Family dysfunction

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“There’s something wrong with me.” During my clinical practice, this observation from a client was often a turning point. This often represented a shift in perspective, a realization that the problem was not merely “the world out there” but “the world in here”. This often meant that the client was willing to recognize that he/she had a history of very poor choices and that these choices had created the morass that had led him/her into counseling in the first place. This usually involved contemplating various labels, i.e. diagnoses, clinical contrivances designed to “give shape to our anguish.”

This always involved addressing how harsh the world had been to the individual…dysfunctional family and all…but it entailed quickly realizing that choices one had made on a daily basis had perpetuated the problem. It always involved looking at the “chooser” that one had formulated early in life, a mechanism that continued relentlessly to perpetuate the maladaptive behavior pattern, aka the “shame cycle.”

This usually involved the experience of hell in some fashion. It involved realizing that one was trapped, that there was no escape (“No Exit” as Sartre put it), and the bitter anguish of hopelessness. This was the “bottoming out” phenomena, the reaching of the limit of the ego’s machinations, and subsequently the dawning of the possibility of a turn-about in life.

The client was often brought face to face with a real paradoxical dilemma. The more he/she voiced his/her anguish…particularly to the family of origin…the more he/she remained imprisoned in his/her private hell. R. D. Laing wrote decades ago about the dilemma of the individual who was caught in an “untenable position” in a dysfunctional family. The more this individual protests, the louder and more passionate be his/her protestations, the more “proof” does the family have that the individual is…for lack of a better term…nuts. So the anguish intensifies and so do the screams. And the family will often look on with bewilderment, perhaps asking, “What is wrong with Johnny or Susie…”

Often the client would have to realize that the validation he/she sought would never come from the family of origin. It just was not possible. Some families are trapped in their own pathology and any individual in that family that protests, that deigns to confront the systemic poison that consumes them all, will not find a ready ear within that family. That “ready ear”, that validation, is going to have to be found elsewhere. Note here what Leonardo da Vinci noted on this issue:

O cities of the sea, I behold in you your citizens, women as well as men tightly bound with stout bonds around their arms and legs by folk who will not understand your language; and you will only be able to give vent to your griefs and sense of loss of liberty by making tearful complaints, and sighs, and lamentations one to another; for those who bind you will not understand your language nor will you understand them. (from “Of Children in Swaddling Clothes”.)

Validation is powerful medicine. As Conrad Aiken said, “And this is peace to know our thoughts known.”

Ignorance is still bliss!

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I would like to recommend an excellent blog to you: http://lowellsblog.blogspot.com/. Lowell is an Episcopalian priest who emphasizes meditation in his ministry. He is very thoughtful and very humble.

I would like to share a couple of his thoughts from yesterday’s blog:

I don’t know now what I don’t know, but God grant me the courage to turn away from my falseness whenever the Spirit of truth comes and guides me into new truth, no matter how scary or humbling it may seem.

Lowell values ignorance like I do. He knows that he does not know a whole lot. And he views faith as the process of learning more and more just how little we know and how that in this process we are always getting closer to our goal. Whatever that is! And yes, our “falseness’ is a steady foe. It never leaves us; for, we always “see through a glass darkly” and tend too often to take our “darkly” view too seriously.

But there is also the need to jettison old ideas and attachments that no longer work. I think it was Teresa of Avila who said something like, “God in mercy never makes us aware of our sin until God has also given us the grace to confess it.”

Our shortcomings mercifully come to us when we are ready for them. Oh would it be painful otherwise! I think narcissism is a basic human flaw. If I’d have seen my narcissism decades ago, it would have blown my mind! Now, when it peaks at me from time to time, I feel the sting of self-awareness, practice that Thich Nhat Hanh “half-smile”, and continue along my way.

Sin, Words, and Grace

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“Speak words that give shape to our anguish.”  This poet recognized the power of the spoken word to provide a container to human experience, to impose a limit to what would be otherwise unbearable.  Another poet put it like this, “To name the abyss is to avoid it.” There is a profound difference in the raw, unmediated, emotional, pre-symbolic (pre-verbal) experience of the abyss and the concept of “the abyss.”

Let me share an anecdote from clinical work many years ago.  I had young male for a client who was very addictive and functioned very poorly at times.  He had no history of religion and church.  He stumbled upon the phenomena of “religion and church” and found himself attending a formal, non-evangelical church fairly regularly.  He told me several times of how comforting the liturgy was to him, particularly that portion where he acknowledged, by the spoken word, that he was a sinner.  As we explored this experience of his, he recognized that by conceptualizing that he was a “sinner” he was able to articulate a deep-seated feeling of “badness” and “darkness” and “shame.”  He was able to apply a limit or boundary to the experience.

