments of injustice and be true to our feeling, and be loved when we are, we would heal. We would wake up in a different world. Unfortunately, this does not happen. People are in terror of going there, regressing that deeply, and they do not want the therapist to be their ultimate parent, their loved one.

 

Too bad.

Part Three. In the midst

Chapter 9: You may have to destroy many things

 

Ralph Klein, M.D., of The Masterson Approach to personality disorder, said that individuals with borderline personality come to therapy to feel better, not to get better. I am certain this could be said of most clients, no matter their diagnosis or problem. Getting better must be seen this way: It is to change, to become different from who you are, not merely to be the same person but to somehow feel better, a drugged brain. Picture what this means at the core. In your therapy, something has happened that has changed your heart, has changed your feelings, has changed your understanding. You now see the world in a different way, see people differently. The personality you've been is behind you. The ground beneath your feet feels different. You suddenly can no longer tolerate your family's personality, their abuse, their denial, their enmeshment, their sarcasm and condescending, their minimizing or controlling you. You reject them or stand tall, and they reject you and stand small because they have never grown. You feel heavier, more serious, and yet light, a new lightness. You may laugh less, but wiser. You no longer people-please. You see your childhood being rewritten: you now know the truth. It is not the fable that you had believed.

The modern culture of therapy is to assume you'll be happier by rational talk and encouraging new behavior. That is a fantasy: Therapy cannot do this. Change means the destruction of the old, questioning everything, and it means growth without growing up. It is unique, and it is alone.

Chapter 10: The goal never, yet partly, to be reached

 

The ultimate goal, of course, is to become the perfect child: spontaneous and deliberate, confident by birth, curious and quickened by everything in the world and the universe, quiet and busy, full of imagination and creativity, equipped to feel all possible feelings even the worst, so secure and un-bottled-up that there will be no global beliefs, hates and prejudices, with nearly every vicissitude of life set upon a proton – from a good in-utero nine months – not an electron. This won't happen, sad enough: We won't even be spontaneous, before therapy and certainly not after therapy, because therapy gives us a surfeit of self-awareness of good and bad.

 

This is true even of feeling-based therapy – banish the evils of cognitive therapy that wants your life to rest upon a thought. But feeling therapy can bring a new spontaneity (that blends with new consciousness): It can invite the exonerated child to leave its prison cell. I, myself, am more spontaneous and childlike now than in the past, when I would have to guard against my immaturity.

 

So that's where it goes: facing the worst, being the worst, being naked and bleeding and protected, to ultimately be yourself.

🔱

Your standard teletherapy session

Second session (first one after the diagnostic interview), I informed my 35-year-old client ("Barbie") that her voice is sing-songy, childlike, with a breezy and nonchalant manner and attitude. That's to say, it is fake. Not surprisingly, she wasn't aware of this. I likened her voice to the "euthymic defense," the fake happy, light, smiley, chipper manner that countless people unconsciously adopt (or wear characterologically) when an underground troubling feeling materializes. The troubling feeling is unnoticed as the defense kicks in immediately. The client had named, at the first session, a smorgasbord of symptoms, basically "everything but the kitchen sink," including self-sabotage by being a "jerk" to people. So I also offered a technique. She claimed that she would prevent or ruin a relationship as a preemptive strike: Everyone would "abandon" her anyway, so obviate the possibility of it. I said – Not exactly. The jerkiness was an automatic not a conscious defense, her peculiar way – similar to a person's urge to reject a compliment – of preventing hope, preventing someone's touching her hurt and starved child's heart. The technique was to stop being jerky and allow the terrible needful feeling, and bring that feeling to therapy.

One problem she had not named at Intake, but did now when I inquired about past diagnoses, was Borderline Personality. But that was fairly obvious from the first hour.

Why jump into what might be a disturbing confrontation: her voice? Two main reasons: She had let more than a month pass between Intake and the next session, a likely sign of flaccid engagement. Better to shove some food in her mouth than to hope she'll stay to read the long menu. And Borderline would be the core disturbance from which all the others grew, so it would need to be addressed primarily and directly. I explained something about it, from Masterson's causal theory describing Borderline Personality as a developmental pathology, and related the various immaturity symptoms to that. She had already acknowledged: "I need to be more professional" at work.

I have a twenty-three-years-long bad habit: I go a full sixty or sixty-two minutes for sessions, leaving no time to reschedule. Clients have my text-message number for that purpose. Most text, but not all. I'll see if she does. Barbie would be one of the several-to-many clients whom I have an odd fused feeling about: There's nothing I can do for her; there's everything I can do for her. Impotent and life-changing. We never really know who will be helped, and are sometimes very surprised.