February 10, 2014

I’m strongly affected by the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman.  Disgusted by the manner of his death — so unworthy, and probably an unnecessary accident.  Stupid.

But seeing film of him on “Sixty Minutes,” as interviewed in 2006, and hearing him say, “When you’re in the theater, with a group of people, and there’s something on stage that is not happening, but you believe it…I’ve done my job.” I realized he lived a great deal in his imagination.

It helped me understand something I struggle with.  Like my mother, I live a lot in my imagination, my introspection, wandering among feelings and observations and efforts to make sense of emotional energies.  Unlike Hoffman, my mother (may she rest in peace) never found a channel for her imagination’s life, so she often was lost between the world, the conversations, she imagined and the “real” ones, the conversations that happened in our usual reality as opposed to the reality of her mind’s experience.

Thinking about Hoffman’s perspective gave me two useful tools.  The first is to recognize that the world of the imagination isn’t a guilty, “wrong” or lesser world — which the materialists and pragmatists who control this culture would have us believe.  The second is to formulate the question for myself: if I have a vivid world of imagination and energies, have I properly defined a channel for it?

I’m somewhere between my mother, who flailed and felt her life was tragic because of her unused potential, and Hoffman, who was lucky enough to find such a channel.  (He said he trailed a girl he had a crush on, in high school, and she happened to be going to a drama class.  Once there, he discovered he liked it.)

Psychology, working as a therapist, and writing about it are the outlines of my channel.  I must shift into realizing what I do — and respect it more soberly.  What a pleasure.  Thank you, Philip Seymour Hoffman.  I do weep for our loss (my loss) of you.

February 4, 2014

Yesterday I heard myself saying to a client, “The opposite of control is kindness.”

N is a young mother, worried about how she’s mothering her 3-year-old daughter.  She herself was co-opted by her mother into care-giving, “from infancy,” as she put it.  Her mother had been sexually abused by her own uncle; when she told her own mother (N’s grandmother), nothing changed.  N’s mother had been fanatically careful of her own daughters.

The good news was that neither N nor her sisters had been sexually abused.  The caution had paid off.

The bad news was that N had absorbed her mother’s anxiety, hyper-vigilance, obsession with the presence or absence of sexual energy (N said, “I’m hindered, sexually.”), and wish to control.  She also had a large reservoir of burbling anger.  Her mother’s “control” had encompassed the whole family.  N was fairly bursting at the seams against control and with her own need to control.

She began counseling because she worried she was angry at her own little girl, T, and didn’t want to repeat what her mother had done to her.

The comment about kindness being the alternative to control came from N’s intense evaluation of herself as a mother.  Was she doing it right?  Wrong?  Could it be better?

It was news to her that her little girl would grow without all this fuss and anxiety.  N’s job was to provide “fertile soil,” good nurturing, food, shelter, safe boundaries — and the child would do the rest.  We don’t “grow” our plants or our children — we provide support for their own growing process.  N needed to get out of the way.

She said she’d been making a huge effort not to hover over T, which was working.  For the moment, T was following her everywhere.  I figured T felt N’s making some distance between them and needed to reassure herself about this “new normal.”  In fact, the following week N reported that T wasn’t following her around as much.

The next step was for N to trust both herself and T.  Yes, terrible things sometimes happen.  But most of the time, minute after minute, day after day, nothing terrible is happening.

Maybe N could provide the realistic caution — keep any eye out for possible threat of any kind — without the anxiety.  She was communicating to T what her mother had communicated to her: fear of the world, expectation that something bad might happen, and hyper-vigilance.  It had kept N safe but had also taught her the world was a scary place.

Instead, N could communicate to T that the world was a rich and wonderful place, and it also made sense to be careful, reduce the risks when they might appear, take action if they did.  That way, she could be sensible about wise protective choices but make life fun within those simple constraints.

To do this, N would have to be kind to herself — the opposite, in this case, of controlling.  Understand where she’d got her anxiety, understand that it was her mother’s anxiety (and not hers, really), take a deep breath and give it back to her unfortunate mother.  It didn’t help her mother for N to carry anxiety.  There was no special danger in N’s life.  She could relax toward herself and, thus, toward her daughter.  Kindness.  Paying attention rather than reacting out of habit — and someone else’s habit, not even her own.

February 2, 2014

Here’s another biggie.

C married her husband M in part because he was so empathetic.  He loved children and animals, worried about them, and tended to them patiently.  C felt she could talk to him about the abuse she’d suffered in her family.

M was ripe for the job, because he’d been through family tragedy earlier in his life (sudden deaths) and had learned to feel responsible for his family, even though he was only ten when the family members had died.

They were very bonded as a couple and only later, in therapy, realized that each was a player in the other’s narrative.

