loneliness

December 7, 2025

What We Do with Time and Thought?

Sometimes advice comes from looking closely. We talk about being readers of speed or slowness, as if a shoulder pressed hard on the grindstone.

A smaller number read and reread, while some avoid books altogether.

But the wise man who penned the capitalized letters above looks more closely. Perhaps he suggests another way to find your way — to think about a life of hesitation, or spontaneity.

To ensure the time is honored and absorbed in full, with little wasted.

Whether we can absorb everything at one go is questionable. Yet it might be worth the effort. Some call it living in the moment, but this is different.

We must think, think about, think through, think enough, and think with clarity about what we are doing, as Hannah Arendt pleaded in her book, The Human Condition.

Making sensible choices isn’t easy.

Let us start with these few ideas.

Should I live with abandon or instead, with care and well-thought-out intention and planning?

Must we take the blame and apologize out of insecurity or out of our need for approval?

How do you determine what is worth giving your life for, and what is worth standing up for despite the risk of defending a principle?

What responsibilities does the status of citizen confer on us?

Are you now, or have you ever been put to the test by telling the truth, lying, or taking arms? How about fighting against a deadly illness, saving the life of another, or donating an internal organ?

Have you come out as a person of unconventional and despised sexual nature, or decided to take on the danger of being unpopular because of political or religious beliefs?

Do you recognize that the loss of your soul, honesty, or morality doesn’t always happen in your response to one significant event, but in small steps that erode your character over time?

If you have a bucket list, consider how long you have postponed fulfilling your desires.

When you reach middle or old age, do you realize that many of the early entries on your list have lost their interest?

Such promissory notes to yourself can be like the suit, dress, pants, or shorts you hope to wear again, only to discover they no longer fit. An old saying applies: You have missed the boat.

Small children tend not to recognize that death lies ahead. As you become somewhat older, the thought occurs to you. When you are older still, would it be wise to remind yourself of your mortality?

Would it be necessary to raise this idea at least once a year?

In middle age and beyond, such a practice becomes less necessary. Your life and the deaths of others announce the issue without your help.

Do you believe you are self-aware? We all miss things. How might you go about learning them? What might be the cost to others and to you?

What is the value of rushing around? What is the value of taking your time?

Have you failed to speak to old friends in years? What is holding you back? What is the value of such people?

Why is it worthwhile to help strangers, including those who are different from you? Do you offer your helping hand face-to-face?

Many external influences have changed you. These include reading news on your phone, using the AI Chatbot, which some describe as a friend, and text messaging.

Are these worthwhile utilities? What do you gain and what do you lose? Do you believe you are saving time as opposed to losing competence to learn and solve problems on your own?

Are you lonely or lonelier than you used to be? Eating alone in the USA has increased by 53% since 2003. The number is much higher among the young.

Do devices like Zoom, frequent job changes, working from home, and a loss of understanding of how to make and keep friends contribute to this problem?

If this is your issue, how do you fill your time when there’s no human contact? Pets, perhaps?

One additional thought about the ticking clock of life. When we are free of essential demands, what do we do?

Meditation can sweep clean awareness of the Earth’s movement around the Sun. What else do we focus on? Exercise, food, the desire to consume, worry, our career, money, relationships, avoidance, and more.

Plato thought of other matters: the contemplation of beauty in moments of quiet.

He focused on the eternal, not immortality, but big and lofty questions regarding the soul, things, and ideas, including nature, beyond temporary joys, lusts, and sorrows.

What do you think?

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The writing at the top of the page is sourced from Edward Zaydelman on Substack.

The weather advice is sourced from MzNickey in East Jesus, TN
July 6, 2025

Alienation, Music, and Finding a Soulmate

Feeling alienated from the world is not a new phenomenon.

We believe we don’t belong, and our lack of confidence underscores our strangeness. Authenticity becomes dangerous for fear of exposing our dislocation, as if there were a flaw in our manufacture, putting us in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Two examples, many years apart.

The first is 18-year-old Susanna Kaysen, portrayed in the 1999 movie Girl, Interrupted. The story begins with an overdose, leading to psychiatric hospitalization.

A friend of hers on the same ward, Daisy, kills herself late in the film.

A nurse, Valerie, attempts to console Susanna:

  • Valerie: “What would you have said to her?”
  • Susanna: “I don’t know. That I was sorry. That I will never know what it was like to be her. But I know what it’s like to want to die. How it hurts to smile. How you try to fit in, but you can’t. You hurt yourself on the outside to try to kill the thing on the inside.”

In the course of her treatment, her psychiatrist Dr. Wick captures Susanna’s estrangement with a quotation in Latin from Seneca’s Hercules Furens:

“What place is this, what region, what shores of the world? “

Seneca (4 BC — 65 AD) understood Susanna’s sense of not belonging 2,000 years ahead of her birth.

Something of a different vintage touches us. It is the 1902 song by Gustav Mahler – “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen“ (Rückert): “I have become lost to the world.”

Once again, we sense ostracism and exclusion from the smiling faces around us. There is an ache in the singer’s voice — a quiet resignation, revealing his self-exile from the possibility of a shared life.

Mahler identifies with the poetry he set to music. As the composer wrote, “It is my very self” expressed in this work.

Modernity has been blamed for such feelings since the Industrial Revolution. Yet, if we listen to songs that move us to tears, we are not so alone as we think.

Mahler is someone else who shares a recognition of our emotional life without knowing us.

A connection to others often comes in the music matched to words, reminding us that some strangers feel as we do, and we are not so odd and dislocated after all.

