August 7, 2017 · 5:20 pm

I climb a mountain

 

I can’t think what will have changed. From the first moment to the most decisive, beginning with distant anticipation, and climaxing with a relaxed strut towards the podium, the range of me was on show. In my imagination, those last few steps should have been heart-stopping. Terror should have taken over, halting my breath, and stripping my voice of all power. My blank gaze, peering into hot lights and eager, expectant faces, should have betrayed my fear, my clammy need to be absent.

In December of last year, while doing some e-mail housekeeping, I sent a message to organizers of the Creativity and Madness Conference, asking them to clarify the status of my then 3-month old application to present my Tommy paper at their next event. Given the lack of response prior to this point, I expected a polite form letter, thanking me for my proposal but rejecting my request. It would have sounded like the kind of letters I get from publishers when they dismiss my queries regarding my novels. No big deal. I was simply striking something off my to-do list, and tidying my ambitions. I’d move on to the next writing project, I figured.

Then came a pleasant surprise, not that my negative streak was anywhere near done with me. Within days of my e-mail, I received a reply from event organizers, apologizing for their delayed response, and asking me to present my paper at the next conference, scheduled for this August. I laughed in semi-belief. The only other time I’d gotten such an affirmation was when I’d…when I’d gotten word that my Tommy paper was to be published, come to think of it. Of course, conference organizers would be interested, I suddenly thought. This was a great opportunity. Those doors that seemed impenetrable now squeaked and moved, showing a gap behind which I saw smiling, inviting faces. It was January. I had seven months to prepare a talk based upon a paper I’d spent ten years writing, off and on. I knew the material like the front and back of my hands. Not only was this not a problem, I was ready to slam dunk, hit a home run; I’d even invent a new sporting metaphor to predict the imminence of my success.

Hold on, I soon cautioned my excitable mind. Hold on. I’ve been saying that short phrase over and over again these last few months. Sometimes the words contain, as in restrain, drunken, inflated thoughts, which otherwise fuel my flights. They pull back upon ideas that leave me breathless, floating on momentum, feeling good but also weightless, like Wylie Coyote finally looking down, realizing he’s in mid-air and that his plan actually sucked. Hold on, I likewise say to nagging doubt, to cynical pride; to envious heart and fearful spirit—four horses of my private apocalypse, ever ready to close ranks and bring me down. Caution reminds me of sober days after, when moments have passed, my carpe has not been diemed, but nobody really notices but me.

That’s what it’s like at night when the mind won’t rest, won’t let go of its spin cycle, and sleep is like a forgotten skill. I feel a portent of failure, hitting me like a dull thud, as that’s the sound of a joke that doesn’t work. Between April and June, I happily distilled my seven-thousand-word Tommy paper into an hour’s power-point display. I selected its best ideas, embroidered with an amusing anecdote or two; I included a dozen or so images, all torn from the internet, to stir associations, give my presentation a powerful edge. I even discovered a few tools in my PP program to inject drama, like fade-ins on photographs. Come late July, I was ready to talk, and barely needed a single note before me to aid my oration. Fascinating insight, profundity, even a song would spin effortlessly off my tongue. Or, at least I’d recite the lines of Tommy’s finale, “Listening to you”:

Listening to you

I get the music

Gazing at you

I get the heat

Following you

I climb a mountain

I get excitement at your feet

Then I traveled to Santa Fe, the site of the conference. On the first day, I regarded the audience, its three-hundred-person-deep girth, and gulped. I listened to speakers whose bio profiles took minutes to announce make dry yet content-thick deliveries. An expert on Leonard Cohen and Carl Jung recited song lyrics and quoted Rumi. A vast crowd of erudite baby boomers gazed lovingly at him and other speakers like they were core members of an established fan base. Suddenly I was in mid-air, gazing at a fan base that was not there, and believing that my plan sucked. No one was interested in Tommy, much less my infantile notions of attachment theory and rock and roll. My jokes were leaden; my anecdotes deadening. The baby boomer crowd would fall asleep, and snore loudly during the lulls within my stuttering delivery.

When my presentation began, my mic failed. Seriously. I felt like uttering that line— ‘is this on?’—to signify a kind of comic parallel, but the failure wasn’t mine. The failure: it wasn’t mine. I looked to my right, at the sound man, who looked slightly panicked, under more pressure than me. His boss, the conference director, appeared to snatch from him a hand-held microphone and then walk towards me. We were already behind schedule because he’d privileged a previous speaker with an extra few minutes. There was no way I’d get similar slack. But it was alright. I don’t recall exactly how I felt walking to the podium—only that I felt okay. My breath was there. I felt reasonably embodied, present; the demons seemed sidelined, and I was relaxed, ready to have fun. I got this, I thought. Then I spoke of Tommy, attachment and object relations theory, including self and other representations: in short, all the stuff that had been stirring for…I want to say forever.