There are some whose life is sin articulate.  Their life is raw, unmediated, unmitigated “hell on earth.”  And I’m not talking about “sin” as it is usually taught.  I’m talking about sin as the experience of being separated from one’s Source and separated in a radical fashion. It takes a quantum leap for the individual so confined to say, “I am a sinner” and in so doing escape that “hell on earth”,  that world which Paul Tillich described as “an empty world of self-relatedness.”

This is actually a conversion experience and is a quantum leap from one sphere of existence into another.  It involves the experience of discontinuity, what St. Augustine described at his moment of conversion as “that moment when I became other than I was.”  This is not simple compliance with a syllogism

Let me close with the marvelous sonnet of John Donne:

BATTER my heart, three person’d God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee,’and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to’another due, 5
Labour to’admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weake or untrue.
Yet dearely’I love you,’and would be loved faine,
But am betroth’d unto your enemie: 10
Divorce mee,’untie, or breake that knot againe;
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.

My soul followeth hard after Thee

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“My soul followeth hard after thee.” I think that voices the deepest sentiment of my heart from my early youth. And recently reading St. Augustine again, I discover that he was saying the same thing in the 4th century a.d. and furthermore many other ancient men and women did the same. And, my passion for literature has introduced me to many contemporary men and women who have the same intense drive in their life. Furthermore, the blog-o-sphere has allowed me to meet many others who feel that passion and do so with the same anonymity that I enjoy.

I think that from our earliest days on the planet there were men and women who made this discovery and dared to share it on occasion. Often the tribal elders looked askance, I’m sure, probably private chuckling with each other and saying, “Hell, I just wish he would get laid and get that stuff out of his system.” And in modern times, I have to wonder if back in the ‘fifties “they” had known about the “god spot” and been able to tweak it with neurotransmitters, what would have happened? Hell, I might even be living an Ozzie life of the “Ozzie and Harriet” genre! But no, I’ve been cursed with this “lean and hungry look” and daily pine, “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.”

Seriously, I don’t know what this is all about. Some of us have sentiments like this one I’m describing and I’m glad that we do. Many of our ilk have accomplished a lot in the world and left a lot of wisdom for mankind. This passion for me does not have the fury that it used to. I’ve grown up and don’t take myself as seriously as I used to…most of the time! But it is there and it is more comforting as I take it…and myself…less seriously.

Throughout all the lying days of my youth
I waved my leaves and flowers in the sun.
Now may I wither into the truth. (W. B. Yeats)

No need to convert you!

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I have realized that my blogging career has paralleled a newly-found, complete disinclination to convert anybody to anything. Here, I do hold forth and usually about things which I take very seriously and believe in very strongly. But, these beliefs are only my perspective and are not therefore eternal truth that you must subscribe to. Now I do believe they are relevant to “eternal truth” but are not eternal truth itself and the degree that they are relevant is probably less than I am wont to believe.
I believe that spiritual truth must be personal, that it must be woven into the warp and woof of our day to day life so that it is very casual and natural. If so, any “converting” that needs to take place will be in the very capable hands of God. He does not need me to argue for him, to reason for him, to intimidate, manipulate, or browbeat. My faith is not something I wear, like my Sunday best clothing, it is just an important element of who I am; it is my “highest value” and will be apparent to those who know me best.
My newly-found approach to faith emphasizes ignorance. I just don’t know a whole lot. Oh yes, I am well educated, well-read, and very verbal—I am very adept at throwing 35 cent words around for nickel ideas. But I don’t know a whole lot. I don’t have objective knowledge of anything, certainly not God and His wisdom. I only at best “see through a glass darkly” and I always come to realize that my class was more “darkly” than I had previously thought, But I see this limitation as being merely my human-ness and something I must live with. And it keeps me more humble than I would be otherwise; it keeps me from needing to “convert” you!
I would like to conclude with a lengthy and insightful quote from Henry Miller from his lurid novel, Sexus:

The great ones do not set up offices, charge fees, give lectures, or write books. Wisdom is silent, and the most effective propaganda for truth is the force of personal example. The great ones attract disciples, lesser figures whose mission it is to preach and to teach. These are the gospelers who, unequal to the highest task, spend their lives in converting others. The great ones are indifferent, in the profoundest sense. They don’t ask you to believe: they electrify you by their behavior. They are the awakeners. What you do with your life is only of concern to you, they seem to say. In short, their only purpose here on earth is to inspire. And what more can one ask of a human being than that?