Defying the singer’s message, we realize we must search for individuals who identify with the music, and thereby with us.

Not only the vocal art of Mahler, but any composition — any song or symphony in which we find the recognition of our vulnerability — enlarges our awareness and demonstrates the possibility of human connectedness.

Soul mates are out there.

No wonder that one of the first questions we ask of a new acquaintance is, “What music do you like?”

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The top image is Lotus and Herons by Huang Yongyu, 1984. It is followed by Vasile Kazar’s untitled painting. Both are sourced from Wikart.org/

July 21, 2024

Becoming Close Friends: A Practical Guide

It feels just right to write about friendship. It means so much. To me, a friend is someone I don’t want to lose, though I have lost some. I’ve had others for almost all my life.

I try hard and hold tight, yet I regret a few departures. Most, not all, my fault, at least in part. But today, I’ll tell you how to make and keep them. We must lose something or someone before we understand their full value.

Acquiring a friend involves a kind of courtship. Given the possibility of rejection, risk is involved. People are busy and have prior commitments. And then some don’t “cotton to you.”

Google tells us this:

To ‘cotton to’ is an idiom born of the cotton industry, meaning to get to know or understand something. In the textile industry, when a fiber cottons, it does a good job of blending in with other fibers to make cloth. Example using the idiom: ‘I don’t recon that boy cottons likely to strangers.’

Platonic friendship, of course, is a different type of closeness from that of a lover, but not automatically less. A chum who came along before the beloved recalls experiences the significant other doesn’t.

Jealousy may occur between an old friend and a new sweetheart. Repeated interaction between these two is the best solution to relieving the implicit threat. The relationship adapts, and all parties must adjust to the cast change and their new positions on stage.

Platonic attachment involves many hours of experience. The glue takes a while to dry. Opening up to each other and building trust are essential for closeness.

We make our first friends in school or in the neighborhood. Each of us is thrown into situations and places. These include taking classes, attending a church, synagogue, or mosque, walking the same route to school, riding the bus, and sitting side by side.

We play games, decide to join identical extracurricular activities, and later on, meet new people at our place of business.

Friendship requires frequent contact, especially when it is being formed. Work tends to offer fewer intimate possibilities when Zoom creates the meeting place instead of the office.

Events after the job can substitute, but many countrymen are lonely. According to Vivek Murthy MD’s 2023 Advisory, we have an epidemic of loneliness tending to cause problems in mental and physical health: Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.

The World Economic Forum offered a comparison of our 2021 social lives to similar data obtained in 1990:

Just 13% of US adults (said) they (had) 10 or more close friends, compared with 33% of those surveyed in 1990.

The growth of friendship often entails the establishment of rituals: attending ball games and concerts, meeting at favorite restaurants or in different cities at conferences or museums, creating a book club, and scheduling Zoom meetings to chat.

In a mobile and virtual society, in-person social pursuits are more challenging to arrange than before. Skin hunger (touch starvation) was frequently mentioned during the Pandemic and still exists. Dogs and cats provide a version of the experience of physical contact.

Connection with an animal differs from friendship but shouldn’t be diminished in importance. Depending on various factors, the loss of companion animals can be as profound an event as the death of a man or woman.

Research suggests spending time with a friend enhances mental health more than with a mate, particularly after the metaphorical honeymoon is over. Routines that can overtake and deaden some marriages are less likely with someone you spend less time with and don’t live with. Moreover, the activities typical of friendship do not include doing the chores, paying the bills, managing the children, and similar stress producers.

One might say get-togethers with friends are “chosen,” while time with a spouse runs the risk of being “frozen.”

No wonder we are advised not to go into business with a friend. The duties, responsibilities, decisions, division of tasks, and issues surrounding money reproduce some of what can undermine wedlock.

Between the 18th and early 20th centuries, it was common for the most profound relationships to involve individuals of the identical sex. That was a period of arranged alliances and minimal premarital romance. Single young ladies of status were accompanied by a chaperone outside the home.

Married females remained in the family residence with a duo’s many children, while the husband spent time in the world among fellows like himself. Same-gendered confidants shared more in common with each other in part because educational and apprentice opportunities for women were less available.

Aging makes it advisable to find new connections along the way, including individuals of different ages. Since some relationships end, others must be created. I met Dr. Mel Nudelman in 1975 when he was almost twice my age—a closeness that grew. It ended with his death in 2012 when he was over 90. My more recent comrade Jim is over 30 years younger than I am.

One feature of friendship involves duties to each other. In clinical practice, asking a colleague in the same discipline to take emergency phone calls while you go on vacation isn’t unusual. When my late friend Dr. Joe Pribyl recuperated from a severe illness, I took on the therapy for a patient of his who needed attention during the months when Joseph was incapacitated.

Running errands, getting food, and watching a pet are kindnesses fitting among cronies. So is consolation and advice.

Remembering birthdays offers a further small but meaningful extension of oneself.

Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil wrote about offering solace to a suffering soul, a circumstance everyone encounters. Listening is at the center of giving such support to a friend.

Murdoch believed the comforter must “unself” himself, erase his ego, and focus 100% on the other. This type of interaction demands that the person providing aid not think of the next thing he wants to say but devote himself entirely to conveying a sympathetic presence.

Weil believed this kind of attention is “the rarest and purest form of generosity,” which calls for one to “decreate” his own self-involvement and allow infinite patience and tenderness to fill the place where the ego existed.