C believed unconsciously that M would rescue her, heal her, make it better.  M believed that was his role, he could do it, and thus his own duty would be fulfilled.

Of course it didn’t really happen that way.  Both of their sorrows and narratives were from an earlier “time zone.”  M couldn’t be present when C was abused, any more than C’s being healed (if she ever was) would be compensation for M’s inability to heal his family at age 10.  The projects were doomed by the passage of time — that past was unreachable.

Besides, no human can really heal another.  A therapist (or a doctor) can help you heal yourself, which is different.

The question was whether — in the present, and without these old narratives — C and M could have a relationship.  Were they interested in themselves and in each other, as people?  Did they enjoy each other?  What would they share?  In other words, how vital was their marriage now?

So many people are still playing out their old stories, full of unfinished business, truncated narratives, unresolved pain.  You can’t make those go away, and shouldn’t try, but they aren’t sufficient as a basis for a good relationship today.  Since we all have imperfect histories, I guess the best we can do is become conscious of our internal narratives and make an effort (a) to take responsibility for them, and (b) not cast others in our private movies.

February 1, 2014

When D was a youngster in working-class Albany, his dad was the steady person.  D’s mother was Italian, given to outbursts and high emotion.  She was very close to her mother, who lived two blocks away.  Both parents did a lot for the community through the church and various service clubs.  Dad never got riled by Mom’s emotional volatility.  He also spent a lot of time working on his trains.

Today, D is an engineer married to a seemingly volatile woman.  She’s also an engineer, but she’s given to outbursts.  She says D’s priorities are (a) their little child; (b) work; (c) leisure activities with friends to whom he’s devoted; and (d) keeping her appeased.

She says he’s not seeing her as a person; he’s not interested in her as a person.  She’s “family,” so she’s, literally, familiar, and he “knows her” so he doesn’t have to be very interested.  No surprises there anymore.  Just an effort to keep her from getting angry.

She does get angry.  Actually, by now, she’s thinking of divorce.  She feels his lack of interest.  Oh, he loves her, but he isn’t really attentive.  The only time he hears her is when she’s screaming.  Otherwise, he says unh-hunh and doesn’t remember.  He says he’s absent-minded (not just about her; about a lot of things), which is true; she says he never forgets what he has to do at work or a gaming appointment with his friends….

He’s startled to realize he has replicated his parents’ marriage.  His wife, F, is no longer close to her mother, since the mother re-married, but otherwise there’s a lot of overlap.  His role is to stay calm, then go do things with his friends (his version of his dad’s trains) while she explodes.

There’s one big difference, though.  Unlike his father, D gets bouts of serious, crippling depression.  Occasionally he gets some mania, too.  When his own affective roller coaster kicks in, he’s very interested in feelings.  He’s scared; he feels helpless; he wants F to be his mommy (which she’s tried to do for years, but which she’s getting really sick of, because he doesn’t show any interest in her state of mind when she’s upset or ill).

D also realizes he’s terrified when F has a screaming tantrum.  Sometimes he’s so scared he can only lie on the floor, tremble, and cry.  That does her no good, she knows, and she’s increasingly inclined to give up.  When she isn’t upset, he doesn’t pay attention; when she is, he hears her but he falls into fear.  As she says, “It’s always about him.”

Finally, D puts the pieces of the mosaic together.  One piece is the parental pattern (Mom, allied with her mother, having angry fits at home; the kids going outside to escape “her mood;” Dad quietly weathering the fit and then going to his trains).  A second is his terror of his own anger, which slithered out a couple of times in middle and high school, with awful consequences: he actually hurt someone, and he repeatedly felt very guilty.  A third is his way of relating to his family, including his wife: they’re “known,” familiar, and he doesn’t have to pay further attention, just try to get along with them.

The upshot:  D is very scared of any real emotion.  Dealing with it isn’t part of his vocabulary — he doesn’t know how.

I asked him if he could talk with his dad — to whom he feels close — about his depressions.  He looked stuck.  He said he could, and he knew his dad would listen (calmly), but his dad would be disturbed, and his dad wouldn’t know how to help or what to say.  Deep or intense feelings, in other words, were beyond the family’s skill set.  They just didn’t “do” strong feeling.  They did activities, roles, kindly and responsible actions toward each other and toward the community.

No wonder he was afraid of strong feelings.  The only times they showed up was when they had become overwhelming: until that point, they’d been repressed or denied.

I don’t know what D will do with this insight.  He liked the recognition itself, that he had created a replication of his parents’ marriage and that he was helpless with strong feelings.  He also liked having me point out that the part of him recognizing patterns was not in the patterns.  He had an outside observer of himself — within himself.

(This is a factor in what Murray Bowen called “differentiation,” and it’s a sign of mental health in Bowen’s model.  I think it might be the beginning of real change.)

