Thursday, September 3, 2009

Thomas

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean-favoured and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good Morning!" and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich, yes, richer than a king,
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine -- we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked and waited for the light,
And went without the meat and cursed the bread,
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet in his head.
Edwin Arlington Robinson

For a long time I thought it was money that was at the root of the substitute pattern, as it was something from my own background that often made me feel left out. Working as a therapist however, has convinced me that money has very little to do with feeling true belonging with others, and in some cases it can even be a terrible hindrance.

I remember reading this poem about Richard Cory when I first started college, and being a little confused by it. Richard seemed like he had a lot going for him. What I hadn’t considered was how much Richard felt left out of what was going on around him, and this feeling of being left out is often at the root of the substitute pattern.

Which brings me to case of Thomas, a well-dressed man in his 40’s, who came into my office a year or so ago wanting to talk about how he could stop yelling at his kids so much. Thomas was a wealthy man who worked in the financial industry in Chicago, and had reached his 40’s having accomplished all of the things he had envisioned foe himself. He had a beautiful wife, two great kids, and had made his first million already. He had a big house, nice cars, and the country club membership to go along with it.

But he was miserable.

I remember reading a book years ago by Joseph Heller called “Something Happened”. The book described a man much like Thomas, who thought that if he just painted the numbers like he was supposed to, happiness would follow shortly afterwards.

But something happened.

And so it was with Thomas, he described feeling this internal pressure all of the time, yet he couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was. So we began a dialogue about this, and I asked him to describe what his life would look like if I could wave a magic wand and take him to the life that he imagined for himself.

His answer surprised me. Most people, when asked this question will orient their answer to the present or the future, but in this case Thomas went back to the past. He recalled,

“I remember back when I was about 10 watching the Irish boys from my neighborhood play football in the park. I wasn’t allowed to play with them, so I would sometimes just sneak down and watch from a distance. I would study how they teased each other, how they laughed, the jokes they told, and I would go home and practice talking like they talked. I always thought they were having some kind of wonderful fun that I would never know about, and that thought has stayed with me for as long as I can remember. I guess then, to answer your question, I would go back and be able to fit in perfectly with that group of boys.”

The honesty and depth of his recollection moved me a great deal, and I could clearly see that Thomas had struggled his whole life to find a sense of belonging in this world. Somehow he had glimpsed the nature of belonging as a child, but was always the outsider looking in from a distance.

And now Thomas again lived high upon a hill looking down at the working-class people of his town. It was in a sense a perfect metaphor for the course his life had taken, and as therapy progressed we talked a lot about how this reinforced a pattern he had been stuck in his entire life.

So as we continued to have this discussion, Thomas made an important revelation. What if he was yelling at his kids because he saw them repeating the same pattern that he himself had fallen victim to? What if he was resentful of them, trying to live vicariously through them, and trying to reinvent a youth through them that he never had access to?

Thomas made all of these associations himself, which once again reinforced the idea for me that people are almost always their own best clinicians. What they often lack is encouragement to pursue these ideas. There is perhaps nothing more disheartening than to come to some kind of deeply insightful personal revelation, only to find that when you try to share this revelation, people don’t understand. The difference with a therapist is, if they are any good at their job, they will give you every ounce of their concentration to try and understand these insights.

In any case working with Thomas on these associations had really started to make him rethink the way he was parenting his children. He eventually came to the conclusion that he couldn’t make his wish come true, not exactly, but what he could do was provide his children with choices that would increase their sense of belonging.

In Thomas’ case most of the restrictions he placed on himself and his family came from the voice inside of his head. Looking a little further, this voice had its roots in the way he was raised by his parents. His mother was judgmental and condescending while he was growing up, and she literally had become a part of an imaginary audience that Thomas always felt accountable to. There is actually an entire school of psychology based on this idea called Object Relations, and these visions we have of our parents that influence our present day lives is one of its most important tenets.

In any case we started talking about how he could identify and answer this voice in his head, and as he became more mindful of this voice, he even began to develop a sense of humor about it.

As we continued to talk, he began to blossom into a very funny person,. He described how he and his kids had begun to do more things together, including playing football and basketball and a number of other things they had never done together before. It was very nice to hear. Often times parents who did not gratify their own desires in childhood literally make their children instruments of their own ego, but this wasn’t the case with Thomas at all. Most people describe wanting to give their children the things they never had, referring to material things, but in his case he was able to give them a sense of playfulness. He was in essence letting them be children, and in doing this became a child himself again, and this made Thomas one of the most fun people I’ve ever worked with.