One should avoid saying things like, “I know how you feel,” which is intended to soothe but displays the opposite: a lack of understanding. Presence and compassion, not solutions (unless requested), are enough.

Reaching out to old compadres with whom you have lost touch is worthwhile. The treasure to be rediscovered includes memories no one else holds or can create.

Shared recollections of parents, the old neighborhood, school, summer camp, games, and youthful friends of the past provide the groundwork for recreating your fondness for each other.

Wartime comrades recall experiences beyond the grasp of anyone who wasn’t present in the moment of combat.

The bonds of buddies are tested. Compromise is essential. People aren’t perfect or matched like a lock and a key.

The value of the pal must be weighed against what bothers or hurts you. A sober period of reflection can be helpful, rather than saying or doing something on impulse that breaks the link beyond repair.

For more on this subject, you can read my blog post, How to Apologize and How Not to Apologize: When Sorry isn’t Enough, or Aaron Lazare’s short book On Apology.

I will end on a personal note. I have a friend of almost 60 years, Al. Our bond has survived a test or two but continues to grow. We are both heterosexual men.

When I encountered physical challenges recently, Al told me he prayed for me. This would be unremarkable, perhaps, but for two facts. First, he is not a religious man. Second, he said that he loves me, not in a sexual way but in the other meanings in which this expression is understood.

Some men wait in vain for a father to express his love. The thought of a male friend doing so never occurs to them.

A friendship like this means the world.

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The three paintings were sourced from Wikiart.org/, while the photos came from Wikimedia.org/

The works are as follows: 1. The Women Friends, 1917 by Gustav Klimt, 2. Three Barefoot Females Smiling and Sitting Barefoot on a Bench by JLS Media, 3. Irena Solska by Stanisław Wyspiańsk, 4. Happy Friendship by சௌந்தர்யா சுந்தரம், 5. Friends at the Theatre: Ludovic Halevy and Albert Cave, 1879 by Edgar Degas, and 6. Friendship 3 by Gideon from Paris, France.

March 24, 2024

Alone, Together and Other Social Choices

Has the world become lonelier, or was it always so?

Edward Hopper’s paintings suggest, at least, that he saw the loneliness of his time. Or perhaps what he painted was his solitary nature.

Not everyone wants to join others. The difference between extroversion and introversion is often what fuels us and whether our interests require time alone.

The introvert’s inborn nature tends toward the latter. Depletion is the consequence of spending too much time in groups. The extrovert is different. He is energized by human contact that saps the former.

The one who avoids parties and needs days off from time in public is often misunderstood.

Does he stay away because he thinks himself better than others? He might be shy, but introverts require recharging.

Does he postpone getting together because he prioritizes writing or another solo task?

Does the public element of his day job leave him exhausted?

Serenity, calm, or a meditative state are unavailable in the active and interactive human world. It is a condition many wish for.

How do we understand those not like us (if we understand him at all)?

Consider Hopper’s New York Movie, just below. What do you see? Is the usher daydreaming? Worried? Lonely? Thinking about her boyfriend? Bored? Has she seen this film too many times? 

Is she craving meaningful contact with others, or is she relieved to be by herself?

What basis do we use to determine this? Is it possible to get the correct answer based on this snapshot?

Now study Hopper’s painting Office at Night. It shows two people, one of whom appears preoccupied with his reading. He is turned away from the woman, indifferent to her.

Though opening or closing a file cabinet, the female faces the man. The typewriter suggests she might be the man’s secretary, as would have been a likely occupation for her in 1940.

But there is another consideration: she is young, pretty, and curvaceous, yet the man pays no attention to her.

What does this say about the pair? Again, we tend to make assumptions based on little data and our own history of making sense of the world. Is he married? Is he glued to what the paper says? Introverted? A workaholic? Will either one take action and engage the other? In what way? Will one of them regret what they do, say, or fail to do?

Depending on how you interpret many of Hopper’s canvases, you might believe you have an understanding of who his subjects are. You might be puzzled. Many conditions can be inferred: sadness, isolation, desperation, and expectation.

Ultimately, the observers—including you or me—exist outside of any activity within the art. Instead, we watch, think, and feel. We maintain a respectful distance from our art-loving neighbors because we are focused on the art and its message.

Do we shape ourselves into solitary, lonely, contemplative, active, or passive individuals? For the same price of admission, there might be other individuals who are by themselves. Doubtless, some are intelligent, puzzled, waiting for a companion, attractive, or any combination of these qualities.

And maybe one has noticed you.

The gallery allows you to create the world as you wish it to be. Anyone there has the capacity to bring a social event into being. Is your next best friend steps away? How about a momentary conversation partner, a person ill-suited to a discussion, an art student, or tonight’s dinner date?

What will you make of it? Do you realize it is yours to make? What does your presence, attire, stance, expression, or gait tell those nearby about you?

You are not a painting, but if those on the wall were watching you as you observe them, they’d have the chance to take your measure just as you draw conclusions about them.

The creations on display—their color, likenesses, and forms—wait for you to create what happens next. 

As Shakespeare wrote, “All the world’s a stage … and one man in his time plays many parts.” Introverted, extroverted, or otherwise, it is your turn to choose and read your lines.

Life is not a rehearsal; it is, in every moment, a never-to-be-repeated performance.

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All of the Edward Hopper paintings are sourced from Edward Hopper.net/

From top to bottom, they are Hotel Lobby, New York Movie, Office at Night, and Automat.