So we’ll see what happens.  At least his wife, F, got a moment of hope, although she wisely said she’d wait and see.  I’m optimistic: he wants to learn, and to do better.  He’s smart.  He does love his wife and child and is committed to family.  We’ll see if he can shift from his family of origin, and how that worked, to his own family, and how it can be more alive.

January 29, 2014

Client T, last evening, came face to face with her sexual withholding.  She’s had one orgasm with a male, into 18 months of a 3-year high school relationship, and none with her husband, D, of 19 years.  She has had orgasms when she masturbates, and those fantasies do include a partner, so she does want the connection, she said.

In their early-years therapy, a therapist in Colorado made it about her — her lack of responsiveness, her failure.  Of course, that made her even more averse to having sex with D, and she had to talk herself into it, talk herself through it….  Not fun for either of them.

Turns out her withholding had valid psychological roots, but they weren’t about D.  They came from T’s childhood.  There was no cherishing male.  Her father was (is) a drunk, vain, demanding, potentially violent.  Her step-grandfather was mean.

So T decided she would cope with her powerlessness and fear by saying No.  She would stop “loving” her father; she would resist him, avoid him, distrust him — and that way she had some control and some safety.

Last night’s lessons were twofold:

1. That the withholding had a valid basis.  It had been an effort to take care of herself, retain some autonomy, and avoid sliding into permanent fear.  It wasn’t wrong; she wasn’t a failure.  She’d saved her own psyche by clinging fiercely to the withholding.  Her sexuality and her body were hers.  She did have some choice.

1. Another layer back, withholding had made no difference in her actual safety.  If she had survived, it was because she’d been able to survive.  Withholding was a placebo: she believed withholding made her safe, so it helped her feel better.  If she’d made it through her frightening decade, it was because she was strong enough, she’d waited long enough, and finally time had got her away from the monsters.  Withholding helped her psychologically — in that environment, when she needed something to hold onto — but she didn’t need it now.  She hadn’t even benefited from it then, except that it had given her a sense of control (which she desperately needed, so good).  But clinging to withholding as a sense of safety was like continuing to clutch a teddy bear she believed was a god.

I don’t know when or if she’ll be able to be more present with her husband.  She realizes he’s good-looking, patient, a kind and thoughtful man, a good provider, husband, and father.  He isn’t perfect, kind of awkward, but he’s pretty darn good.

What touched me was the way a child reaches for her teddy bear and endows him with godlike powers.  She has NO choice, really.  Since that’s emotionally intolerable, she invents an assistant.  And it works.  The belief in her withholding, her teddy bear, gave her the hope and sense of safety she needed.  She wasn’t overwhelmed.  I think placebos are sometimes essential.  We err when we dismiss their importance and value.

Yes, when a real medicine is available, let go of the placebo.  (T really does have choices now — that’s the real medicine, the real autonomy.)  But until there’s real medicine, hold onto that placebo.  And don’t disdain it later.  That teddy bear got you through.  Say thank you.

January 27, 2014

My brother John’s 70th birthday.

The dam broke this morning.  I imagined my poor mother telling me I shouldn’t stay back with her.  I have talent, brains, charm, taste, creativity, coordination…so much going for me; I mustn’t give it up to stay with her.

And I believed “her.”  I realized I have been grieving for her suffering for as long as I can remember.  Her fearfulness, her anxiety, her dependence on men and on her own body-looks to seduce them — all in an effort to feel safer, “loved” and worthy.  All hers.  Not mine.

It pains me to let her go.  I wanted so badly to help her, the way you want to help your child, for whom you’re responsible forever (not really, but so it feels).  To leave her to suffer and die, going ahead, seemed too terrible.  Like Sophie’s Choice and the stories of the camps separating parent and child.

But this Hermine (mother) was a grown-up in my imagination today.  She knew my staying back wouldn’t help her.  Her life was an exemplar of un-fulfill-ment.  My holding back wouldn’t change it, would only ruin mine.

So I am going forward, feeling heartbroken for her but seen by her, worthy, charming, intelligent, productive, calm, attractive, talented — all the things I actually am (which she did know, I realize), and which I have denied for almost seven decades.  Better late than never….

Realized the emptiness I feel in relationship with Americans (compared to Latin Americans and Europeans and Asians — almost everyone else) is analogous to music without overtones.  The notes are there, but the layers of resonances are missing.  I have no idea how this works, psychologically or culturally, but it’s true, and I’m grateful to finally have a name, a metaphor, for it.

January 26, 2014

So I’m getting clear about the triangles-of-meaning:

My mother couldn’t relate to me (she did love me as much as she had available, and I knew it).  Therefore I felt so alone, scared, baffled, helpless.  What could I do to get a better connection (which I so desperately needed)?  I tried everything and nothing made any substantive difference.