 

Graeme Daniels, MFT

 

 

 

 

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July 27, 2017 · 8:05 pm

Dunkirk

 

The war film is a dying genre. I do not intend a pun, and I didn’t want to dislike Dunkirk, the latest effort to memorialize a famous World War II battle. But unfortunately, I didn’t like Dunkirk, or rather, I didn’t love Dunkirk which, given my expectations going into the theater, was tantamount to hating it.

War films have a special place in my life. In theory, this is because James Daniels, my grandfather, was a veteran of World War II, and more specifically, a veteran of the Dunkirk evacuation that rescued around 340,000 British soldiers in May 1940 and thus girded Britain’s survival through the early years of the war. You might think I’d have heard the odd tale or two from my grandfather about the brave efforts that brought him home. I’m afraid not. Granddad said little, if anything that I recall about the battle or its aftermath. Occasionally, he’d utter tongue-in-cheek comments, barely chuckling as I asked if he’d “killed any Germans”; instead replying that he was too busy running away. As I conjure the memory of his dignified medals, sitting within a framed, sepia certificate of recognition, and hanging on a wall in his home in North Wales, I don’t recall hearing of the shame supposedly anticipated by escaping soldiers, as the film suggests happened. After his passing, I learned that James’ experience must have been more horrific than I’d ever imagined. He couldn’t swim, and according to my father, retreated from gunfire into the English channel, not so much escaping as choosing how to die. James was spared because a daring sergeant grabbed him by the scruff and pulled him into a boat. James spent his later war years in places like Iceland, the Orkney islands, waiting upon further assignments, and meeting a nurse that would be my grandmother. He fought at the D-day landing in 44′. He didn’t talk much about that. Iceland, he complained, smelled of fish.

To hear what I thought were proper, exciting war stories, I had to watch movies when I was a kid. From the fifties through the seventies, the best war films featured largely British casts fronted by American stars: The Bridge On The River Kwai, with William Holden (though Alec Guinness, later Obi Wan, won a best actor oscar); The Great Escape, with Steve McQueen stealing scenes with a motorbike; and The Dirty Dozen, with Lee Marvin kicking ass and being cool and snarky. Even the obviously bad films were guilty pleasures: The Longest Day depicted the D-day landing with a technical prowess that was admirable in 1962, but despite an all-star cast, the acting scenes were embarrassingly awful, and the anecdotal tidbits between battle sequences seemed hopelessly contrived. A Bridge Too Far (1977) followed a similar formula, was similarly bad, yet was also oddly enjoyable (like The LD, BTF was based upon a Cornelius Ryan novel). And it, too, relied upon an American star—Robert Redford—to front a largely British cast and thus cameo the film to financial success.

After that, for a while anyway, the most important war flicks were all about Vietnam: The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket. Stars featured in the first two, not so much Platoon. In FMJ, the man behind the camera—Stanley Kubrick—was the star. In 1998, WWII made a comeback in the form of Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, which was nothing less than an assaultive viewing experience—the most traumatizing of all war films. That same year, Terrance Malick revived the war-time poetry of James Jones with The Thin Red Line, perhaps my favorite war film ever, and the only film amongst these to achieve a coherent story and theme with an all-star cast. By the way, I think of Schindler’s List differently: a holocaust story, not a war film in the traditional sense. The Hurt Locker is perhaps the best film from the desert war era. What it has to say about PTSD is incomparable.

The closest thing Dunkirk has to Robert Redford is a guy from a boy-band called One Direction. Otherwise, it has Kenneth Branagh, best known as Hamlet, playing a commander who spends the evacuation stuck on a pier, staring out to sea and making decisions. Then there’s Mark Rylance, who won an Oscar last year for Bridge of Spies, playing a civilian rescuing soldiers on a private boat (apparently one of many at Dunkirk). Star-power isn’t the selling point of Dunkirk. I’d imagined or hoped that it might rival Saving Private Ryan for spectacle, or maybe The Thin Red Line as an artful effort. But it matches neither standard, unfortunately. Behind-the-scenes stuff is regrettably eschewed. The true story of Churchill’s demand that boats return to collect the French is omitted, as is Hitler’s famous halt order to his troops, which allowed British, Belgian, and Dutch soldiers to collect on beaches and climb atop boats.

Instead, a series of Luftwaffe attacks that sunk ships and doused British morale are depicted prior to a triumphant finale. Meanwhile, the story follows three young soldiers who jump queues (lines), stowaway on doomed escape boats, bicker over a French interloper, but eventually make it home to Dover. The biggest hero is a pilot of a Spitfire who seems to take on the Luftwaffe all by himself while running out of fuel. His singular heroics redeem a British air force that is otherwise absent, and his surrendering glide over Dunkirk’s beaches is an eloquent tribute to the operation. These mini-plots all contain their share of suspense and thrills, and are indeed moving. But somehow, the finished product underwhelms. What I’d expected was an expansion of the experience I’d had reading Atonement, Ian McEwan’s war-time novel (later a good film, also), which features harrowing descriptions of the Dunkirk evacuation as a subplot. Watching Dunkirk, I was waiting upon a coup de grace, a war film to end them all. I was ready for a cathartic event, one that would bring me to tears as I thought of my grandfather, James.