December 24, 2023

Triumphing Over Holiday Depression

It is that time of year. TV offers happy families and smiles around the Christmas tree or turkey dinner. Festive window displays adorn your local department store. Greeting cards proclaim good cheer and the value of family and fraternity. And there you are, alone or lonely, wondering how you missed the boat.

The media often overstate the happiness quotient of the average person, at least in my country. It is difficult not to believe that many, if not most, people are having a better time than we are; they are more loved, more popular, and have more fun.

First off, don’t be fooled. You are not alone. Just because you are not represented in the media ads doesn’t mean you are solo in your suffering. Many keep a low profile at this time of year, fearful they will be judged losers if they proclaim their isolation; few want to be objects of pity, and that is precisely what they expect if it should become known that they have nowhere to go and no one to be with on Thanksgiving or Christmas or New Year’s Eve.

But countless people are alone: many of the divorced, widowed, and childless; many who live at great distances from their families; many who have recently broken up with someone; many who are estranged from family or friends; many who have recently moved; and many of the unemployed, who have lost the connectedness to co-workers that was an emotionally sustaining source of support.


Holidays can also be difficult because of the haunting memories of better times. This is especially true if the loss of loved ones is fairly recent. The first festive occasion or two after a divorce or death is especially difficult, so great is the contrast between the focus on family that past holidays brought and the fact of being bereft. Moreover, holidays tend to rob the lonely of the distraction of work, generating significant expanses of empty time, filled only by reflections on one’s sorry state as the time moves with a dull, clumsy, funereal tread.

On top of all this, there is the problem of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). Typically, the pattern is one of onset of a depressive episode in the fall or winter, with remission coming in the spring. Additionally, the cyclical condition is not due to some external event (such as the beginning of school in the fall) but instead is thought to do with the relative unavailability of “bright visible-spectrum light” characteristic of the dark months.

What do you do then if you are suffering from the holiday blues? Here are a few possibilities:

1. Although your unhappiness presupposes the absence of satisfying social contact, at least consider whether there is someone you can reach out to who might welcome being remembered by you and invite you over. Social withdrawal tends to feed on itself, only making us feel worse. While it is true that rejection is painful, many people are more than usually welcoming at this time of year; the risk might be worth the reward.

2. Keep busy doing something productive or distracting — ideally active. Clean your house, build, exercise, or learn to play chess online. Do a task that will take you outside yourself.

3. Consider volunteering at a homeless shelter or a soup kitchen. Not only is this important work, but it will fill the time and might even make you aware that, however bad your situation is, it is better than others. Another benefit is the human contact such volunteerism provides, including the possibility of making new friends, among whom might be those who also find themselves alone on the holidays.

4. Make a list of the things about which you are grateful. Most of us take much for granted. Perhaps there are still things in your life that you can count as blessings and look forward to. Such reminders are often helpful in boosting a sagging spirit.

5. If you have the means, travel can be a good and beneficial use of your time during the holidays. Fares are often cheaper on the holiday itself. Going to a warm climate or a new place might break up your routine and, once again, give you a chance to do new things and meet new people.

6. Internet social networking sites may be worth investigating. While not usually as satisfying as face-to-face human contact, this relatedness can lead to friendship for some and reduce one’s sense of complete isolation.

7. If you’ve been on the planet for a while, remember the past difficulties you have overcome and how you did so. Likely, the same human qualities that enabled you to overcome other tough times will get you over the holidays.

8. If you have been diagnosed with seasonal depression (SAD), consider obtaining a light box that provides a full light spectrum for your own in-home therapy. These can be found easily by googling “lightbox,” “happy lamp,” or “happy light.” These are not enormously expensive.

9. Music can be a balm, making it, or listening to it.

10. Psychotherapy and/or anti-depressant medication are always available should you wish to take on your sadness in the most direct and consequential way.

11. My dad’s favorite expression was, “Every knock is a boost.” Reminding himself that he would learn and grow from hard times enabled him to get through the Great Depression as a young man with only sporadic work opportunities. The Stoic philosophers would have applauded him. If you can reframe your suffering as something that will enable you to strengthen your character, it might assist you in getting well into the future. The diary of the most famous stoic, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, will likely be found in every library.

12. You will be welcomed in almost any house of worship. They hope to provide you with solace and joy.

With all my good wishes for a better year.

Peace.

GS

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All the paintings are the work of George Frederick Watts. They are Love and Life, Hope, and The Creation of Eve, in order from top to bottom.

November 26, 2023

The Transformation of a Man Without Love

Something new entered the heart of a 55-year-old man.

J had been alone in the world for twenty-five years. He had never been a father, lover, spouse, or friend. In prison, he was bitter, gloomy, celibate, ignorant, and solitary. The ex-convict’s heart was nonetheless full of virginal innocence.

His sister and her children had left him only a vague and far-off memory that gradually disappeared; he made every effort to locate them and, having failed, forgot them. Such is human nature. Other tender emotions of his youth, if he had any, had fallen away.

J promised a dying woman to find her eight-year-old girl who was hostage to an abusive couple. When he rescued and took charge of the little one, he felt stirred to the depth of his being.

Whatever affection within him came alive, and was directed towards the child. He approached the bed where she slept and trembled with the joy of a mother with her new born.

I will tell you who this man is, but first, I want to address his loneliness. It is not uncommon.

I have met such men. Some have themselves been abused, others neglected. A few received little parental guidance and grew up clueless. Usually, they had difficulty making friends and often endured being singled out and bullied. They never found the gift of making social contact and lacked the confidence to approach anyone attractive to them.