Oh, she told me what a good girl I was; she depended on me; she turned to me for understanding and “mothering” (how good can that be, when the “mother” is three years old?).

But I never received the reassurance, the connection, the feeling-safe-and-warm, the security and reliability that I needed.  So that’s the source of my lifelong internal anxiety and desperation.  Push myself, try harder, watch every incremental move left or right according to my environment, etc.

When I try to let this go, I come up against the triangle  (Think of “MOTHER” as above or below this line):

I NEED…………………..MOTHER (the source)………………………….. to feel worthy and safe

That is, without Mother, I insist, I can’t feel worthy and safe.  It has to go through her.

I (adult) know that’s nonsense.  I have survived, long past her never-changing and death.  I have achievements.  I have close loving friends and a loyal partner of 36 years.  Why don’t I let go of that old paradigm?  Why do I insist it’s the only one that counts?

I see this in others.  An obese client in California who is furious that the world doesn’t give her as much as she’s given.  That her husband doesn’t fill in the blanks left by her (disturbed) parents.  Why can’t she move on?

A musician friend in Boston who was rear-ended and went into a depression because she could no longer play well.  Her brain was concussed from the accident; things didn’t hook up correctly, or well enough, any more.  I asked her who she was, aside from being a musician — music being something she did, not who she was.  She said she didn’t know.  She’d never even wondered.  I felt she might never leave that paradigm.

Another musician friend, a violinist, whose father (a violinist) died young.  This man hadn’t planned to be a violinist, but he started playing his dad’s instrument and valued himself almost exclusively according to his success (or lack of success) as a violinist.  I could see how much more he was — but he couldn’t.

So I wonder why we cling to an outmoded, unhappy triangle (me/Mother/be worthy; obese furious client/disappointing world/feel worthy; musician/playing/be worthy; musician/playing/have meaning).  There’s the door, clearly marked Exit, This Way to Feeling OK, and we stay put in our miserable, long-ago battle.  I really do wonder why.

Speaking for myself, I know one factor is pride.  I don’t want to admit I’ve spent my lifetime searching for something that I didn’t really need and that didn’t exist.  I made up this search, endowed it with meaning, and have been following clues along the imaginary path for almost 70 years.  That’s embarrassing.

Another factor I’ve recognized is what I call a “magic task.”  When you’re scared in childhood, you make up a story that gives meaning to baffling reality.  IF I just do x, or find y, I’ll be safe.  I now have hope (this can be done!), I have a sense of control (it’s up to me!), and I have anesthetic (I’m way too busy to notice how scared I am).

When I give up my magic task, admit I invented it, I let all that (ancient) terror into the room.  I was that scared.  I had no realistic defense.

I guess my only hope is to realize I can withstand those waves of terror today.  Waves that would have drowned me at age two or three.  I have to find that panicked little girl and help her understand she did survive; her imagination ran away with her; she doesn’t need her fantasy world (of fighting with her magic sword, her magic task) for protection any more.

I can only reach her if I understand the power of her attachment to the fable.  When that’s gone, so is her hope and sense of control and anesthetic — all of her protection.

I get to all that by asking her, OK, so you can feel worthy when your mother loves you better.  How would you feel if she did?  That is, suppose your fantasy came true, and she learned how to relate and really saw you, valued you.

[Pause for sobbing]

I think that’s the new sensory image I’ll practice.  Because it does feel plausible.  It is how I would have felt if she’d been able.  And it’s certainly a more constructive narrative, so why not?  Maybe I’ll even imagine her apologizing for her years of inadequacy, telling me I am just as good as the next guy or girl, and of course I can try things.

I’ll test this on clients, see if it’s helpful to them.  Bye.

January 23, 2014

I’m seeing in several clients and in myself, within the past week, a deep and difficult struggle.  When your family isn’t what you need, nor what you thought it was, how do you “divorce” them (as one client put it)?  Can you?  Should you?  Is it permitted?  What’s the price?

One client is 50.  I’ll call her Teresa.  She’s from a small town, the youngest of four.  She was the adorable baby — bright, pretty, happy, fun.  Mom, who’s now 82, is a woman of principle who cares deeply about her children.  At one point, after all the children had been born and her husband was increasingly a drunk, she spoke with her father about leaving him.  Her father told her he and her mother would support whatever she decided, but no one would love the children like their father.

Today the mother says her father was mistaken.  What he said was true about himself as a father but not about her husband.

Teresa has just come out of a high-level corporate job, has plenty of money, and is staring at a long future.  At some point, she knows, her mother will no longer be in her life.

She’s spent her emotional life in her family, even when she was far away.  She called her siblings; she visited; she left her job to care for her dying father.  As far as she’s concerned, they’re a close family.

