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.