Family and relatives may be their most reliable and closest contacts. They tend to live with or near their kinfolk for much of their lives. Perhaps they make a decent living but remain in the shadows.

All of us have walked past them without noticing. They don’t cause trouble. Indeed, such males have mastered the art of invisibility and the rest of us the trick of recognizing an untroubling slice of what the world offers us, but nothing more.

It is worth wondering what they do during the holidays. Occupying themselves with themselves, I imagine. Unless, like J, they have the good luck of discovering a friend or neighbor’s kindness — or becoming a loving uncle or unexpected guardian to a young person.

There is a door to ending loneliness. I’ve known a few like J, the gentleman described above, who waited for another to open it.

Sometimes, one does well serving as a doorman.

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The little girl in the story above is Cosette. The man is called Jean Valjean. They are characters in Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables.

The photos are sourced from Wikimedia Commons. Both are pictures of fathers and daughters. The first is the work of Caroline Hernandez, while Reinhard Breitenstein photographed the second.

September 17, 2017

Alone

Loneliness is a desperate thing and a thing desperately hard to capture in words. But when the wish for connection becomes reality, the heart trembles …

We are isolated for several reasons. What happens in our head is unique. Intimate communication is a struggle. We are surprised at the blunt instruments words become. The indefinable essence is too often lost, subject to the way we sound, our facial expression; and the auditor’s capacity to listen. Without his ability to identify some likeness between his experience and our own, the effort is futile.

Nor do we even fathom ourselves fully. Messaging cannot deliver a meaning unknown to the sender. The most insightful among us still are trapped looking at themselves from the inside, unable to escape a claustrophobic perspective – unable to discern the unconscious. Meanwhile, the vantage point from outside is second-hand news, told to us, but not known by us.

Self-knowledge is imperfect, not comprehensive. Humans accept obvious motivations and easy explanations to explain themselves to themselves. Who even considers the many causes of a simple task like deciding to grocery shop today? Hunger, scheduling, a sale on peaches, your child’s request for a particular food, a friend’s comment about a good meal, a cooking show you watched, or all of these? We admit, at least, that love is inexplicable, our heart a mystery.

Hope of connection lives, nonetheless. The desire for understanding overpowers the complications. And sometimes hope is fulfilled.

Dostoevsky, the great Russian novelist, understood this. Two characters in his masterpiece The Idiot – a towering achievement in reckoning with the complexities of personality – express their separation from the mainstream of society.

Dostoevsky presents an embittered young man, Ippolit, within weeks of death; who himself believes he will never be understood, yet strains to be heard, recognized, and accepted:

In any serious human thought born in someone’s head, there always remains something which it is quite impossible to convey to other people, though you may fill whole volumes with writing and spend thirty-five years trying to explain your thought; there always remains something that absolutely refuses to leave your skull and will stay with you forever; you will die with it, not having conveyed to anyone what is perhaps most important in your idea.

The novelist’s title character is a casual friend of Ippolit, a saintly and open man named Prince Myshkin. Ippolit and Myshkin, despite their differences, both want connection.

The following narrated passage recalls a time when the young Prince was in treatment in Switzerland. Expressing himself was then a particular challenge. He led a life alone, separate, cut-off:

Once he went into the mountains on a clear, sunny day, and wandered about for a long time with a tormenting thought that refused to take shape. Before him was the shining sky, below him the lake, around him the horizon, bright and infinite, as if it went on forever. For a long time he looked and suffered. He remembered now (years later) how he had stretched out his arms to that bright, infinite blue and wept. What had tormented him was that he was a total stranger to it all. What was this banquet, what was this everlasting feast, to which he had long been drawn, always, ever since childhood, and which he could never join. Every morning the same bright sun rises; every morning there is a rainbow over the waterfall; every evening the highest snowcapped mountain, there, far away, at the edge of the sky, burns with a crimson flame; every ‘little fly that buzzes near him in a hot ray of sunlight participates in this whole chorus; knows its place, loves it, and is happy’: every little blade of grass grows and is happy! And everything has its path, and everything knows its path, goes with a song and comes back with a song; only he knows nothing, understands nothing, neither people nor sounds, a stranger to everything and a castaway.

Notice the character’s reference to a fly. He is quoting his young friend Ippolit, the man near death, the one struggling to be understood. And in this moment, the Prince recognizes his own sentiment. Dostoevsky continues:

Oh, of course he could not speak then with these words and give voice to his question; he suffered blankly and mutely, but now it seemed to him that he had said it all then, all those same words, and that Ippolit had taken the words about the ‘little fly’ from him, from his own words and tears of that time. He was sure of it, and for some reason his heart throbbed at this thought …

At such moments in the mountains – in the empty spaces of life – we wait for the voice of another to utter our thoughts, intuit our mind, touch us by understanding our sentiments. It is as close as one can come to escaping the solitude of the human species, finding a soul who matches us at least a bit, at least for a time …

Those most desolate among us, those most cut-off, quietly despair of finding such a witness: one who not only sees, but understands. The inhabitants of hope’s waiting room are on every street, in every therapist’s office. If they persist – as they often do – the moment of hope’s fulfillment is transcendent.

As William Blake wrote in Auguries of Innocence: 

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 
And Eternity in an hour.

—

The first image is William Blake’s Ancient of Days. Next comes Jean-Jacques Henner’s Solitude. These are both sourced from Wikimedia Commons. Finally, a photo of Cadillac Mountain in Arcadia National Park.