But now that’s changing.  She notices that, if she doesn’t call them, they don’t speak.  On business calls, she realizes her brother has already planned what’s supposed to happen with her sisters.  In fact, the brother simply took over the job of managing the family’s business affairs — even though their father thought she should do it.

They don’t come to her 50th birthday party.  She is wounded.  She’s always gone to all their events, and their children’s events.  Is she invisible?  Second-rate?  She realizes they’re too busy, wrapped up in their own lives, marriages, and children.

At first, she’s angry (in her hurt reaction).  Then she begins to re-educate herself, realizing that for fifty years she has assumed a tighter connection than actually existed.  That’s where therapy begins.

I believe she — like me and like other clients — filled in the blanks.  Her family couldn’t or didn’t relate much to her, so she related more to them.  I think of a relationship as a rope: they stayed near their end, self-referential, so she walked way over to their end.  Otherwise, she wouldn’t have been close to them, and she needed to be close.

Because….if she wasn’t close, life was too scary.  Her dad was easily irritated (“Don’t wake the sleeping beast”); her mother was preoccupied with managing the father and her children; the older siblings were out of the house as soon as they could manage it.  Teresa was alone.

That’s too frightening.  You have to belong, or you won’t be safe.  Your school of fish is swimming around in a group.  You have to swim with them.

But later on, as you become more than a member of your group, you start to notice how (or if) they relate to you.  You prefer to swim over here; they insist on returning to their usual spot.  You’re in a bind: do you go with them, and belong?  or do you honor yourself and your preferences, feelings, perceptions, and needs?

There are two central things to notice.  The first is that you can’t just stop loving or needing your group.  You are you, but you’re also part of your network, history, and experience.  You can’t stop needing to belong.

Too many of us, when the family can’t provide what we need, tell ourselves to grow up, stop hoping for pie in the sky, get over it, and move on.  There’s not much flesh on that carcass, there’s no more water in that well, and so forth.

Factually, that’s correct.  But what are we supposed to do with our need to belong?  Cutting off our sense of belonging is amputating part of ourselves.  Not the best solution.  So don’t confuse the inability to fulfill that need with the validity of the need.  Even if they can’t meet your needs, your needs are healthy.

You can honor the need — in fact, you have to, because they can’t.  You can tell yourself, “You deserve a family.  I know you need to belong.  It’s really sad that they don’t know how to be a healthy family.  But don’t try not to need a family, just because they haven’t learned how.  Your need is valid.”

Then you can sympathize with your predicament and your sorrow.  Your feelings matter, therefore you matter, and you don’t have to try to kill off one of the most loving parts of yourself.

The second thing to notice is how bravely and creatively you’ve dealt with the empty emotional places in your family.  Teresa is typical.  Her siblings weren’t thinking much about her.  The loneliness would have overwhelmed her in childhood, so she figured out that she could create –in her mind — the relationship she needed.  She fully believed they were close and cozy.

The result was that she felt enfolded in her “loving” family, safe, valuable, connected.  She was fooling herself, you might point out, but you’re overlooking the stakes.  Without that story line, that sense of connection, Teresa might have given up.  The despair of the lonely child is immense.

Sure, Teresa feels like a sucker today.  She made up this story that was never true; she believed it; she has indeed been a fool.  But that foolishness saved her emotional life.

So please keep noticing (a) that your need to belong was (and is) valid; and (b) the story you made up, which had you connected to people who weren’t actually paying much attention, was invented by you in your wisdom, to protect you from a truth you were not yet ready to tolerate.

OK, what about today?  Now that Teresa can see she invented more connection than was really there, how is she supposed to digest this shame and pain?  She does feel like a fool.  She does feel lonely.

Teresa today can provide things she couldn’t have access to as a child.  For one, she has context.  She can compare her family to other families she’s observed or spent time with, including her own “family” of friends and colleagues.  They have wanted to know what she felt, what she needed, and how she was doing.  The rest of the world isn’t like her family (or vice versa).

They aren’t mythic anymore.  They’re specific, mundane people, doing their best.  The reflection of herself in their “mirrors” isn’t the only, or the most accurate, image of her.

In addition to context, Teresa today has consciousness, an observing self.  She isn’t always and forever inside the experience of her family loneliness.  She can observe it.  Which means she can sympathize with it.  This isn’t self-pity, or wallowing.  This is recognition of loss, and the attendant grief.

My mother told me about theater people, friends of hers, who would mock Russian drama.  “Oh, I’m so thirsty…” etc., moaning on and on.  Then comes a drink, and then returns the moan, “Oh, I was so thirsty…”

What’s different here is that, in your lonely childhood, you weren’t moaning, “Oh, I’m so lonely…”  You were very busy coping — trying to please, inventing a feeling of connection by identifying more with them than with yourself, etc.  You were fighting hard to make it through.