To be sick, to be neurotic, if you like, it to ask for guarantees. The neurotic is the founder that lies on the bed of the river, securely settled in the mud, waiting to be speared. For him death is the only certainty, and the dread of that grim certainty immobilizes him in a living death far more horrible than the one he imagines but knows nothing about.

The way of life is towards fulfillment, however, wherever it may lead. To restore a human being to the current of life means not only to impart self-confidence but also an abiding faith in the processes of life. A man who has confidence in himself must have confidence in others, confidence in the fitness and rightness of the universe. When a man is thus anchored he ceases to worry about the fitness of things, about the behavior of his fellow men, about right and wrong and justice and injustice. If his roots are in the current of life he will float on the surface of life like a lotus and he will blossom and give forth fruit. He will draw his nourishment from above and from below; he will send his roots down deeper and deeper, fearing neither the depths nor the heights. The life that is in him will manifest itself in growth, and growth is an endless, eternal process. He will not be afraid of withering, because decay and death are part of growth. As a seed he began and as a seed he will return. Beginnings and endings are only partial steps in the eternal process. The process is everything…the way…the Tao.

The World of Jesus

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Thomas Cahill in his book, Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus, paints a very human picture of the culture into which Jesus was born and into which Christianity took root. We usually make the very human mistake of assuming that the world of an earlier era, any particular era, was just like ours and try to impose our values and belief system on that era. Cahill, if you will use your imagination, will help you get a very grasp, a very human grasp, of what the world was like in the time of Jesus.

Cahill gives us a feel for the world of that day–politically, spiritually, and socially, and it often was not pretty! And Jesus deigned to question most of his world’s fundamental values, synthesizing various and sundry “heresies” that were being bruited about the Mediterranean world at the time. And, of course the most basic “value system” he assailed was religion and anytime one questions that he/she is volunteering for crucifixion! (I remember an old bromide from my youth, “Remember, if Jesus came back today, it would be the Christians who would nail him to the cross.”)

Do not assume that with Cahill you will get the definitive view of the worldview of Jesus’s day. Remember, he was not there! But we have a lot of information about that world and if one is willing to approach that information intelligently and imaginatively one can get that “feel” for that world by reading Cahill. We often forget that Jesus was human; or, better yet, we choose to neglect his humanity, preferring to “glorify” him in such a lame, immature manner that we do him no Glory at all. Remember, we purport to teach that in addition to being transcendent, He was immanent! “The Incarnation” literally meant “the enfleshment.”

Thoughts re Incarnation

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I think the Incarnation is an essential issue in life. But it is also essential that this be a personal issue and not merely historical dogma that one has been imprisoned by. The issue is always, “What does this mean to me?”

One meaning of “coming down from above” and “dwelling on the earth” (i.e. “incarnation”) is to stop living in my head and to start living in my body. And though this is most obviously applicable to a pointy-headed pseudo-intellectual cerebrotone male, I think it is applicable to the human race. Our task as we evolve, individually and collectively, is to follow the advice of Fritz Perls and “Let go of our mind and come to our senses.” W. H. Auden described it as “flesh and mind being delivered from mistrust.”

And, how is this done? Why don’t I just do it? Well, I wish it was that easy. I actually think it is a life-long process, that it is the actual experience of “working out our own salvation with fear and trembling.” And, that process is underway here in some paltry fashion. That is why I can borrow the words of Leonard Cohen again today and humbly pray, “Oh bless this continual stutter of the Word being made flesh.”

Thoughts re St. Augustine

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It is amazing to note change. I’m now reading St. Augustine’s Confessions and enjoying it immensely. When I labored through part of it in college, I found it excruciating. Now it is invigorating to read of another man’s struggles with his Source nearly 2000 years ago. And I had forgotten what a randy son-of-a-gun he was!

I really liked his description of his moment of conversion as “that moment wherein I was to become other than I was.” I wander if “W” would have any idea what he was talking about or even Romney? I bet O’Bama would.