I’m not gonna find this in movies.

 

Graeme Daniels, MFT

 

 

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July 19, 2017 · 3:31 pm

We are the dead

 

I’m about two thirds in to the black hole that is Leftovers, the cryptic, apocalyptic HBO drama that has taken my life over the last two weeks. I’m down in the well with Kevin, the psychotic protagonist, with Patti, his tormentor/imaginary friend, wondering when and how I’ll ever get out—not that I want out, necessarily. It’s complicated.

Actually, I’m glad Kevin got rid of Patti, finally. I mean, I think he got rid of her. For all I know, her death will have been another hallucination; a Twin Peaks-like spin into a netherworld, after which she will appear again, stalking him and us with her maddening presence. She reminds me of a girl who wouldn’t leave me alone when I was nine years old, and no, she wasn’t looking for her first kiss. At least we got an explanation out of Patti. Moments before getting her head blown off in a Godfather-like ruse, she pronounces to Kevin, her assassin, a rationale for the diabolic breakdown in feeling that has overcome humanity since October 14th. It concerns attachment, and love, and abandonment, she states—all themes that have dominated this mind-slogging second season.

Kevin thinks he’s in purgatory, having accepted a mission into hell to kill the demon Patti, who in this underworld dream has become a senator, having presumably ridden a wave of end-of-world fervor. Kevin’s been having a rough time lately. He’s dead, sort of, after an inferno-inducing overdose facilitated by…well, nevermind. Anyway, he is estranged from his wife—that happened before season one. He’s been dumped by Nora, his girlfriend, in season two; he’s also estranged from his son, who at this point has joined a Guilty Remnant (a cult devoted to smoking and stalking) split-off group; meanwhile, Kevin’s pissing off his teenage daughter, who thinks him unreliable, blameworthy for her own abandonment struggle. Kevin feels alone, desperately, epitomizingly alone. Patti thinks this is the new normal: October 14th, that spectacular cosmic event of 2011, in which 2% of the world’s population inexplicably vanished, has rendered love moot, by demonstrating once and for all that goodness and justice mean nothing. The seemingly random extraction of people has turned the world upside down: it has made a liar of religion, morality, even medical science. It has shown that personal responsibility, good and bad deeds, don’t matter. It has destroyed our implicit belief in a meritocratic universe.

Two thirds in, Leftovers is shaping up as a parable of depression and deadness: what happens when the event is over, the moment of choice has passed, and only the aftermath remains. Well, questions remain: does it matter if we take care of ourselves, each other? Does it matter if we smoke, for example? The Guilty Remnant hierarchy denounces violence as a means to elicit memory (the ‘We make them remember” ethos), declaring violence “weak”. But if self-care, morality, and love don’t matter, then what’s so important about strength? Is it, as Patti suggests just prior to her demise, a matter of survival in a context wherein happiness or personal growth no longer exist? Are all of these strange behaviors—the delusions, the mutism, the acting out—variations of self-defense? Season two ends in relief, with a breathless, tearful reunion between Kevin and all of the estranged. Paradise? A happy ending? Not quite, but it rebukes Patti’s decree, anyway. Some things matter. Good thing too, for Leftovers was starting to get me down, into defense. No, I won’t choose mutism or smoking.

Here’s what happened. Kevin had been through purgatory and hell. In fact, he technically went through it (them?) twice after being shot on earth after his first return. Guy couldn’t get a break. When he wakes up in that Twilight Zone hotel, recognizing the scene, knowing he was back for another ordeal, he yells “MOTHERFUCKER” into a bathroom mirror in despair. I felt for him, his frustration and hopeless. But I laughed. I laughed my ass off.

 

Graeme Daniels, MFT

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July 9, 2017 · 5:39 pm

The ultimate risk of addiction treatment

 

In the field of addictions work, so-called, it is common for practitioners and later patients who integrate ideas to cast addiction as a problem of emotion.

The addictive personality is one who is pleasure and novelty seeking, and risk taking, it is said. Risk-taking except in the area of intimacy, wherein he/she is likely avoidant. Psychoanalytic theory, attachment theory, and a host of techniques derived from either, are supported by neurobiological research, which affirms that unconscious process, communication that occurs implicitly, via eye contact, body language, and voice prosody, is mediated via the prefrontal orbital areas of the brain, and nurtured (or not) in human beings during early childhood development. The role of the therapist in our society, not unlike that of the early caregiver in some respects, is to serve as an auxiliary ego, using words, reflection, tone and physicality: to connect.

Addicts and trauma survivors would appear to have something in common: a penchant for disconnection, or dissociation, as trauma researchers indicate. John Bowlby, the founder of attachment theory in the latter half of the twentieth century, offered that psychoneurosis derives from protracted separation anxiety: that children deprived of maternal care first protest, then despair, and then finally exhibit detachment, which is characterized by dissociation, a state of disembodied escapism. What latter day research indicates is that infants and toddlers’ levels of the steroid hormone cortisol maintain elevated levels when a caregiver is either absent or insensitive. If such a child is deprived of all caregiving, cortisol levels stay chronically high and therefore children will develop passive parasympathetic strategies of dissociation. Habituation of the brain to the opioid-releasing state of dissociation thus becomes a “default mode” of affect regulation. The result: a predisposition to addictive behaviors, and insecure attachment in the form of an unresponsive, intimacy-avoidant personality.