Now, when you moan, “Oh, I was so lonely…” you’re getting sympathy for the first time.  It isn’t exaggerated.  You’ve waited a long time even to have acknowledgement of your struggle and fear.  Your tendency is to be too brave, to keep pretending there’s no problem — which cheats you (as did your earlier circumstances).

If you downplay your earlier sorrows, you’re mistreating yourself as they mistreated you.  They didn’t notice or care how you felt.  Now you’re not wanting to notice or care how you felt.  Back then, it was adaptive.  Today it’s cruel.

The eternal question is, “But what do I DO about it?”  OK, so now you admit you were lonely and scared.  You acknowledge how scrawny your family’s ability to connect is, how self-involved they are, how little they see you.  Now you’re sitting with this pain.  What are you supposed to do?  Cry for the rest of your life?

No.  Do the wrenching work of shifting your self-image.  The pain and anger are crying out that something is wrong.  You have to fix it.  What’s wrong is the way you see yourself.  It’s time to identify with YOU.  That includes how much you suffered, how scared you were, and how distorted the mirrors were in which you learned (from your family) who you are.

It includes looking at what you really think of them (rather than the other way around).  Identifying with yourself and your point of view.  Trusting your own perceptions.  Recognizing your struggle and your success.  (You’re still here, aren’t you?)

Repeat that process every day for however long it takes, and you’ll stop being angry, hurting, fighting against the self-image their ignorance and prejudices created in you.  They were what literature calls “unreliable narrators.”  They believed their story (including the assumption that you didn’t matter), but it wasn’t true.  Yes, they were sincere, but people can be sincere and be wrong.

You are now the narrator of your life.  I guess that’s a kind of divorce, at least from the family (as you perceived it) of your childhood.

December 29, 2013

I I know a lot of people who have an emotional attachment to food.  I’m one of them, although most of the time by now food is just food and not magic.  Still, two days ago, I was reaching for cookies, a bit of candy, etc.  I didn’t stop myself — I’ve learned denial just sets up an internal battle.  There’s some real need or feeling, and it’s my job to figure out what that is.  Then I can work with it and, probably, find a better way to meet the need.

This time, what I heard from within was that extra food felt like some kind of “balance” or “justice” for mistreatment I’ve suffered.  It was a treat for me.  It was an indulgence.  It was control: “I can have what I want!  (So there!)”

As soon as I wrote that down, I stopped eating, so that was good.  Listening and paying attention helped me stop acting-out.

A bit later I realized there were two levels of reaction to the mistreatment (which involved trauma and helplessness).

Level One was straightforward: Fight Back.  “I’m not your victim.  I’m me, and I get to do what I want!”

Level Two was much trickier, and I’m still working on it: Stop Agreeing with Them.

As long as I’m fighting back, I’m still connected to them — OK, I’m not their victim; I’m their adversary.  But I’m still defined in relation to them.

If I remove myself from their assumptions, their behavior, my relationship to them, I get clearer boundaries.  I can see them as I see them.  (Very different from being sort of merged with them and seeing me through the premises of their behavior.  What did they think of me?  They didn’t.  Or I was there to be used.  Whatever — it’s through their eyes instead of mine.)

They shrink, and I grow in my awareness.

Today I can even realize (horrifying) that they’ve been dead for decades and I’ve kept them alive as two-dimensional paper cut-outs.  Like the things you shoot at the carnival, which pop up again when the barker re-sets the machinery.  They have been my companions in the imaginary world I’ve carried within me — because I couldn’t let go until they loved me.  Too painful.  Better to live part of my time in the parallel universe that includes them.

It’s pathetic, and yet I understand it.  Staying attached to them gave me a world in which I wasn’t alone.

But, much more importantly, I’m seeing once again how skewed a child’s perceptions can be.  The data were all there: they looked past me, used me, expected my services…and I misinterpreted those realities.  I thought they were about me — I was not worth any more than that.

In fact, the data said a lot about them (couldn’t relate, had few clues about parenting, were faking it, were blinded by their needs to their effect on the children, etc.).

That’s very lonely, yes.  But I’m not alone today.  Maybe I can actually be all right in this world and relinquish the parallel universe that contains them.  In fact, I can have what I want.  There’s no one objecting to that, so no fight is required.

I realize the parents weren’t holding onto me.  I was holding onto them.  I feel myself now gradually peeling away the little fingers of my childhood hand clutching their arms.  “Come to me.  We’re all right over here….”  Grief, yes.  Need for extra food, no.

November 19, 2013

Just spent a weekend with a group of women, in which the hostess is involved in the same kind of battle: her husband of 11 years, and his stubborn, neurotic passive-anger (the reasons for which she understands), versus her own limits for tolerating any longer their incompatibility (and, maybe, his indirect generalized hostility).