August 27, 2017

The “Sex” of Therapy and the Road to Erotic Transference

The internet is filled with worried psychotherapy patients: worried over their therapists. They are brimming with fear of being discarded, frustrated at their inability to get closer: wanting a permanent relationship, a kind of family tie, or the therapist’s touch. Much of the day is preoccupied with worries involving the counselor, a fresh slant on the distress that brought them into the consulting room initially.

On offer today is the likeness between the “desire” implicit in the client’s wanting the safety and secure guidance of a caregiver … and the romance and caring of a new love.

Treatment begins with a “getting to know you” phase, entirely one-sided, except for the therapist’s way of interacting, the knowledge he imparts, and the questions he asks and answers. But there is more:

  • his attention, concentration, intensity of focus
  • the tone of his voice
  • his physical state of being
  • the office setting (if he approved the decoration)
  • his consideration and understanding
  • the comfort he offers
  • his “presence”

The contact is not so different from meeting a new, potential romantic interest, and going on a date. An appointment is made, a limited time is expected, and the initial stage of acquaintance with “who he is” is part of the agenda. Many questions after the first contacts will still be unanswered in both situations. The newness makes it electric, whether the charge is one of excitement or trepidation.

As feelings unfold, therapy offers a kind of seduction or foreplay: a back-and-forth in conversation, a dance without movement. If there is a desire for physical contact, then the patient experiences the ache before touch, enlarged because he cannot touch: a yearning magnified by the boundary the doctor will not cross (assuming he follows a therapy model insisting on such an invisible moat). The appeal is ancient: the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden.

Allowing the therapist inside is an intermediate goal of psychodynamic treatment: to permit release of material in need of expression, of grieving, of working-through. Transference is expected: the development of feelings about the counselor similar to those tied to significant people in the client’s past, including parents. Without the patient “exposing himself” and dropping his guard, a dynamic therapy will be unsuccessful. To continue the many metaphors here, you are giving yourself over to the other, putting yourself in his hands.

Jealousy may develop. There are significant-others in the counselor’s life, known or unknown: lovers, children, and friends. He also maintains a practice full of patients, competitors for his time. The weekly session is but a mini-slice of him, something shared when you are starving and have shared too much in your life already. In the course of working-through the transference, such feelings diminish. The counselor steps more “off-the-pedestal” than earlier, if not fully off. Only, that is, if the transference has been resolved.

Not all treatment models include enough time, in my opinion, on launching the patient into the world. Outside, sympathetic others represent a more appropriate target for strong and continuing attachment once the client is ready.

Part of the reason therapy is often eroticized is because of our instinctive desire for contact and kindness, a buffer against the inherent loneliness of the human condition. We want permanence and protection to face the transitory inevitability of life. Many of us wish to crawl into another’s skin, not be the solitary creatures we are, manufactured by nature into different sausage casings. We yearn for merging and this yearning is easily sexualized because intercourse involves momentary joining.

The illusion of the perfect therapist can create something of the honeymoon period. The blindness of new love enabled our species to survive. We need the illusion to bond in both treatment and everyday life. A persuasive mirage is not inevitable, but the risk of it is.

Powerful emotional attachment, assuming it happens, is maintained (in part) because of the distance and lack of consummation. Marriage, in contrast, involves consummation, routinized closeness, and repetitive exposure and over exposure. The illusion disappears, at least to some extent. The honeymoon ends and marriages fall into the world of reality from the lofty plateau of apparition and romance. Without a continuous fight against this gravitational force, starry nights and champagne morph into partly cloudy daylight and carbonated soft drinks that have lost their fizz.

A couple of additional thoughts: not everyone develops the sort of attachment I’ve described. Nor is there a way for those vulnerable to enchantment to protect themselves against it. Remember, however, some therapy models depend on the development of strong transference for ultimate healing.

Life teaches us we can’t have everything we want, nor forever keep what we have won. Yet our time here offers the possibility of joy even though many wishes are denied. We adapt. We must adapt.

If impermanence is the nature of things, the sooner one accepts that truth, the sooner one will come to appreciate and enjoy what is still possible here: on a rich, confusing, dark, but dazzling place called Earth.

—

Two versions of a Starry Night, above: the first by Van Gogh and the second, Edvard Munch. Both come from WikiArt.org.

December 18, 2016

Returning to Therapy, Renewing Friendship, Starting Over, Fixing Things …

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The holidays are a time of both fond and aching remembrance of those who are absent: an estranged family member missing from the celebration, a once close friend silent, a therapeutic relationship over.

Ghosts.

Perhaps then is it time to begin again?

Our century is a “time vacuum.” You can buy everything except a 25th hour in the day. A lack of time combined with distance puts relationships at risk. Friends are more digitally available, but offer less physical presence. Gone are the school days providing hours of contact with our playmates and extra time together in the neighborhood.

Relationships beg for attention, but speak too softly to be audible in a world of carnival barkers pretending to be wisemen. The torch-carrier who wishes for human closeness might bring a spark, but lack the wood. The lonely woodsman hopes for a lightening-strike because he has no flame. Waiting comes and friendship goes … disappears.

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Funny how much effort we put into the maintenance of things and how little into the feeding and care of friendship. Time is set-aside for routine dusting, sweeping, vacuuming, mending, and replacing. The days are scheduled: Saturday means washing clothes, Sunday stipulates mowing the lawn, Monday is for watering plants. We get absorbed and stop thinking, a human condition to which we are all subject and which we all need.

