Categories
love psychoanalysis

having people

I am suddenly very tired of some people. Please don’t judge me poorly. I think I have exhausted myself chasing them. I feel tired.

I realize there are people in my life who can give me x, where x is way not enough and way not what I want, yet I have spent years investing a tremendous amount of energy in the pursuit of more-than-x, an intimacy, a closeness, a mutual lovingness I should have known was never going to happen.

I have done this all of my life. My husband said to me once (a long, long time ago): “When people tell you something about themselves, you should believe them.” People have told me repeatedly, often in so many words, that they can only give so much, that they don’t like too much closeness, that they need time, that…

It’s not that I don’t understand what they are saying. I simply don’t believe them.

Now I see that I could not, simply could not, follow my husband’s advice. My mind was structured in such a way that the possibility of not pursuing, at all costs, intimacy with people I like and love was simply not there. I am learning so much about psychic structures. I am learning that people can’t help themselves. I couldn’t help myself.

I think I am learning for the first time in my life not to pursue people who don’t want to be pursued. What a concept. And here’s another concept I have learned but I am having a hard time, still, putting into practice: it is of no use whatsoever to tell people that some of their behaviors are damaging to them. It is infinitely more helpful to give them as much acceptance as we have to give and hold our peace.

But sometimes this need to tell and tell again comes from that other need, the need to get close to them. You need a solid measure of self-love to hold your peace. There is no peace at all to be held without self-love.

I have despaired for years (I say years but I should say decades) over the loss of friends I never had in the first place, some of them people who had no idea I longed so much for them, and would have been astonished to learn it. Now I’m sitting quietly, finally mourning their never-to-be-changed distance from me, their being not-what-I-want. I mourn my relinquishing of them and my relinquishing of a whole way of wanting, desiring, and having people. It’s being a long and painful mourning.

Once I had a therapist who was a kindly woman but didn’t know enough about the soul and the mind of people; I saw her for many years to little gain. One day, in a moment of what felt to me great openness and vulnerability, I told her about my anguish at the prospect of losing someone. There was huge anxiety and loss in that statement. I was in great pain. My therapist memorably and lapidarily said: “We can’t lose people because we don’t own them.” I count this as one of the two or three most useless/hurtful things she ever said to me.

Categories
psychoanalysis

orifices

They attacked my orifices (making free is attacking), all of them, one by one. Did you know eyes were orifices too? I realized it when they got attacked and oozing blue fluid leaked out. They came at them with sharp prongs, like fingers. If their nails were cut short they made up for it by pushing and pushing. Sometimes they pushed delicately and insistently, like caresses. The torture was unbearable. It tore me up. It shamed me to the core. Careless fingers played freely in my mouth, my throat, my nose, my ears, my butt, my little pink vagina, my thin delicate urethra, my eyes. I ceased to be human.

Thick green viscous fluid like motor oil poured out, puddled at my feet — fetid.

This is how I discovered I had been toxic all along.

I was cleansed. Empty of poison, orifices broken and widened, I took in all the emptiness of the world. What a miraculously ample supply! I merge with the emptiness of the world. My skin and my flesh are its vessels. I disappear in the emptiness within and the emptiness without.

Do you have a liver? Do you have lungs? Do you have a retina?

Mine were toxic motor oil. Now I’m pure.

Categories
psychoanalysis

terror is learned

I cross the line (back and forth, back and forth) —

Not a line but a chasmic divide;

What does a change of habit signify?

 

There’s no harm in recognizing the failure of birds to thrive.

 

I see my mom mistily at the airport; she hasn’t seen me — she doesn’t have rheumy eyes but we’ll give them to her for the occasion. She doesn’t have eyes at all. When i was little/younger/young i found great comfort in writing,

Also in clean surroundings, tidiness, the thrill of a white page.

 

Sometimes parting is just a gift.

 

(Are you illegal?)

 

There is no audience.

What to do with lifelessness but indulge it.

Terror is learned.

Categories
psychoanalysis

they come at night

They come at night they come for you with knives they come at night.