I suspect she has some unresolved anger as well, given her family history of a strong-willed and critical father.  It’s hard to watch, because my heart goes out to her.

But what I want to say today is about trauma.

It’s occurred to me that the reality of trauma includes helplessness — whatever happens is “out-there.”  It happens to you.  Power and attention are focussed out-there.  Your own brain freezes, time stops, and you spend the rest of your days sniffing the air, suspecting it could happen again in some form, and tightening your muscles so you’ll be prepared when it does.

Healing trauma requires returning the power and attention to “in-here,” within yourself.  How do you do that?  By wanting to know how you felt when it happened, and, more importantly, what lessons you took away from it.  (You’re helpless?  You’re ashamed?  Life doesn’t make sense?  Life is fragile?  Evil is overwhelming?  Nothing and no one should be trusted?  The only reliable reality is death?)

Once you take yourself and your assumed beliefs more seriously, you can re-identify with yourself.  Even if you don’t change any of those beliefs.*  Now you are the believer, the person living your life.  What you felt and what you learned are being honored.

Happy or unhappy is secondary.  Whether anyone else shares your point of view is secondary.  You are home to yourself and your little world.  Unlike the person(s) or event(s) that traumatized you, you’re paying attention to the effect(s) on you.  Trauma told you you didn’t matter.  You’re saying and showing that you do.

• You might want to re-evaluate your beliefs.  Sometimes, what was true doesn’t generalize, that is, it was true in that situation but not now or in other situations.  For example, if the trauma happened in childhood, you’ll realize you had almost no power and no options, whereas now, as an adult, you have choices that can protect you, prevent further trauma, and help you design your world in a way children never can.  Unless you find out how you really felt and what lessons your inferred from your traumatic experience, you can’t re-evaluate how you’ve continued to understand it.

November 12, 2013

I’m seeing so many people — especially women in their early 40s — who are at a crossroads: stay with the fellow, or leave.  There are always reasons, and often the man is just less grown up.  He’s bipolar, or he’s got PTSD, or he’s been spoiled by his family, or he wants the women to be more like the porn he watches.

The women are usually brave and low in self-esteem.  They’ve had an abusive mother, or an addicted parent, or they grew up in poverty and felt the shame, or they were sexually abused by some relative and the parent(s) didn’t really believe or care about them.  Horrible stories.

Some are caught up in hoping they can “help” the fellow.  They’re scared of leaving, because they’ve already passed their tolerance level for loneliness, in childhood.

What I see is that they don’t know about their own limits.

It makes sense, since their model comes from a childhood in which they were trying to make the world a safer place for themselves, and children have no realistic idea about their limits.

Their limits in relation to the fellow are more widely understood.  She can’t change him.  She can stop enabling, but he’ll have to figure out change for himself.

The limits with themselves are generally less well recognized.  I guess no one noticed or cared about their limits, so they haven’t either.

One woman I’ve started seeing, K, was abused by her mother, who hated her own mother because the she’d put up with the grandfather sexually molesting their daughter (K’s mother).  That is, Grandad abused Mom; Grandma turned a blind eye.  Mom is truly mean to K and hates Grandma.

K goes to live with Grandma, who is kind to her.  So K has some sense of self, and has done good professional things as an adult.

What she’s just starting to see is that the pattern with her boyfriend of 12 years, F, resembles the pattern with her mother.  F loves her, apologizes for his bipolar moods and his sloppy, spoiled, porn-addicted life.  And she loves him.  He feels like home.  Stay or leave?

The factor that leaps out at me is her limitation.  She’s feeling desperate, sometimes would prefer to be dead….  Can she tolerate being in this pattern again?  Trying to heal someone who doesn’t give a shit about being healed (Mom, F).  Picking up after F so the house isn’t a mess she can’t live with.  Trying to explain her reality to them.  Trying to adjust to a trickle of caring when she needs a river.

My guess is she can’t.  The violence she does to herself by staying in this pattern again — this time voluntarily — could lead to her self-destruction.  She’s imposing on herself the same cruelty these other half-blind people impose(d) on her.

But can she accept her own psychological limits?  I don’t know.  Can she face (a) being alone again, (b) giving up hope from her early relationship with her mom, and now with F, or (c) the trickier one, admitting that she can’t tolerate being in this desolate role any more?  And what can I offer, to help her?

The concept of herself as her responsibility, I guess.  There is a person in there, who’s been through hell (which she recognizes).  How much is she going to care about that Self, for whom she’s responsible?  Anyway, I’ll try it….  Something has to break her internal deadlock.

October 26, 2013

The important part of that is the shift in organizing principle from “What He Did” to What Takes Care of Me?”