This perspective is a paradigm shift for many seeking treatment for problems of substance abuse, sexual acting out, food addiction, and such, because society’s inclination is to externalize the problem of addiction: it is the substances that are addictive, for example—not so much that a predisposition within an individual exists. Meanwhile, sex addiction is a term used by some to exert an alternative, moralistic argument against sexual promiscuity, or alternative sexual lifestyles, rather than an assessment term that draws attention to a mood or mind-altering use of behavior. Food addiction is a label that is likewise criticized for being a thinly veiled attack upon the obese, especially obese women. The problem with labels is that they elicit persecutory anxiety, especially in those prone to what Melanie Klein once termed the paranoid-schizoid position, a primitive stage of childhood development. The benefit is that labels, like any succinct form of communication, draws quick and urgent attention to problems that merit just that.

The reason why the paradigm shift is important is so that preventive measures can flourish. Education is of course important, but education in the cognitive, Socratic sense is only the beginning, not the end of the intervention. We can, as we have for decades as a mental health community, provide appropriate medical care for those whose dependencies (to opioids and alcohol, for example) merit such monitoring and focus; we can concurrently and thereafter dogmatize that the consequences of addiction (jails, institutions, and death, to quote 12-step programs) are prohibitive; we can gingerly (or not) shame addicts into realizing that their behaviors are self-centered and immature, and we can impose various consequences based upon the premise that imposing limits will alter behavior (actually, limits are a good idea, but are mostly beneficial for friends and family—not as an agent of change in treating addiction). But for real change, the following is necessary.

Consciousness. Structure. Honesty. Time. Consciousness comes first. Not consciousness of the problems outlined in the last paragraph. There’s plenty of consciousness-raising about that already. Consciousness of feeling states, beginning perhaps with bodily sensations, as mirrored, amplified, and sometimes spoken to by an observant other, perhaps a therapist: someone who will monitor the moment-to-moment reactions of the patient; modulate closeness, sensitive to the fears that may manifest as withdrawal, whether the person is aware of their defenses or not. Structure comes in the form of routines: go to therapy, 12-step meetings, work and family obligations, etcetera—those necessary things to do to support growth and recovery. Time: the re-building of this afflicted self takes time, patience, and ongoing consciousness, about things like bodily sensations, feeling states that are felt and not—about that which has been driven underground, into the unconscious, and otherwise discharged via behavior.

This recovery process is another kind of risk. The biggest risk of all: to re-attach.

 

Graeme Daniels, MFT

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June 26, 2017 · 5:34 am

More things in heaven and earth

 

I am watching it. I am compelled, and I should not be writing of this while I know so little, while so much is unexplained. But that is my life, my “subjective” reality: the unknowing. And not knowing doesn’t stop me from writing or doing my job.

I am four episodes into The Leftovers, an HBO series adapted from a novel by Tom Perrotta which is set in the aftermath of a rapture-like event in which 2% of the world’s population has inexplicably disappeared. October 14th of 2011, is a 9/11-style shorthand for a mass “departure” that scientists can’t explain. This results in a social malaise that recalls P.D James’ Children Of Men. In that novel (also made into a film), the world’s population has become sterile for similarly mysterious reasons, and in the aftermath an aging (and therefore dying) population is variously depressed or psychotic. Cultists speculate that mankind is being punished; that its hubris, perhaps manifest as a privileging of science, is to blame.

In Leftovers, the focus is not so much on a failure of science as it is that of mainstream religion. Major denominations are nowhere to be seen. A baby Jesus replica is stolen and later desecrated by the acting out daughter of a local police chief of a grim, middle-American town. Baby Jesus is later returned, but significantly, the response is indifferent, and the police chief ultimately dumps the rejected figure on the side of a road. Meanwhile, cultists are represented by a group call the Guilty Remnant, a name reduced to the letters GR until episode two. This tidbit of withholding is typical of the series thus far, which parallels the air of unknowing by minimizing exposition, thus keeping viewers in the dark, and not just about the headline departure, but also about personal details. I am gripped, but optimally frustrated—the essence of suspense, I suppose. Four hours in, I am yet to understand the following: why do all the followers of GR smoke (an ironic play on ‘don’t waste your breath’?) Have the departed transformed into dogs or birds, creatures of either violence or passivity, as is also suggested? Why do the dreams of some enter those of others, as indicated by the profusion of nightmares featuring strangers and foreshadowed events? Why is the police chief estranged from his kids and his wife? It seems implicit that something happened, and whatever it was, it happened before the departure.