Dutiful honor paid to the numbing maintenance routine blinds us to the implication of the toll taken on everything in the world, including our affections. All man-made things need renewal. Just as in the old days when mattresses were supported by ropes which needed regular tightening (as in the expression, “sleep tight”) so must the unseen cords binding us to each other be tightened. The unseen is easier to miss, the seen can’t be ignored. Habit takes over.

Our attention to physical things can be trancelike, done without consideration. Experts, handymen, and service contractors are available when we don’t know how to do the fixing ourselves. You take the car for repair or you go to the Apple Store for a new computer. E-mail might remind you the auto needs attention with a “tune-up special.” The computer signals its unhappiness by running slowly. Your spouse tells you marital counseling is necessary.

Who speaks for friendship and its tender sensibilities? Who speaks for a return to therapy?

Actually, the friend or the therapist might. I would call old patients on occasion, far from everyone and far from often, to see how they were doing, especially those who I thought (a bit like a car) might need a tune-up.

I understand however, I was not typical. Moreover, as I say, I didn’t do this often. Yet possibility exists in taking action, breaking with the customary. As Carlo Maria Giulini, the great symphony conductor said of himself, “I am an enemy of routine.” Thus, his performances almost always were full of intensity, never “phoned in.”  Possibilities exist if we envision the world anew.

—

Most of us wouldn’t think about letting the house get too cluttered or dusty, the sofa too frayed. We stretch in the morning, exercise before or after work, and check the iPhone. Not to mention performing the job for which we are paid and caring for our kids.

Frayed feelings are invisible. Emotions are hidden. Therapists are not psychic, friends even less so, and counselors can become surprisingly obtuse after their workday is done. The smoke detector does its electronic whine when the battery needs replacement. Distressed friends usually don’t give the same decisive alarm.

We take care of what is observable. Most of us want to look nice, want our residence to be welcoming. We try to keep things as they are: attractive. If I wear a hole in my shoe, as Adlai Stevenson II did during his 1952 Presidential Campaign, I get embarrassed and take it to the shoemaker. Friends are usually quieter than unintentionally air-conditioned footwear. Some are like the old soldiers described by General Douglas MacArthur. “Old soldiers never die,” he said, “they just fade away.”

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We assume the permanence of people and things. Marriage takes for granted our mate will remain young, fit, appealing. Yes, everyone understands age is a thief, but that is an abstraction. When the roses are in bloom and the kisses strike fire I dare anyone to really — really — believe the flesh is weak. Might we insist on better care of relationships if we thought they needed the same oversight that our sofa does, a piece of work whose fabric will wear out, whose springs will lose their spring?

—

My friend Nancy Pochis Bank is a chalk artist. She decorates chalkboard menus and buildings, creates murals — whatever you fancy. Nancy marries beauty to usefulness, making lovely things of the everyday. Many people wonder (and Nancy has heard this) why she employs such a temporary medium for her work, the effortful beauty she creates — knowing her magical product will disappear with the next day’s menu or a new rain?

The mistake we make, I think, is looking at Nancy’s craft as temporary and not realizing that our relationships (and all else) come with no greater guarantee of permanence. They are as vulnerable to destruction as Nancy’s outdoor art is to the weather. Like Nancy in creating her art, we are the art we create, we are the chalk ever-changing because it and we are exposed, vulnerable. Our friendships are, as well. Ignore them and they will be gone. Walk on them (like a sidewalk chalk-drawing) and you leave a mark. She says her work is a reminder to value that which is ephemeral.

—

Therapists are not identical to friends, of course. The form of contact is both intensified and limited. Counselors tend to require less special-handling than companions, though many patients fear not giving them enough. And, therapists incline toward welcoming you back, even if you left abruptly.

The desire for a second chance with estranged or neglected friends is driven by fond memory. With some you fell into an emotional ravine that hobbled and gobbled you up. Is another try worth the risk? Only you can say. Stranger things have happened than a joyous reunion. Perhaps you can sew your togetherness together anew.

—

Counselors discourage catastrophizing. Not everything is a matter of life and death and yet, everything is in the sense that it is temporary, as life is temporary. The holidays remind us that another year will end without some of those with whom we began it: work friends, close friends, neighbors, and yes, the irreplaceable people who fill the obituary pages.

You can take this as a dark message and flee or think about who you want in your life and what you can do; whether they are on good terms with you, out of your life, or drifting. The New Year is an ending and a beginning. The cycle round the sun ends. A new spin on the axis offers beginnings only if you make them happen.

The subject of relationship renewal brings to mind these T.S. Eliot lines from Little Gidding, the last of the set of poems he called Four Quartets:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Sometimes we learn things the second time around.

Friendship and therapy can be like that.

—

The top photo is of German Manga artists Asu and Reami,  known as DuO, at the Comic-fest in Munich on September 3, 2005. The next image is called Morning Fog at the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco. Both of these were sourced from Wikimedia Commons and are the work of Fantasy. The photo of Adlai Stevenson II won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for Photography. William M. Gallagher, the photographer, wasn’t aware at the time he took it that it revealed a hole in the shoe on Stevenson’s right foot.

 

August 14, 2016

How Well Do You Fit in? The Therapeutic Dilemma of the Introvert in an Extroverted World

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In my therapy practice I encountered many people who didn’t quite fit into the world. Sometimes it was because the world valued beauty and they were not beautiful, sometimes because they had no interest in sports where others cheered for a team, and sometimes because their skin color and religion were out of place. More often they believed their internal life didn’t match up with those around them: too sensitive or unlikeable or too serious; peculiar, different, odd. Quiet in a loud world, thoughtful in an impulsive world, gun shy in a world where many shoot first and don’t even ask questions later. Most importantly, they lacked a niche, a social group, a family or family substitute in which they felt safe and cared for — a place of solidarity and belonging — or an institution (like a small community church) offering something bigger than the commonplace mission of “getting and spending” and personal success at any cost.