Categories
psychoanalysis

mental illness, physicians, the brain and the mind in pain

I’m having serious questions about the role of physicians in mental health. It seems to me that the mental health field should be returned to non-physicians, and physicians should limit themselves to neurology and the study of the brain. Which is in fact what they do anyway, except psychiatrists’ power to dictate the terms of the discourse is so strong that brain chemistry is becoming more and more the theoretical framework we use to talk about mental health and mental illness, and psychiatrists the people we naturally turn to to get an opinion about the way minds work.

We don’t need a dramatic philosophical revolution to re-establish, and collectively agree on, what we have always known: that the mind (the heart, the soul) and the brain are two separate, qualitatively different albeit related entities, and that we have only the faintest idea of how they are connected.

The specific forms of pain that attach to the mind should be the province, exclusively, of mind-specialists, or psychologists. Psychologists should be people who study the way people relate to themselves, the world, and others incessantly, and garner ever new knowledge about what makes all these relations happy and peaceful rather than unhappy and tortured. There is a tremendous amount of wisdom accumulated on this subject and psychologists should not engage with patients unless they 1. have put some serious efforts into delving into this wisdom, 2. keep delving into it,  and 3. realize that there is much they won’t ever know.

Point 3. leads directly to recent movements in psychoanalysis according to which the person who knows best about the torture of the mind is the sufferer, and this knowledge, much of it unconscious, is the treasure the therapist and the patient need to unearth together.

Any other approach to mental pain is foolish. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people operating in mental health today use foolish approaches, and people stumble through life carrying untold burdens of suffering they could turn to each other to relieve.

Categories
psychoanalysis

we, who are very badly hurt

I am grappling with things. I am grappling with getting better almost in spite of myself. I have been defined all of my life by pain. I am confused about a me who’s not defined by pain, loss, impossibility.

I am still clinging to pain of course. But my mind, this tough tough little thing, is edging away, thumbing its nose at me. My mind wakes up early in the morning eager to do things. My mind thinks thoughts that are foreign to me. My mind is boiling over with a strange enthusiasm for disclosure. My mind wants to proclaim itself to the world.

I am letting it. My mind and I have an excellent relationship. We leave each other be. My mind lets me continue to be sick in all sorts of ways, I let it open itself up to the world. Neither rushes the other. Occasionally we have a conversation, but those are hardly needed because my mind and I are in constant dialogue. We know how to talk to each other. We consult all the time. We are constantly checking in on each other. As I said, we have an excellent relationship.

My mind is bouncing off the wall, for instance, with desire to proclaim to the world that people like me can be healed. My mind is a fierce apologist and proselytizer on behalf of psychoanalysis. Left to itself, my mind would talk all day long about deep therapy.

We needed to strike a bargain on this one. For one, people have a justifiedly bad opinion of psychoanalysis. People in my circle, educated people who use psychoanalysis all the time as a tool for interpretation of texts and events, find it dated. Its sexism seems to them intolerable. They don’t believe anyone nowadays could possibly take psychoanalysis seriously.

Yet they use it, constantly, as an interpretive tool. They think it’s a fine interpretive tool; it just doesn’t cure anyone.

Other people, people in pain with a history of treatment, simply do not believe psychoanalysts still exist. Lately I had a conversation with someone who had read in a memoir that the author had gone to therapy multiple times a week for three years. He, my interlocutor, was flabbergasted. Multiple times a week?!? For three years?! I learned that when he was in therapy he would see his therapist once every two, sometimes even three weeks, depending on how scheduling worked. He was getting his therapy in an office organized in such a way that he couldn’t be sure which therapist he would see from one session to the next. Therapists didn’t last long in the outfit anyway and would move on quickly. This guy said jokingly, “If I had seen a therapist several times a week for three years when I was in my 30s I would have had a chance not to be permanently fucked up.”

How devastatingly sad. I said he didn’t need to be in his 30s to stop being fucked up. He was alive, right? Capable of forming thoughts, right? Then I said that there are people who see their therapists multiple times a week. They are not millionaires. I am one of them.