It’s just a story, after all: a good one that promises more about meaning; perhaps how religion, ostensibly exiled, has a defiant, parting comment on humanity. The stories of those who enter therapy are good stories also, and the details are likewise often obscured; divulgence of truth, not to mention meaning, is delayed. It is a feature of projective identification, a primitive defense yet more ubiquitous than most imagine, that individuals communicate in fragments: through play, language that is reduced to slang, idioms and inside jokes; by ‘acting out’ infused with terse revelations; by somatic displays that medicine can’t explain. Symbolic expression, via the articulate, coherent use of language, has broken down, though it may repair and unfold over time. Unpleasant emotion is dissociated, replaced by a standard of flatness and baffling obsession. When something has happened that is traumatic and not understood, life goes on, promise onlookers. It goes on with ritual, structure; with substitute things to do that mark time but also betray, in pieces, an epistemological drive.

The police chief of Leftovers loses his bagel in its inadequate incubator, and he’s not gonna take it lying down. He bemuses colleagues by not giving up on the search: for his bagels, for that baby Jesus. He finds the bagels also, eventually, through a semi-violent dissembling of machinery. They were stuck in back of the toaster, trapped in a secret passage, burnt. As the chief pulls them out, he sits back, moping over burnt food, dead…something. He is mildly relieved, having discharged energy from a nagging mystery. He is also depressed, aware that mysteries will keep coming, and that unfolding reality may yet be horrific. “Say it! Fuckin’ say it!” he later cries towards the wife who won’t speak, won’t explain. But she wants to leave him, she writes, giving an answer. It’s not enough. He pleads to know why. About everything.

 

Graeme Daniels, MFT

 

 

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June 10, 2017 · 6:17 pm

Interruptus

 

A hypothetical dialogue (believe it or not) about a crisis:

 

“What’s the point in talking about it. It’s not gonna solve anything”

“What’s the point of checking out that person at the gym. You’re married, right?”

“Yeah”

“Well, that’s not gonna solve anything, either”

“Yeah, but…”

“What?”

“It’s different”

“How?”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously, put it into words”

“Well…I dunno, it’s…when I’m looking at someone I’m…I don’t know how to say it”

“You’re blocking. You know but you stop thinking, and you act instead”

“Right. You’ve said that before. I’m…wait, acting?”

“You’re acting on something, a feeling”

“…yeah, you know what it is—this is interesting—I think I am solving something, in a way. I mean, when I do that stuff I’m taking care of business, if you know what I mean. It feels necessary. It’s…”

(pause)

“…you want me to say the rest?”

(sigh) “Maybe, I…now I lost my train of thought”

“Interruptus”

“What?”

“Forget it”

“Oh, I get what you’re saying, I think. Well, I mean—okay—I’m expressing my sexuality, right? Jeez, that sounds weird putting it like that. Finishing, I mean. I’m…(laughs) I don’t know why this is so hard to say. I’m used to…I guess I can’t control myself, or it seems like…I just can’t turn it off, ya know?”

(pause)

“Or on, in another sense. Again, it seems like—”

“Yeah, okay, I get it. You’re not gonna say it for me. I need to use the words, give it meaning because…Gawd, I wish you’d explain again why that’s so important. (pause) Awright, so again, I can’t just turn off my sexuality, right? That’s the problem. It’s there…all the time. Waiting”

“True”

(pause)

“Okay…(shrugs)…so?”

“But so is the rest of you”

 

Graeme Daniels, MFT

 

 

 

 

 

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June 4, 2017 · 5:51 pm

How do I…?

How do I…?

  A question that emerges after the story has been told, the problem outlined. A man doesn’t trust himself: he has a plan to stop doing what he’s been doing for a long time, perhaps his entire life. He’s determined; the stakes are higher than they have ever been before, which usually means that others will be affected. Guilt will be key. The guilt stems from the prospect of failure, a background of it, and the implicit knowledge that there is something inside that demands expression.

 How do I…?

 As a therapist, I attend to the question on its own terms, responding with an outline’s semblance. First I mimic the crowd, who also knows the story, the history of the problem, and the stakes. Those stakes are reiterated. Regular reminders about the consequences of problem behavior: the impacts upon self and especially others; the damage to health, career, family. To hear some, you’d think that nothing more than such interventions are called for in the prevention of self destruction. I think that therapy supplies the subtext: people care; the man, despite himself, and despite the observations of some, cares also Further, reality can be cruel. Fate is indifferent.

 Implicit is the call for fellowship. The man in question has been isolating, not talking to others, getting lost in himself. Where is the accountability? I ask. I’m quick to explain: I don’t mean he should answer to me, or that he owes anything to anyone. At an early stage of therapy, I avoid stepping into dynamic roles wherein lines of authority are unconsciously laid. I mean something subtler; having something like structure, containment—that there is someone to speak to, to be honest to, when mania has run its course.

 How do I…?

 Continuity. How do you keep it up, your motivation? A woman changes her mind, doesn’t want what she wanted last month, has forgotten what drove her in another mood; what seemed different. The next twisting, turning switch must be explained while the past is denied. A therapist is memory—an aspect of containment. Something changed. Why? The question doesn’t compel answers as much as it does thinking, the protraction of curiosity, and slowing down. Very little has to happen “right now”.

