If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? – Shelley

Seasonal affective disorder (or S.A.D.), also known as the winter blues, affects “0.5 to 3 percent of individuals in the general population,” according to MedlinePlus. But it also “affects 10 to 20 percent of people with major depressive disorder, and about 25 percent of people with bipolar disorder.” So if you’re already suffering with a mood disorder, the shorter days and colder weather may be making it worse. There is, of course, a subtype of S.A.D. that’s less severe but more common. Things seem flat, cold, and remote, instead of enlivened and eventful.

From mid-February, it may feel like Spring is a long way off, regardless of what the Groundhog says. But Daylight Savings Time begins on March 12th this year, rain or shine, cold or mild. That’s less than a month away. Hang in there! And if you’re struggling with your mood, call for an appointment today, at 917-873-0292.

We were all born innocent and beautiful. Then we had a childhood, in which the people who raised us gave us some combination of three things: love (getting the good stuff), neglect (not getting the good stuff), and abuse (getting the bad stuff). When a kid gets neglect and/or abuse from a parent, the psychological process involved is something like this. The person who is supposed to take care of him with nurturance and protection is giving him pain instead. Why? Because the parent is a bad parent. He or she may be a good person, but too damaged by their own untreated trauma to provide good parenting.  If the child realizes this, he will be forced to see that his parent will never meet his needs for consistent nurturance and protection, since they aren’t capable of it. That’s despair, and no kid can tolerate that, because the younger you are, the more your very survival is at risk if your parent is bad. Babies can actually die from lack of love, even if they get all their physical needs met (food, cleanliness, protection from heat and cold, etc.). The name for that is marasmus, or “failure to thrive.” To avoid such life-threatening despair, the child uses the only available defense, despite the terrible price it will cost him. He keeps the parent good, by taking their badness into himself: he must be the bad one, so that the parent can still—in his mind—remain good.

This defense solves the terrifying problem of being stuck with a bad parent. But it does so at the expense of the child’s self-respect, and he grows up believing that he is bad to the core. After all, only a bad child would get bad treatment from a parent who was fair and just. If the parent is good, and yet she treats him badly, it must be because he himself is bad: he must deserve the bad treatment. Believing this, he grows up with a heart full of toxic shame. Guilt is pain about something you have done, but shame is pain about what you are. Some kids misbehave—lying, stealing, hurting themselves or others, abusing drugs, failing at school, having sex too early and unsafely—in order to verify that they are indeed the bad one. If they are going to get neglect and/or abuse no matter what they do, then doing bad things will at least mean that they really do deserve the pain they get, and that feels less unjust. This story accounts for the fact that, when troubled adolescents do get asked why they behave so badly, they often have no idea.

Such a kid typically hates her parents and appears to be in a battle with them. Her destructive behavior is seen as a means of revenge against the parents, and in a way, that’s just what it is. It can also be a protest against a deeply felt though poorly understood sense of having been wronged. It can also be an effort to attract the parent’s attention so that neglect will be replaced by punishment (since, unlike neglect, punishment at least requires the parent to acknowledge the kid’s existence). And in an environment of authoritarian bullying, parental commands backed by force, and unexplained rules, a kid may become destructive in order to preserve her integrity. I may be a bad person, he thinks, but at least I’m my own person.

Now that you’re an adult, the old defense has worn out its usefulness. It costs far more than it’s worth. When you hear the question—what’s wrong with me?—the answer is nothing, because it’s the wrong question. The right question is, What happened to me?

There are several reasons why being kind to yourself might feel terrifying (at first). It requires admitting that the good parents you yearned for are never coming, because here you are, doing for yourself what they should have done. It reminds you of what you should’ve gotten from the people who were supposed to nurture and protect you. The better you treat yourself, the greater the contrast between what you got and what you now realize you deserved. And if you grew up believing that kindness was weakness, that kind men were feminine, that kind people were naïve and lucky and full of shit, then you have to admit you were wrong.

Feelings of worthlessness/self-hate are messages from a wounded child part of you. Don’t buy into what he says. You know things he does not know. Turn toward him, and in your mind’s eye (your imagination), pick him up and dry those tears and speak to that kid with soothing words of love. Tell your inner lonely little child: I love you… I got you… we’re ok… come with me. Talking to parts of yourself that way is not crazy, it is a survival skill.

When you hear intrusive negative thoughts, use your mind/your intellect/your inner observer. Say, oh, look, part of my mind is attacking me right now… isn’t that interesting. Say to that inner attacker: Oh, you again. Yes, I know what you think. But I know something you don’t know. Say to that inner attacker, Yes, I know you think you’re making some kind of contribution, but aggression is not the kind of help I need right now. When you hear intrusive negative thoughts, connect them with what you know about your history. Oh! This is an echo of other people’s shit that got thrown at me in the past. I do not have to hang onto it.