Finally, there are those who had a terrible experience with a psychoanalyst and decided that this experience speaks for the whole discipline and every single practitioner of it. Since seriously hurt people, people who are so traumatized their lives are living hells, have a propensity to think in black and white, I go easy on these people. They have had the crap beaten out of them by mental health professionals of all stripes. They have been medicated to their eyeballs, abused in psychiatric wards, and treated by incompetent therapists. They have earned the sacrosanct right to think in black and white. If they are still alive, they have found ways to keep themselves going and whatever I think of those ways, I owe it to my fellow sufferers on the path of trauma and recovery to respect them.

I have encountered a whole lot of really hurt people in my life. We tend to find each other. We recognize each other really fast. We cling to each other. We have been desperate for recognition all of our lives. My assessment of how really hurt people, people like me, are doing has changed parameters a few times in the last three years. Before starting analysis with my therapist, I, too, believed that therapy was perfectly useless and judged people’s success at dealing with the horrible pain that tore at them very liberally. Basically, if you were alive, making it through the day without knocking yourself out on a regular basis, able to keep a roof over your head, and doing at least some things that gave you joy, you were doing okay. This is how low my expectations of healing were. After all, this was the life I myself was leading.

After some time spent working with my therapist, like all neophytes, I became haughty and looked down upon lives lived in resignation.

Now, three years and counting in analysis, I realize that you do the best you can with the hand you’re dealt. Excellent therapists don’t hang out at street corners. Deep therapy when you are so hurt you can barely breathe requires something not everyone has. In the rubble of your life, there must be a solid rod that, for some reason, managed to stand tall. Maybe many among the badly hurt have such a rod (they are after all hanging in there), but for some the rod has taken a few beatings too many. There isn’t enough gentleness in the world to walk them through the agony deep therapy asks of them.

So I’ve come to respect the bandages and the patches, the flimsical tents by the side of the road, the makeshift cooking stoves, all the accoutrements of survival. some people are desperate to tell you that their tent — its make, its color, its structure — is the best possible tent. If you are fragile (I am fragile) this will get under your skin in all sorts of ways. When that happens, when other people’s despair and insistence that there is only one way to live gets under my skin, I think of that proud, brave rod. Most of all though, I think I’m not alone, and that tomorrow I’ll see my therapist, and she’ll tell me that I’m perfect and fabulous and the greatest thing that ever happened, and everything will be okay.

Picture by Puneet Arora

Categories
psychoanalysis

if you blame

If you blame yesterday’s act of terrorism against several US citizens going about the business of democracy on the aberrant delusions of someone with mental illness, you wrong all the victims of terrorism gunned down, blown away, gassed, or hacked to pieces by people who are certifiably sane.

You also wrong men and women in armies everywhere, who commit atrocities in the name of patriotism or just the imperative to follow orders and, as a consequence, become mentally ill.

Mental illness is not simple. Sane people kill every day, for good or bad reasons. Most of the people who will be murdered tomorrow (and there will be many), will be murdered by certifiably sane people. Many certifiably sane people become profoundly disturbed as a consequence of having killed.

The relation between killing and insanity is not simple.

If you blame the violence perpetrated yesterday on an elected official of the United States on the aberrant behavior of a deranged young man you wrong all elected officials everywhere whose right to govern freely has been and is being tampered with by the United States government. This is violence too. It may not always be bullets in the head, but it’s violence against international law, cooperation, and respect for the sovereignty of other country-states. It hurts freedom and democracy and the respect we owe one another.

The relation between killing and other forms of violence is not simple.

If you blame yesterday’s killings on the deranged behavior of “the mentally ill,” you make us all very nervous about the strange, introverted, unhinged, pained, and often fabulous people who populate our communal lives. In particular, you cast a black shadow of panicked danger on the students in our high schools and universities, and make teachers everywhere nervous and suspicious around students who think and act differently.