I’d like to share again my favorite Shakespearean sonnet which pertains to this notion that we have a soul within which “pines” to be seen, recognized, and respected. This is the most pressing need of human kind, always has been and always will be. For, “getting there” is a process individually and collectively. Enjoy:

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
(Thrall to these rebel powers that thee array),
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this the body’s end?
Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more:

So shalt thou feed on death, that feeds on men,

Otherness, Hell, and Grace

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“Otherness” is the paramount issue for our day. ‘Otherness” (and it is usually enclosed in quotes) refers to the awareness and experience that “beyond the small bright circle of our consciousness lies the dark” (Conrad Aiken) and that beyond that darkness lies the object world. The task is to venture into that darkness, struggle through it, and find the “light” that lies beyond. This “light” represents our escape from the Platonic shadow world and allows us to see things, including people, as they are and not merely as a means to fulfill our needs. They are “other” than we are. Their wishes, their desires, their fancies, their intents will be different from ours in very critical ways. And we don’t have to like them, we don’t have to even put up with them, we can always just leave them alone and try to avoid them. And, yes, there are times when their “otherness” is of such a nature that our “respect” for them will not over rule a responsibility to call the cops! But we will still respect them, realizing that “there go I, but for the Grace of God.”

But venturing into this darkness of “otherness” is often scary as hell and somehow hell is very related to this spiritual adventure. But that is another story. This experience of “otherness” has been written of from ancient times though it was described in different words. For example, I think Jonathan Edwards famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” is an example of the terror that is often encountered in this adventure. And too often the terror is so intense that a quick antidote is sought and one will do as Kierkegaard suggested and grab the nearest bit of flotsam and jetsam that the vortex provides. And these antidotes can play a role if they are merely used as a respite and are not glommed onto as a means of preventing any further spiritual growth; further spiritual growth will always entail imbibing more of this terror.

St. Augustine’s conversion also reflects this same subjective anguish. In his “Confessions” he declared, “At the very moment wherein I was to become other than I was, the nearer it approached me, the greater horror did it strike into me; yet it did not strike me back, nor turned me away, but held me in suspense.” He even used the term “other” and I liked his phraseology, becoming “other than I was” which reflected he knew this was a moment of transformation, rebirth, or salvation. And though this terror was great, yes this “God” appeared very angry, “it did not strike me back” but actually…if I might exercise my literary license here…”held me in its loving arms.”

And I love Aeschylus’ reference to the “awful grace of God.”. This Grace is perceived to be “awful” because our pretenses, our illusions, our vanities, our false gods are melting in the “judgment of God” which precedes are awareness of God’s infinite mercy and grace. It is not that God is awful, or even judgmental. It is merely that our ego clings so desperately to our fig leaves that having them dissolve so suddenly….and even if it is over the course of a lifetime it can still be conceived as “suddenly”…feels like we are “sinners in the hands of an angry (judgmental) God.”

Rilke in the Duino Elegies described this experience with otherness as a terrifying moment, declaring, “Beauty is only the first touch of terror we can still bear and it awes us so much because it so coolly disdains to destroy us.”

And then there is Emily! Ms. Dickinson certainly understood and embodied otherness and her brilliant poetry illustrates this so beautifully. I’m going to share one of her poems which is so terrifying, not merely because of the imagery, but because in this poem she does not conclude with the Grace that she acknowledges elsewhere in her work:

He fumbles at your spirit
As players at the keys
Before they drop full music on;
He stuns you by degrees,

Prepares your brittle substance
For the ethereal blow,
By fainter hammers, further heard,
Then nearer, then so slow.

Your breath has time to straighten,
Your brain to bubble cool—
Deals one imperial thunderbolt
That scalps your naked soul.

C. S. Lewis’ Hell & Paul Bowles’ “The Sheltering Sky”

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In my last posting I discoursed re boundaries and love, noting that everything that passes as love is not necessarily love if scrutinized carefully. Boundaries get easily confused and often we aren’t loving our “lover” or “loved one” but merely loving ourselves projected onto that person. As I said, quoting Auden, “Suppose we love not friends or wives but certain patterns in our lives,” the other person being merely a “pattern” that fulfills some need of ours.

As a result some awfully convoluted, twisted, enmeshed, disgusting relationships get hatched and, per C. S. Lewis, often end up with both parties writhing in the hell that was initiated on earth with one person’s possessive love and the other person’s lack of the wherewithal to escape. Yes, ultimately the responsibility is mutual.

Paul Bowles anecdotally illustrated such a relationship between a mother and son in his excellent novel, The Sheltering Sky. The novel, and the movie bearing the same title, portrays the two as reprehensible, disgusting, and ugly human beings. Eric, the adult son, is his aging mother’s traveling companion and is accustomed to the various and sundry indignities that go with this role. He is, among other things, her “step and fetch it” and can never do anything right. She scolds him for not being able to stand on his own two feet but he musters up the courage at one point and fires back, “But you sabotage any effort I make to become independent.” Bowles describes her as very lonely and noted that the only way she had to engage with the world was to be hostile and disputatious, especially with the hapless Eric, but with the whole world. These two characters epitomize the mother-son dyad confined to hell in C. S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce.