When I don’t drink I face the night largely defenseless, and I often regress to infancy, when I was helpless and terrified. I wake up shaking in terror often.
So of course finding and protecting “the bean” is a good sign. At one point my mother dropped it into 5′ of water, and I rescued it.
And I am of course intelligent enough to realize this is deep stuff, and psychosis not an impossible concomitant. But if I were going to go crazy, it would have happened long ago. You don’t go crazy when you contact deep realities: you go crazy because you cannot.
And it is odd to me to think that the whole Western world was obsessed with the ridiculous Freudian ideas of psychosocial development for so long, especially since he saw, then discarded, the only true part of it, which is that the sexual abuse of children and adolescents was common then as now.
What children need is warmth and understanding, and it is a trauma and crisis of our age that we have multiple generations of emotionally superficial, wounded people providing the care to the next generation.
What is natural for humankind, what is in our genetics as they have developed across at least hundreds of thousands of years, but which likely stem from much deeper roots, is for a child to be raised by multiple generations of women who are from his or her family.
I think generalized neuroses really began in this country at least when we became mobile, and women were separated from their mothers and aunts. One woman, alone with an infant, is a herculean task. I really believe this. And this situation will amplify the fears and maladjustments of that woman in ways which no one is there to see or correct. The husband is gone. There is the child, housework, and TV. There is the telephone, too, of course, and my mother make ample use of that. She was lonely, and she was often angry at me, in no small measure, no doubt, because I was a rambunctious and nearly compulsively disobedient child. For her part, she was obsessed with appearances, and obsessed with the horrifying idea that I might be, as they said, “a brat”.
I look at all this, and I look around me, and I see dead children everywhere. They are the ones who use heroin, knowing it will kill them eventually. They are the alcoholics, and the cruel.
My path forward is to forget about saving other people. That has always been a distraction. I think I might come back to it–I hope I do–but it will only be intelligent and useful when I have walked through my scars and inner landscape and returned to this very moment as a single human being.
It is hard, being someone working on these issues in a world which is manifestly frightened of deep emotion, but I have done it my whole life, and see no reason it won’t continue. I feel, in fact, all this is slowly getting easier, as I let the largest things express themselves, and as I, in turn, mirror with attention my own inner experience.
Depth is not a place you get lost if you anchor it in your body. Your body does not lie, and contains within it the seeds of everything you need.
Just within the last week I realized I have been suppressing positive emotions. They come up, they show up at my door, and I tell them to go away. I’m having a fucking pity party and I don’t need no fucking good cheer.
But why? Oh, we are all ludicrous–perhaps not, actually–but I certainly am. Habits run deep.