Blame yesterday’s act of terrorism on a culture of intolerance and violence and you won’t wrong, hurt, or marginalize anyone. Blame it also on the easy availability of guns, and, again, no one will be hurt – many will be spared instead. Blame it, too, on the paucity of true support for those who are tortured by mental pain — not the availability of drugs and mental jails but that of safe and anonymous places to turn to in order to be heard and made to feel less alone — and you will be helping more people than you think.

Categories
psychoanalysis

dealing with disappointment

My therapist appreciates that I notice and acknowledge all the fabulous things she does for me. Truth of the matter is, as a person, I am tuned in to goodness. Acts of generosity, attentiveness, love, care, and sheer dedicated professionalism tend not to escape me. I notice them and acknowledge them. With everyone.

Maybe it’s the pure joy, the unfettered thrill of experiencing direct, simple goodness. It makes me deliriously happy, happier than most people. It gives me a tremendous rush. I want to jump up and down. If it’s appropriate, I do.

And I like people to know. Because it’s so damn happy-making; and because maybe if they learn what makes me deliriously happy they’ll do it again, sometime. And I’ll be deliriously happy again.

What I am terrible at is feeling and expressing disappointment. I have such a hard time with disappointment that I go to great lengths to deny it to myself. If someone lets me down, I’d rather berate myself than berate them. Also — and this is another thing I learned in analysis — it is almost intolerable for me to deal with even the tiniest experiences of pain in people I love. Example. My therapist just got herself a new couch. She took a long time choosing it. She put serious effort and went through a long deliberative process to make sure it was just the couch she wanted. If she had not been my therapist, I would have ooh’ed and ahh’d at the couch endlessly. Since in therapy I try to be professional (I use this word guardedly: I am not a child; I know I am working: I work as seriously as I possibly can), I told her the couch was nice and left it at that.

It is a nice couch. I have nothing against the couch. At the same time, I am not delirious about the couch. I don’t think there can be a couch that would make me delirious. Couches don’t figure prominently in my fantasy world.

A few days ago I asked her whether she was happy with the couch. The couch has lived in the office for a month or more now. She said the couch was okay; she wasn’t super happy with it but it was okay. See, that killed me. I felt such a tremendous stab of pain and hopelessness inside me. She had worked so hard at getting the perfect couch! I wanted to be Mary Poppins and drop a fabulous couch in her room right then. I wanted her to be the happiest, most satisfied mom in the world. Then she told me she was very happy with the new chair. I think I actually like the couch better than the  chair, but my feelings are entirely irrelevant here. I was tremendously relieved to hear that my mommy was happy with the chair she painstakingly chose.

I think I’m beginning to tackle the issue of dealing with being disappointed in my therapist. I am sort of blown away by the fact that my psyche is figuring out all these ways to bring me closer to this terrible trial. My psyche is simply amazing. I say this because it’s true. It’s a generous, hard-working, brave, and kind psyche. It protects me when I need protection but also pushes me gently and firmly toward growth. I am very grateful for the workings of my psyche, which happen entirely without the awareness of my conscious mind. I contemplate them solely after the fact.

There are times when I think my therapist is the most fabulous person in the world, from all possible points of view. My psyche lets me, because it knows I need it. Lately, though, my psyche has started introducing little blows of disappointment into this fantasy. Dullness. Unexcitement. This has of course happened before. But one new thing my psyche is doing now is that it’s making me late for therapy (I am never late for therapy); it’s making it hard for me to get out of bed; and it’s making my therapist’s office all but intolerable. When I am in it I feel a sense of body heat that emanates from the inside and no amount of coolness can soothe. It’s dry heat, my father’s favorite form of heat. He smothered us in it when we were little. My little self experienced it as psychic torture. This was when my father was terribly unstable and volatile, and, after my mom and he split, it was during the court-mandated days we spent with him at his swanky, intolerably heated house. I had to pretend, for 12 eternal hours, to have the time of my life. And I did. I kept it up like a good little trooper for the duration. I never let my guard down. I was the happiest daughter ever.

It was dangerous around my dad. Things would blow up at the drop of a hat. That stifling heat stands as the symbol of many little deaths. Weekly deaths. Sunday deaths. I wish I could ask my sisters how they feel about it. I know my mom has the same abhorrence of dry heat as I do.