This is a potential gift we have when we become parents. If we are mindful enough we can learn from the mistakes of our own childhoods and try and make sure patterns don’t get handed down for generations. In the case of Thomas he was able to reinvent himself by thinking of how important of a job being a parent was. When he came into my office he wasn’t sure exactly what was wrong, but knew that something had to change. His parental instincts had led him to therapy, where with just a little listening and encouragement, he was able to make important changes in both he and his children’s lives.

For a friend who has died

"Each one of us here today will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question: We are willing to help, Lord, but what, if anything is needed? For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don't know what part of ourselves to give or, more often that not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them-we can love completely without complete understanding."
A River Runs Through It

Got word from my sister today that her best friend, who was also a friend of mine, had died. She had just turned 40. When you hear news like this a million questions go through your mind. How did it happen? What happened? Was it an accident? Suicide? We want some explanation as to how this happens because it doesn’t make sense to us. Young people aren’t supposed to die, and when they do, we also for a second consider our own mortality.

So in talking with my sister I learned that her friend had essentially drank herself to death. She had been drinking secretly for years, and finally her organs had shut down and her heart had eventually stopped.

This was devastating news for my sister in more ways than one. Losing your best friend at such a young age is awful enough, but losing them to something that could have been prevented hurts even worse. You wonder, what could I have done? Did I miss a sign? A cry for help? You think constantly of all of the things you might have said or done to help, but it’s simply just too late.

Which leads me to the quote at the beginning of this entry. Why is it that we are so often unable to lend assistance to the people closest to us who seem to be in so much pain? Does our fear of intrusion prevent us from asking the right questions? Should we be able to intuit people’s internal pain and find these things?

Ultimately I think the answer is no to all of these things. Often a great deal of guilt comes along when someone close to us self-destructs, but ultimately we are all responsible for our own lives. I think so much of our external problems start with some internal disruption going on inside our troubled hearts and minds. Many of us can fake our way through a day, and yes I speak from a great deal of experience on this. But ultimately we have to resolve these inner conflicts if we want to live the life we know we’re capable of.

So I think a lot about my friend who died today. The stories in this book have all been success stories so far, but it would be unrealistic to suggest that everyone gets over feeling second best in their lives. Some of us need to escape this feeling, and drift towards addictive behavior. We need a respite from these feelings, and often something like alcohol or overeating provides some temporary relief.

The problem with this solution is that the thing that provides relief is also what keeps the door locked on our self-awareness. Addictive behavior also leads to self-loathing, which then further reinforces the original feelings of inferiority. This is a vicious cycle that becomes deeply habituated and very difficult to extract yourself from.

So I think about my friend and how she must have felt as she continued to drink massive amounts of liquor even as her body was failing. She was one of the funniest, sweetest, women I’ve ever met, but somehow what was going on in her internal world was just too difficult to face. Sometimes this looks like boredom, but I also think it can be deeply rooted in the substitute pattern. Our idle time is painful in part because we haven’t found a sufficient level of challenge in our lives to induce creative solutions. We have in a sense “settled’ for a life that is less than we were capable of, and this is very difficult to face. So we fashion an escape. For some it can be wandering the world, while others find they can find the same journey is available in a bottle of Vodka in the comfort of their own living rooms.

So perhaps there are levels of inferiority that vary widely from person to person. That has been my experience as a therapist. The psychologist Alfred Adler said ‘The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge to conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation.” This also seems relevant to a discussion of addiction, as the emotional agitation in some cases becomes too difficult to bear for even short periods of time.

So in my overwhelming sadness for my friend, I think about what could have possibly happened to alter her life course. My wish was she could have gotten into some kind of therapy, and at least begun a dialogue about what her inner world was like. Hopefully she may have found a gentle and supportive therapist to work with her on this. I know therapy works because I have personally experienced it. All of us, every one of, at times feels very alone in this world, and therapy can be one place where you have someone unequivocally and totally devoted to you. In a sense this is more intimate than a marriage, a parental relationship, perhaps even the relationship between a person and their clergy. If you feel like my friend did, or if aspects of her story seem familiar to you, please think about making that call. Sometimes even a glimmer of hope is enough of a catalyst to begin the process of change, and any good therapist will help you in your journey to find and develop this sense of hope.