Your inner attacker is an internalized parent, a copy of the one(s) who gave you some amount of neglect and/or abuse. Your parent(s) may have grown old and harmless by now, but those aged parents aren’t inside you. What is inside you is a figure made of the young, strong, crazy people they were when you were a kid. You can’t get rid of that inner bully or kill him/her off. S/he has a place at the table. But not the head of the table. The inner bully needs a seat in the car, but not the driver’s seat. Get that person into a passenger seat so you can steer your life.

When you start to love yourself, it will soon become clear that the love that you have inside—which is yours to give, when and where you want to—is very high-quality, and it’s going to get even more valuable as you grow. It’s the good stuff. It is worth a lot. You can be a source of the good stuff, giving as well as receiving. When you’re accustomed to feeling like a vacant cave of darkness, a black hole from which not even light can escape, it’s strange to think you might turn into a star that radiates light instead. But it happens.

For Further Reading:

The Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller

The Forgiving Self, Robert Karen

Healing the Shame That Binds You, John Bradshaw

Radical Acceptance, Tara Brach

Slings and Arrows: Narcissistic Injury and Its Treatment, Jerome David Levin

If this post resonates with you, consider booking an appointment with me at 917-873-0292, or email Jamey@drjameyhecht.com. Sessions are available in-office in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and remotely in NY, NJ, TX, and CA.

Working with me in therapy often includes discussion of existential issues like what this post talks about. It can be hard to find a therapist who can engage with you on deep issues and get closer to big questions. If this resonates with you, call me today for an appointment: 917-873-0292.

A celebrated psychoanalyst named Wilfred Bion (1897-1979) opined:

We are, after all, ephemeral creatures living on an insignificant spot of earth that circles (according to the astronomers) round an ordinary star occupying a somewhat peripheral position in a particular nebula. So the idea that the universe obeys the laws in such a way that it becomes comprehensible to us is sheer nonsense; it seems to me to be an expression of omnipotence or omniscience (7/4/1977, Tavistock Seminars, p. 28).

This idea is intended to be refreshing—like Socrates’ inconvenient reminders that humans know nothing compared to the Gods—-and to wake us from the trance of our daily affairs. But suppose we have heard this before. Suppose it has not had the intended liberating effect, but has become a reach for power, whereby we in the audience are supposedly hypnotized by commerce and culture (Wordsworth’s “getting and spending”), whereas Bion and others like him are awake. It’s as if Bion thinks this is news to us; that we have been lingering in the medieval past, waiting for a Copernicus to set us free. Announcing that humans live “on an insignificant spot” is, I suggest, “an expression of omnipotence or omniscience.”

All of the “significance” or “meaning” to which we have any access is centered here, on the only green world we know. “Earth’s the place for love,” wrote Robert Frost, “I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.” When Socrates reported that the Delphic Oracle had said “No human being is wiser than Socrates,” it was clear that Apollo meant human wisdom is worthless compared to the wisdom of the Gods. To get exuberant about the “vastness of human ignorance,” as Bion and others have done so often, is an expression of omniscience which pretends to have exited from that state and looked back on it with fond pity—as if the whole life of mankind were a provincial illusion, except for this very humble bit of it where a thinker notices the surrounding universe. Experience says that our “merely” human action creates real relationships, real suffering and losses, real nurturance, connection and love, creativity and damage, joy and pain. Of course the scale of our actions is a match for our own size and longevity, not those of a galaxy or a mouse.

When people play this “human insignificance” card, or sagely announce that all people are somehow 100% ignorant, or that life is meaningless—just ask them: compared to what?

They are adopting a stance, making a gesture, offering a corrective to somebody’s dogmatic slumber. But no matter how often they adopt a Socratic pose, they still conduct their own affairs as if those were plenty significant to them, because making meaning is what human beings do. Socrates himself claimed to know nothing, but he introduced that speech (his courtroom oration in his own defense) with very little doubt: πιστεύω γὰρ δίκαια εἶναι ἃ λέγω. “For I am confident that what I say is just.”

Since we ephemeral creatures acquired, say, the Pythagorean theorem, and that theorem is not nothing, human beings do know something. We don’t know what the Gods know, or what the unconscious knows, or what another person knows of their own body and life experience—but we do know something. We are tiny compared with a whale, and huge compared with a fly—not merely tiny-compared-to-anything. It is, perhaps, “sheer nonsense” to speak as if the telescope has been invented, but the microscope has not. If human beings are “insignificant,” then what is significant? And to whom?

Perhaps this impulse—to lament our utter insignificance, our total ignorance, our ephemeral brevity, our powerlessness in a cold universe—is an unconscious repetition of very early feelings. A baby, after all, is overwhelmingly lacking in power, knowledge, size, and ability compared to the adult(s) on whom the baby is totally dependent. Similarly, a grownup’s grandiose disillusion with all of human culture echoes the teenager’s outraged discovery that our lives are mediated by socially constructed stuff, not eternal verities. The parents who once seemed all-knowing and all-powerful are deflated in our estimation, an experience that gets repeated in other domains later on.