As a child, I sacrificed daily, hourly at the altar of my parents’ happiness. Unfortunately, they had no idea. They saw nothing of it. What a terrible waste.

I had no choice. My psyche decided that was the best way, and my psyche is my very good friend.

Anyway, my psyche is now making my therapist’s office the most unbearable place in the world.

There is something else. When my therapist moved to her new office she went from small, cozy, and old to large, hip, and new. Just like my mom and dad, when we moved from the home of my early childhood to the home of my 7th and 8th years, the home of the unbearable heat.

My therapist’s office would be okay if we could throw the windows open, let the light and coolness and the bird songs in. But the windows are sealed. I don’t know what’s the advantage of sealing windows. I like windows one can throw wide open.

So yesterday my psyche did something pretty fantastic: it took me out of the office (thus making me comfortable) and gave me a chance to live a couple of hours with disappointment. How fucking cool is that?

This is what happened. In the 59 second walk from my car to my therapist’s office, which includes an elevator ride, my psyche got incredibly excited at the idea that today we’d have therapy outside! Yay, outside! It was a fabulously gorgeous day and that seemed so the right thing to do. Even before I sat down I told my therapist, “Let’s go outside.”

Now, see, my therapist is pretty amazing. From the day we met we started this intense process of analysis of boundaries, and now we have boundaries well within the confines of our daily conversations. We are both in love with boundaries. We reorganize them all the time. We look at them, think about them, understand them incessantly.

Bottom line, we went out. We drove to a place she knows I like and had pastries. And therapy. We had therapy in a cafè on a gorgeous, cool, sunny day, surrounded by beautiful things, and pretty much alone.

Now here’s what my psyche knows. My psyche knows that I am losing — need to lose — a foundational fantasy of my therapist. My psyche knows that it is going to be — is being — a tremendous loss, and that depression, rage and bleak despair will cloak it. So my psyche took me to a lovely place to kick off the official season, The Time in Which I Go through Experiencing Searing Disappointment in My Therapist. I’d like to reiterate that I have experienced disappointment before. So far, though, I have fought tooth and nail to keep the fantasy intact. It’s time, now, slowly, gently, lovingly, to readjust the fantasy — and lose some essential, sustaining, life-giving aspects of it.

You can’t go out in the world with your analyst of three years without feeling disappointed. If you need me to explain you don’t know about the psychodynamic process.

So there was that, disappointment. But also fresh air, the sun, the lovely surrounding, the delicious pastries, and lots and lots of tenderness.

Categories
love psychoanalysis

obsessing with the fantasy of another

I learned this week that we don’t obsess over real people but over our fantasies of them. I learned this on myself, but I’m willing to generalize, just for the heck of it, and also because it seems right. In fact, this seems right in such a trivial way, it barely stands repeating. Yet it came as a revelation to me.

This thing is, if you had told me some time ago, when I was obsessing over someone, that I was obsessing over my fantasy of that someone, it wouldn’t have helped at all. I would have probably said, “Yeah, I bet you’re right,” then carried on with my obsession and the behaviors it dictates.

But what I learned this week goes a bit further than that. I learned that, when we obsess over someone, we have lost touch with the reality of that person. Okay, this sounds trivial too, but bear with me. Let’s say that someone obsesses over a famous person. There’s plenty of people who do that; it is so common, there are laws against acting on such an obsession. In this case, there is no real relationship between the person of your obsession and you. This is someone who is simply and solely a fantasy.

But let’s say you fall in love with someone because they are groovy and cool and lovely in all the right ways. Let’s imagine that. And then, let’s say, these people don’t pan out in quite the way you want them to. They are a little less groovy or cool or lovely, or maybe they are just as cool and groovy and lovely but they don’t have enough time for you, or you think they don’t. Maybe you want to be around them all the time but the dictates of real life don’t allow that. They have to go to work, you have to go to work. Or, let’s say, you start worrying that they don’t love you any more, or not as much as they did at the beginning, in the golden times of your relationship. You worry so much that this anguish gnaws at the delicate roots that keep your love for them anchored to the earth. They tell you over and over that they adore you, but it’s not enough. You feel bereft with loss.