 How do 1…?

Needs. A subset of the why question: why do people do what they do, especially if what they do generates guilt? Why doesn’t guilt itself motivate change? Why doesn’t remorse always do what courtrooms think it should? People do what they do in spite of guilt, in spite of shame, guilt’s less confident twin. Truth—that something within—hurts; it hurts self and others, and it always will. It needs out. It needs to be released, titrated in the spirit of compromise, for if it can be discharged without anyone knowing, then no one gets hurt.

 How do I…?

 Hope. When continuity has broken down; when the relapse once cast as a mere change of mind has returned the individual back to square one, a knowledge of pain lingers. The day after is another appointment. The fellowship, in all likelihood, is still there. People still care. The questions are still worthwhile. Curiosity is resilient. The therapist is in his office, waiting.

Graeme Daniels, MFT

 

 

 

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May 21, 2017 · 7:14 am

AB1775 goes to the Supreme Court

 

I thought it was done. You might have thought I was done writing about it, at least. I thought the battle of AB1775, a droplet in the public consciousness, was over, and that our side had lost.

Our side is comprised of therapists, mostly, and a few of our clients. Everyone else—police, politicians, parents’ groups, the public at large, I guess—thought it a piece of legislation that was long overdue. Ever since 1980, when the original Child Abuse and Neglect Act (CANRA) was passed, everyone seemed to think it common sense and only too right that creators and distributors of child pornography ought to be prosecuted, and not only prosecuted, but outed by psychotherapists who hear of these pornographers’ behaviors in their offices.

Then something interesting happened. Thirty plus years later someone noticed that users, or viewers of child pornography were not being reported. Or, therapists weren’t sure if they ought to report these people, because the Civil Code didn’t stipulate as such. So, here’s what happened: A lawyer or two for the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists (CAMFT) decided to write a law (AB1775) with the help of law enforcement, and send it to the California legislature for a rubber stamp. The law inserted the words “streaming”, “download”, and “viewing” into a section outlining criteria for reporting child exploitation. The law was indeed rubbed stamped—a 72 to zero vote. Most of CAMFT’s thirty thousand-deep membership learned of the bill’s existence a month prior to its passing, in a newsletter release pertaining to legislation CAMFT was supporting.

The law went into effect Jan 1st, 2015, but before long it was being challenged in court by, among others, my friend and colleague, Don Matthews, in a law suit aimed at Kamala Harris, then the attorney general of California. The plaintiffs asserted that child porn users in general do not perpetrate ‘hands on’ or direct contact offenses; that those who voluntarily (a crucial point here) seek therapy do so because they want to stop the behavior and are thus seeking help. The plaintiffs’ case in Matthews v. Harris (there are two other therapists on the suit) was struck down in Superior court, and again in appeal, leading many to think that AB1775 was here to stay. But this week we have news that the California Supreme Court has decided to review the case once again. I hope they will consider the case differently than previous judges have.

Here’s a review of opinion: Superior Court judge Michael Stern upheld the law, finding that no constitutional right to use child porn existed, and that viewers of child porn can have no reasonable expectation of privacy, given their (likely) awareness that such behavior is socially unacceptable and criminal. Court of appeals judge Roger Bern echoed that possession is not a right and added that requiring therapists to report possession is not significantly different from requiring therapists to report those who create child porn. Judges further contend that reports to authorities may block the proliferation of child porn, and finally, that just because child porn users haven’t directly harmed children in the past doesn’t mean they won’t in the future.

Well, where to start. Firstly, it’s frustrating that judges would predicate their assessment of therapists’ obligations on whether a client or patient’s disclosures are of criminal behavior, the criminality of which is presumably understood. How is it possible that no one has explained that there are numerous crimes, including heinous ones like murder, that therapists are NOT legally obliged to report to authorities if the disclosures pertain to past events? Therefore, the criminality itself, known or otherwise, of a disclosure, is clearly NOT sufficient grounds for a confidentiality violation, and never has been.

Well, what about children? Isn’t the salient factor in the disclosures targeted by AB1775 the harm aimed at this protected class of citizen?

Yes. However, there are two problems with this “shouldn’t protecting children be our top priority” argument. The first is my own idiosyncratic (perhaps) bias: if we were to persecute everyone whose consumption of products enabled the exploitation of children, then we’d be exposing large sections of our internationally-reaching consumer society. To isolate one industry is not judicious discrimination; it is scapegoating, and (especially with respect to teen pornography) staggeringly hypocritical. The second problem concerns something else that is little considered: that lawyers and clerics, two occupational classes that hear their fair share of child porn disclosures, are exempt from the requirement to report child abuse, including child porn use. Lawyers simply do not appear on the Civil Code’s list of mandated reporters. Priests and other clerics do appear on this list, but are exempted from reporting through the loophole of code 11166 (c) if disclosures are made within a “penitential communication” (i.e.: a confessional)

So much for “shouldn’t protecting children be our top priority”

Next, if we think reports to authorities will block the proliferation of child porn, can we check that supposition given that the law has now been in effect for two and a half years? I’ve made some effort personally in this area, calling child protective services offices, plus an internet crimes task force based within the San Jose Police Department. My efforts have not yielded results. Officials have either not returned my calls, or not known the answer to my questions, or they have passed my questions on to other officials, who also do not answer my calls. No one seems able to even estimate how many reports have been made of child porn use in the last two years, whether in response to the new legislation or not. Also, with respect to blocking proliferation, how does that work if, like most of the electronica we purchase, the child porn is being produced and disseminated from overseas? Has California’s law dented the child porn industries of Thailand or Russia in any way that is discernible?