October 25, 2013

New client today, 31, Catholic, who is devastated by the recent knowledge that her husband of six months had a couple of affairs during their pre-marital relationship.  They’ve been together for ten years; the affairs took place 7 years ago (3 years into their relationship).

He says he told her he never wanted to marry, he never expected their relationship to last because she’s a lot younger than he is, and he simply wasn’t that unitary.  She was.  Plus, he was her first lover.  She feels betrayed and wounded into her soul.

I guess he’s changed during their ten years together, because he decided he did want to marry — her.  He tells her he wants to be with her the rest of his life; they were talking about having children; she still loves him.

The part that surprised me was the almost spiritual depth of her devastation.  She said she’d never been betrayed before in any important way, so we weren’t dealing with the resonance of an earlier unresolved betrayal.  We weren’t going outward in connection to other events; we were going down into an entire belief system and faith.

I thought, she’s facing a loss of innocence.  She made a commitment and kept it.  He says it doesn’t matter because he wasn’t married, and now he is, and will be, faithful.  But he kept things from her (she discovered the affairs inadvertently), and he lied to her when she confronted him.  So she’s in that quandary of loving but not trusting him.

Then I thought, this as a “coming of age” transition: say hello to human frailty and get realistic about the chasm between our ideal and real selves.

What seemed more likely was that she is a tender flower, a sensitive soul, and she’s badly bruised by his more typical, pragmatic, easy-come-easy-go approach to love and sexual intimacy.  Doesn’t this give her a responsibility toward herself to be more careful about what environments she puts herself in?

If she had a child, wouldn’t she screen environments?  Yes, spend time in some; no, not in others which might damage the child.  I think she needs to start being more responsible about making such decisions for herself.

Even the priest told her (a) well, he wasn’t married at that time, and (b) she’s more “moral” than her husband is.  I figure, if she’s highly moral, she’d better pay attention to whether her husband is.  When I asked her if he was as spiritually sensitive as she, she immediately said no.

Two things became apparent.  One, that if she is more spiritually evolved than he is, the discrepancy will come up again, maybe not in the arena of fidelity but somewhere, because they are different.  Some other time, she’ll hear him saying, It’s not such a big deal, or I didn’t realize how much this would hurt or offend you….

And two, this is her job, whether she stays with him or not.  If she leaves and doesn’t take on this responsibility toward her “soul,” she’ll either be (correctly) too scared to get into another relationship, or she’ll get into another relationship with someone whom she hasn’t properly screened.  (Maybe she’ll be lucky, but most guys wouldn’t qualify for her sensibility.)  The only way she’ll feel safe — be safe, if that’s possible — is if she knows herself well enough, and respectfully enough, to select her current and future environments according to her limits and value.

The lesson for me is about the responsibility-to-self.  I always want to belong, to fit in, to be like other people (whatever that means, far too general), to console the inner loneliness.  I have often betrayed myself in that cause, and I’d like to be more loyal to me.

      

September 28, 2013

Realized walking the dogs this morning — cool morning, summer receding — that holding myself in comes from waiting for the other person to say her lines until finally we might get to some authenticity.  It probably goes back to my mother.

I was thinking of my stepmother, whom I’m going to visit Thursday, who is 91, and who has even less brain-power available than usual.  (She had a horse accident in her twenties, was comatose for 10 days, and has been limited since then.  But always determined, and pretty.)  She has a few lines in her repertoire, and I have to wait for her to say them.

My problem is that I didn’t realize they’re lines.  They’re part of her limited script.  I’ve been waiting, breathlessly in the psychological sense, alert, attentive, for her to say something real.

I learned that with my mother, who had a huge repertoire of lines, infinite scripts, full of charm, creativity, wit, and warmth.  Except 90% of it was a performance.  Well, maybe 99%.  The truth was her anxiety, her emptiness, her desperation.

And there I was (what do kids know?) waiting and waiting and waiting, holding on, not-growing, not taking initiative, slowing myself down, until she might say something real.

I suppose it’s why I can’t walk slowly with old folks for more than a minute without feeling I’m going to explode.  Why I can’t stand listening to Lucho say the same thing three times while he figures it out.  His mother is intolerable in this way — on stage, performing, doing psychological pirouettes, at which I’m supposed to smile and nod.  I feel my mouth muscles are going into spasm by the second hour.  Can’t do it.

Anyway, it’s good to figure out why most of my life is lived in isometrics:  Go!  No, no, don’t move….

Reading a New Yorker review of Astor Piazzola’s opera “María de Buenos Aires,” and realizing all the works of art — any form of art — we enjoy wouldn’t have to be there.  There was nothing; now there’s an opera, a painting, a song, a painted ceramic, a book or story, this blog…  How the hell do we come up with these things?  Where do they come from?  We speak of the muse, but that’s just putting a word on something magical, trying to hold it in place.