To provide therapy for such people one must acknowledge that, indeed, some of us fit better into a different time and place. I’d like to look at the therapeutic model from which the counseling field grew and ask the question: does it still offer the best possible assistance to a person who is isolated, perhaps by his nature and temperament, perhaps by a society prone to discounting his human qualities, perhaps by a world transformed from being too closed to too open; perhaps by all of these.

Psychoanalysis, Freud’s method, developed in a Victorian Era, tailored to the values, customs, and morals of the time: a repressive society in which a woman who showed her ankle in public could cause a small scandal. Polite social gatherings didn’t permit discussions of sex. Revelation of personal problems betrayed weakness and breached decorum. One suffered silently. Not surprisingly, Freud offered a treatment designed to open those topics not disclosed elsewhere, fashioning the counseling apparatus to lift the gurney of a disapproving society off patients who had been crushed by it. In other words, psychoanalysis was a therapeutic approach tailored to a different social world than we live in today, at least for those of us in the West.

There was, however, a positive side to the era. Values identified in bold letters were supported by strong institutions. The family and church might crush you, but they also provided decisive direction and unconditional, although superficial, acceptance, at least if you followed the rules. You  weren’t on your own, adrift, and uncertain about how to lead your life. The restricted set of permitted choices made the day less complicated and overwhelming. The life map presented by family and social institutions, government and military, offered easy-to-follow steps.

If Freud were alive today would he have used a different model for treatment after his world vanished?

I suspect so. He could not fail to notice how the closed, restrictive, prescriptive social order has been replaced by one more permissive and open. A society requiring unquestioning acceptance of your parents’ religion, vocational advice, and veto power over a potential spouse has been set aside.

Now, for example, you are considered free to determine not just your faith, but whether you want a religion at all. Yes, parental direction and disapproval are still present, but they have lost a good part of their grip. A federal government that once ordered you to perform military service, today leaves the defense of the country to volunteers. Sex is everywhere (as are exposed ankles and more). There is no place to hide. Loud voices predominate. Extroversion trumps introversion. Freedom to make personal choices comes with the expectation you will make good ones instead of being overwhelmed by the array of possibilities. Few behavioral menu options are forbidden and most are public.

We live in a garden of delights or a world of confusion that would have seemed dreamlike, disorienting, and scandalous in the time of Freud’s early work. We cannot escape a Kardashianized existence of energetic, fast-talking, self-promoting performers who are role models no introvert recognizes in himself. Meanwhile, he has the vague sense of missing someone he has never met.

What components should therefore be added to the traditional “talking cure” in the second decade of the 21st century?

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I’d begin with recognition that the social world of today is tipped to the advantage of extroverts. At least one-third of us, however, are not so classified. Methods of self-enhancement and personal validation for introverted clients must go beyond an effort to make them into fake extroverts. Temperament is more or less fixed by biological inheritance and very early experience. An introverted and insecure patient can become more self-confident with the help of therapy, but his preferences for privacy, quiet time alone to recharge his energy, and one-to-one contact over an affinity for large groups are likely to persist.

The introvert is not true to himself if he tries to become a chattering machine: the “Bigger Than Life” of the party. Treatment must value his qualities as an introvert and support him in his effort to find a useful niche within the work and social worlds that makes the best of his unique skills. His temperamental strengths include an ability to listen, reflective thought as opposed to impulsive action, seriousness of purpose, persistence, and a good eye for risks. Susan Cain’s book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking offers a place to start.

A second component consists of helping clients find or create socially supportive, cohesive institutions and groups where they can attach to something less isolative, more fulfilling, and bigger than hollow self-interest. As noted by Sebastian Junger in his short, but powerful new book, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, our ancestors in prehistory lived in small groups (50 or fewer) whose survival depended upon pulling together. The tiny society was largely “classless and egalitarian.” Sharing was essential and little personal property existed. Loyalty was prized. Status, to the extent it was present, came from providing for the group and defending it in war. It was a place where quietly doing your part was enough for acceptance and approval, membership and the availability of a mate. Everyone fit.

Contrast such a living situation to the endless, senseless, heart-deadening contemporary competition to be as good or better than your peers and survive on your own or, if you are lucky, in a family including only a spouse and children. Our ancestors were bound together by a mutual necessity and support now replaced simply by sharing an address: living in apartment buildings and neighborhoods of nameless strangers. Isolation is the inevitable result of having little intimacy, as well as sham closeness dependent only upon the accident of sharing a cubicle or the ties of occasional after-hours good times that do not bind.

The therapeutic project of the urban, anonymous 21st century must recognize the present historical moment as especially challenging for the introvert. More than most others, he wants relationships of depth. The therapist’s transfigured and transfiguring task is to creatively enable his client to locate some way to connect, belong, and find meaning instead of settling for alienation — the extent of which few are permitted to know.

Treatment is a serious job for this serious person, it is true. What could be more fitting?

—

The first image is called Alone by PiConsti. Look closely for the tiny creature in the picture. The photo beneath it is Isolation Lake (5) in Chelan County, WA by Bala. Both are sourced from Wikimedia Commons.