This is clearly a pathological situation. In fact, chances are you entered this love relationship already in a state of extreme psychological weakness. People with a solid sense of themselves and others don’t fall into these traps.

Now what you have is a tremendous infatuation that nonetheless leaves you miserable. What you do, then, is detach yourself from the reality and attach to the fiction, the fantasy of the other person. There is a mirror person of that person in your mind who can be and is the perfection you seek. You need this person. You need this person more than you need food or sleep. So you stop eating and sleeping and work really, really hard at sustaining this fantasy. It’s tremendous work. It’s soul-killing work. It’s misery work. It is hell, really.

What happens is that, in most cases, you find that person. Magical moments do occur, and confirm to you that everything is okay. You tell yourself that you love person X, not your fantasy of person X. You tell yourself that person X is attainable. She is there for you. You can have her. You just must work really hard at keeping her. You can’t let her slip away from you.

This obsessiveness leads to separations. No one can endure interacting with someone who is in love with a fantasy of them. If they are healthy, they’ll leave. If they are not healthy, they’ll stay and you’ll kill each other. If you, the obsessed one, are prone to violence, you will become violent.

The solution is to connect to the real person. If you have the real person, you won’t need the fantasy. But some of us don’t know how to connect to real persons. Somehow, we didn’t make it to class the day the teacher explained how to go about doing that and we never got a chance to catch up. We missed that boat. We have been stuck in fantasy-land (misery-land) ever since.

When people think of psychoanalysis as obsolete or burdensome, they don’t realize that there is no other way, for people who missed the class where the teacher explained how to attach to real people, to learn it. There is no other form of therapy that can teach you that. The reason is that psychoanalysis alone offers you the chance to build inside yourself the structures that missing that class forfeited you. Only trained psychoanalysts can engage in the lattice-work of transference and counter-transference necessary for this delicate reconstruction.

Now I know many people who had horrible experiences with psychoanalysis. I also know people who had horrible experiences with friends, husbands, wives, students, fellow drivers, and dogs. Most people don’t stop seeking and constructing friendships because one or two friendships went sour. People remarry. People get new dogs.

I hope all people who never learned how to attach to real people give themselves a chance to find an excellent psychoanalyst, because there are some miseries in life which should not be endured. Being unable to attach meaningfully to others is one such misery.

Art by Carolyn Cole

Categories
love

serious crisis #327

My therapist and I are emerging from Serious Crisis #327. The emergence involved: one pumpkin pie; one pecan pie; one chocolate cheesecake; one large under-skin sebaceous lump; one proper cuddling session.

Cuddling is essential when you are little.

I am little.

I am about 7.

Seven is a difficult age because you know so much, you understand so much, yet you look so little. You are little, too. You need your milk warmed up for you; you need someone to make your bed; you need help organizing your book bag in the morning; you need piano lessons; you need help finding and obtaining books; you need to have your rage heard; you need to have your sorrow heard.

Today my therapist did something extremely moving. I was in the middle of saying something that was really important to me, and she was very absorbed in trying to make me understand that I had misunderstood what that something was about. I have no memory at all of what it was, but I have a distinct memory of thinking at some point during the back and forth, “Don’t fight me on this; I may be wrong, but I need to be heard.” In that instance, because she was very tuned in, my therapist stopped herself in mid-sentence, took a mental deep breath, put the breaks on the train and assumed the physical and mental stance that says, “I don’t care about winning this point, I want to hear you.” It was such a powerful moment. It was as if someone were running away away away then, suddenly, stopped, turned around, and came back to you; said, I decided not to go, I’ll stay here, I want to be with you.

I was so touched I dry-sobbed.

Then I became little. I used to be extremely little, but now I’m 7. Strangely enough, even though seven is a lot older than one, two, or three, I don’t feel any less little. I still feel pretty damn little. I love feeling this little, because I get attended to the way a seven-year-old should.