For Patricia
“Insight into a client's hidden, personal ideal (fictional final goal) is essential for a permanent solution. Unless an overblown ideal is discovered and dissolved, there will always be a temptation to intoxicate oneself with fantasy, an activity that is easily facilitated by substance abuse. The deep inferiority that many addicts feel or fear is caused by the great distance they experience from an impossible high goal of personal superiority. Other people are often seen as obstacles or enemies, and the real, normal challenges of life are viewed as threatening tests, interruptions of personal fun and pleasure, or distractions from personal glory. Within this perspective of life, withdrawing and 'getting high' can be very seductive, and the addiction can be used as a persuasive excuse for avoiding reponsibility.”—Dr. Weiss the strict Adlerian
Fantasy
The water shimmers
Turtle green
Smooth like wax it holds the sky
In what's beneath,
It recreates the heavens
Amid algae and muck,
The snap and plash of creatures feeding
Underneath, who barely disturb the mirror
But swim around the rays of light below
Creating in it patterns,
Signatures of their lives,
Spirals of their longing,
Visions of their sky,
Controlling how they move,
What they look at, where they feed,
Within the murky camouflage
Their world provides.
They seek to control the moss,
Control the stone.
And so they protect what lies sacred within them
And take occasional gasps of the sun
Before resuming their wiggling around
What they've created of themselves
To keep from wriggling out.
Addiction
Identify the moment in your life
When the pain started,
Feel it without escaping,
Then let it go—
Ah, but feeling it is the easy part,
It is the most familiar of territory,
It is the life I have expressed most beautifully,
Not so this letting the past,
Something only dimly known, go
And knowing it for now as only a tool
To introduce me to the blues,
Steely Dan, and the countless
Words of denial
That outlive the truth—
Is it
Forgiving the fact that mere pain
Could keep me from God?
That new-born spirits can be so easily
Crumpled by circumstantial
Evidence?
Time makes things seem
As if they weren't real
As if my decisions weren't final,
Weren't even mine—
The gaudy power of my misery
Merely a trinket in the row
Of common souls
Almost commiserating.
There so much work to do
Undoing the work,
Unwrapping the rubber band
That almost learned how
To fly.