Finally, with respect to Judge Bern’s last point, since when do we persecute people on the basis of what they might do? If you get picked up by police for committing a relatively minor crime, are subsequent punishments justified because they seek to prevent a presumed escalation of criminal behavior?

Wait. The voices of immigrants, people of color–two classes of people that are slightly more popular than users of child porn–are suddenly in my head. Of course we persecute people on the basis of what they might do.

 

Graeme Daniels, MFT

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May 7, 2017 · 3:18 pm

Love and hate and Don Juan

 

It was all a fantasy, an act, and yet it seduced because it seemed so real. It even took off from the stage at one point, crossing some invisible plane, whooping and dancing with harsh laughter, helicoptering over a star-gazing audience. There will have been more special effects in Don Juan in Soho than in the original, 14th century legend, but the essentials of a drama that has inspired the likes of Moliere, Byron, Camus, and Mozart are unchanged.

Patrick Marber is the playwright who has turned Don Juan into a twenty first century rogue in west end London. He appears currently as David Tennant (of Doctor Who fame), transformed from his sexy nerd sci-fi persona to that of a lusty, unfettered snake. His Don Juan is a self-confessed “child”, unapologetically seeking pleasure, while decrying the envy and hypocrisy of those whose outrage implies they wouldn’t want what he has. I was drawn to see the play because the main character was described in press releases as a sex addict, which is the fashionable term these days, replacing that of libertine, womanizer, or more plainly, sinner. Religion and morality have been the traditional lenses via which Don Juan has been criticized or admired. My profession, and specifically, the corner of it that treats sex addiction, has afforded sex addicts something like empathy while retaining our fascination, and it is this fascination that prevails in Don Juan, even as the seduction subsides, and tragedy unfolds with Reaperish inevitability.

And yet, what is most fascinating about Don Juan in Soho is not his seductions of women (only one such exercise is captured in full flight), or even his masterful manipulation of important male characters in the play, such as his long-suffering and devoted man-servant, and his curmudgeonly but foolhardy father. Ultimately, what I found most fascinating was his seduction of the audience, including me, though like a proud would-be target, I found myself resisting the supposedly irresistible, and feeling separate, even haughty, as the audience cheered and whooped along with the Don Juan specter.

This seduction is for audience sympathy, through a complex display of honesty, entitlement, defiance, and counter-provocation. As Tennant’s DJ argues that he’s not a rapist (“I don’t grab pussy”), I hear echoes of a familiar rationale. The libertine/addict claims he is not hurting anyone, contrary to the claims of others, like (in DJ’s case) his man-servant, or more ominously, the claims of brothers of a jilted bride. He points out that all involved are chronologically adult, and thus responsible for themselves, and anyway, have derived pleasure from his sexual behaviors, which is Don Juan’s all-justifying raison d’etre.

To those who disagree, or who seek to penetrate his hidden depths, DJ exudes contempt, even if they are, like his man-servant (Stan), people he values and cares about somewhat. DJ’s seeming need of Stan is not only endearing, it tugs upon suspicion that he, like the addict as he/she is understood by modern psychology, has needs that are not encompassed by physical pleasure, but merely symbolized by it. Needs for attachment. For love. For distance. Of course, DJ will never say or admit as much, and this will be his downfall, everyone says. So, besides his pursuit of sex, he alternates between acts of subtle supplication (for attachment), and efforts to subvert the wholesome.

A Kleinian analyst would have a field day watching this play. From start to finish, DJ seems most drawn to seduce those who are innocent—those whom he’d find deluded, or hypocritical. He is a child seeking pleasure, and thus wants to suckle and be suckled, but he also bites and seeks to destroy that upon which he projects his ambivalence. He callously drops the woman whom he’d married just two weeks prior to the play’s action, and whom he’d diligently seduced over the course of a year (just for the challenge, apparently). In the play’s most entertaining sequence, he hits upon the bride of another man in a hospital, hours after having been responsible for the groom’s injuries following a boating accident. Even more improbably, DJ seduces the bride while being fellated by another woman whom he’d met only moments before this scene.

His aggression isn’t exclusively directed at women. He is misanthropic, not merely misogynist, as some suggest of Don Juan. Those who highlight the latter listen selectively, and are gender-centric in their outlook. DJ delights in hoodwinking his rich father, on whose aristocratic fortune he depends. His enactment of remorse for his father’s benefit reminds me why sex addicts enter therapy, because I often hear about the pleasure’s aftermath of guilt, or even more so, of the shame of being exposed. When DJ seduced me, he did so because he revealed his darker, unrepentant side, and I rarely hear the level of honesty that DJ otherwise exhibits.