Followers of psychoanalytic mystical monists like Bion and Jung and Lacan often need reminding: it is hubristic to boast of one’s own humility, intellectual or otherwise. The young Martin Luther was praying in his cell one day, whipping himself in his ascetic devotions, when the Devil appeared to him, saying: “Very good, Martin. Soon you’ll be more pious than God.” The cure, it seems, is to accept that everything contains a seed of its opposite; that altruism need not be “pure,” or else it may never happen; and that meaning is its own reward, neither absolute nor entirely empty. “Ephemeral” in Ancient Greek means “of a day.” We are indeed fleeting, temporary, evanescent. A day is an instant for a mountain—a lifetime for a mayfly, an aeon for an evanescent neutrino; and for a timeless photon, eternity. But we are not mountains, nor may-flies. Your life is meaningful, because meaning can only happen in a life, just as location can only happen in the universe. Life is meaning.

Working with me in therapy often includes existential issues like what this post talks about. It can be hard to find a therapist who can engage with you on deep issues and help you orient yourself to big questions. If this resonates with you, you can call me today for an appointment: 917-873-0292.

Whatever your age, you are also all the ages you’ve been before. Part of your psyche is an infant, because past selves remain as parts of an increasingly complex self-system. Younger parts of self, with unhealed wounds and unmet needs, can interfere with adult life, until they get the necessary loving care from the most adult parts of self.

Now, without an awareness that the self has parts, we are likely to feel crazy the moment our feelings do not agree with one another. I want to eat the cake, but I also want to be in a caloric deficit. I want to keep playing in the snow, but I also want to go inside and warm up. Knowing it's impossible to do both, I might well feel crazy whenever a pair of incompatible desires assails me. 

Unless, of course, I have an understanding of the self as a dynamic composite, in which case it all makes sense. A more ancient version of this same fact can be found in the distinction between monotheism, and the polytheism it replaced. If there are many Gods, as Plato pointed out in his Euthyphro, their desires can be in conflict with one another. But the God of a monotheist cannot do this, for lack of any opposing competitor. In the work of making sense of a dangerous world, each had its advantages. And it was Plato who first discovered (or at least, first mentioned) the inner child, in the Phaedo. But I digress. Let’s return to the self. 

Think of a moment when your behavior seemed to you to be immature for your age, or otherwise irrational--procrastination, for example. What tasks are you avoiding? Part of you wants to complete these tasks and enjoy the sense of accomplishment and relief that comes from a job well done --but part of you prefers to keep deferring the inevitable. When you catch yourself engaged in this pattern, perhaps you are harsh and punitive with yourself. Perhaps both the avoidance and the punishment feel somewhat alien—-as if you were not quite in charge of either of those inner and outer goings-on.

Where, then, do they come from? Whenever anything just doesn't fit with the present reality, we can ask ourselves what it might fit with from the past. The mind doesn't randomly generate errors, so much as it displaces significant, meaningful things from one context to another, where their meaning is far less evident. 

Perhaps the part of self who is responsible for procrastinating is an overwhelmed five or six year-old kid who is genuinely frightened of adult tasks, and concerned that completing them would result in abandonment. That is, if he shows he can take care of himself, nobody will ever take care of him again—so he procrastinates, instead. Or rather, he forces you to procrastinate. The purpose of his boycott is to make sure that he, the inner child, gets the loving attention he needs, as a matter of (what feels like) life and death.

Perhaps the part of self who is responsible for the punitive attack on the procrastinating, needy child is an embarrassed, rageful adolescent. The inner teenager is, after all, disgusted and repulsed by the frank, naive, primitive neediness of the defenseless child. The teenager’s whole existence is about escaping from childhood, parting company with it, and often marshaling a bitter contempt for it in order to bear the terror and loss of saying farewell to childhood forever. This explains the savagery of the “super-ego” when it punishes that lost little kid for the sin of imposing inconvenient delays on the whole (inner) family.

The inner adult, the most adult self, is the part who is best able to nurture, respect, protect, and educate all the younger parts of self whose difficult states of mind sometimes rise to the fore and feel intractable. Instead, your most mature self, the parts of your personality that are most intact and best developed, can be encouraged and equipped by psychotherapy to re-parent the rest yourself. Freud taught long ago that each of us is all the ages we have ever been. Like ancient Rome, the psyche is a many-layered thing, in which deeper levels from long ago persist beneath contemporary layers with more life and less history. Conversely, being young involves more strength and less wisdom, so that the middle-age we so long dreaded becomes a domain of awareness, rather than mere lost youth.