He temporarily, at least, torments a homeless Islamic man, who resists DJ’s attempt to bribe him into making blaspheming remarks. Ostensibly, this scene illustrates again the libertine’s distaste for the wholesome, for he thinks them false. But the Islamic man shows his “integrity” by refusing to blaspheme for the reward DJ offers, and as a result, DJ rewards him anyway. A secondary purpose of this and another scene I won’t detail might be a politically correct subtext: Christendom is oppressive, harboring of sex offenders, and repressive of sexuality in general, the protagonist declares. But DJ and his playwright live in 2017, and theater-goers are progressive-leaning, so author and actor are more careful with Muslim sensibilities.

Amid his two or three soliloquy/diatribes, DJ expands upon his political/philosophical outlook: he rails against men in power, makes allusions to modern race politics, the aforementioned quotables of Donald Trump, now so etched in the public mind that the lines mocking them draw instant recognition and approval. DJ, we are led to believe, is a relative hero: in 2017, he has an advantage over his medieval ancestors, because today it is less offensive to be merely promiscuous, even if that promiscuity is extreme. The audience for Don Juan in Soho ultimately applauds the protagonist and is saddened by his demise: partly because he’s clever and attractive, but more importantly because he seems democratic—meaning, he will fuck anyone, of any color, religious, or class background. Because he isn’t hateful.

But that’s incorrect, actually, because Tennant’s DJ isn’t entirely honest. He is a child, but he’s not a lover. As the Kleinian lens teaches us, children can be hateful, and may remain in that hateful state throughout their lives. And maybe that’s okay, we might quietly, reservedly suggest—as long as that hate is understood, exposed or tempered by notions of justice, for example. So, Don Juan from Soho is hateful, and maybe that’s okay with his audience, because the things he hates—the people he hates—are those whom his audience hates also.

 

 

 

 

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April 18, 2017 · 6:21 pm

In praise of fantasy

There’s a case to be made that acting out results from a failure of the mind. By acting out, I refer to an umbrella term, comprised on the one hand of behaviors deemed unhealthy or destructive by mental health principles, or a leaking, in another sense, of mental nuclei, into the atmosphere, into the psyches of others. Why? Because the purpose of acting out is to express something.

Fantasy is not a form of acting out. Not really. Fantasy, writes author Michael Bader, has a compensatory function; it replaces behaviors rather than fuels them. It serves repression while simultaneously illustrating its failure. This is an important idea, this paradox, especially for those who fear imagination, and wonder what it will stir and then collapse. Are violent fantasies really dangerous? Perhaps, for those few individuals whose minds overflow with impulse; whose minds cannot contain energy and contradiction. For the unimaginative, thought informs behavior, as if there were no division between thought and action, and therefore no room for choice. And that’s a two-fold problem with addiction: it squashes both choice and imagination.

Voyeurism offends for several reasons. One reason is that voyeurism is an uncreative, passive act. It is the lazy expression of a frightened audience, living vicariously through the actions of others: heroes and villains, playing out love and hate. Sex and violence are traditionally forbidden acts, except in defined contexts, and so literary and visual arts must follow rules, identify and exhibit the right contexts, stylize the choreography versus capturing mere reality, and assume some manner of moral stance. Stylizing violence has been easier, somehow: its artifices are well-contained in sports, in movies and in television, and if a culture has had many victories in the realm of violence (many wars it has won, for example), then there are many heroes to celebrate, thus dignifying annihilation. The plight of victims can be observed also, but it makes for lesser entertainment. Note the absence, for example, of an all-encompassing novel or film about the holocaust*, as there is no way to give it a happy ending.

The term happy ending has a crude sexual meaning. Part of my work is with clients (mostly men), whose sexual imaginations have been lost to the world of that bastard genre, pornography. Fantasy is effortful. Relative to spectating, it fatigues, relies too much upon a sexuality that is within oneself. To these men, I often pose the question, “what happened to fantasy, to imagination?” Some gaze back at me with quizzical expressions, querying my naïvete, and wondering if I can possibly understand the scope of their loss. The loss relates to broken memory, a reliance upon a visual record, and a breakdown of narrative, leading to a stolid, joyless experience of images. There is fear: an unconscious, neurotic belief that memory can’t be held, and that dreams drain away. A kind of hoarding seems like the answer to an empty core. I find myself discussing compromises: a negotiated plan involving restrained double-takes in public, a looking away from visual cues, or a measured duration of concentrated looking.

We look away, consistently, from that which we should examine. We gaze longingly at that which merits only a glance.

*a paraphrasing of filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, who abandoned his early nineties film, Aryan Papers, declaring the project too depressing, too big, for cinema. He further noted that Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, which seems to cover much of the holocaust story, is actually a tale of exceptions—those who survived.

Graeme Daniels, MFT

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