Does Being Poor Make You Neurotic?

The title is "What Poverty Does to the Young Brain" by M. Ostranger.(see http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/what-poverty-does-to-the-young-brain)  And it does seem to prove the point: poverty hurts us.
I am really not sure. I grew up in a ghetto but never knew it.  I always thought that living in overcrowded, noisy conditions, sharing beds and closets, was the way everyone lived.  That the same old cheap food was the way everyone ate.  If there is no other frame of reference how can we judge and how can it have an impact?  We lived apart from mainstream culture,  never went to a restaurant to see how others ate, etc.  In other words I had nothing in my life to compare anything to.
That was also true of my parents.  When I was sixteen, one of my dad’s friends turned to me and said,  “Your dad is so cheap he squeaks.”  I never knew that. Then I started to put the pieces together:  when we bought anything we traveled to the East side to where everything was cheap.  It slowly began to sink in.  It was not his poverty that was the problem; it was that in his mind he still lived in the ghetto, and never ever got out of it.

When I asked for music lessons they sent me downtown where the lesson was fifty cents.  I never thought it should be any different.  When the kids on the block took tennis lessons I was the only one who couldn’t because I believed my father could not afford it.  In my teens it was no longer true but I was impregnated with this belief and I believed that lessons were too expensive.    He had me living in the ghetto most of my early life, afraid to spend (no longer true today). It was only later, by accident, that I learned that he never spent a cent and had money when we were teen-agers. Meanwhile when I could begin to make comparisons it affected me because I felt that I was not as good or as important as other kids.  This was compounded by never being hugged or talked to. It was not just poverty; it was a state of mind inculcated into us.  That state of mind was made clear to me when I was seventeen, when in an interview a interviewer ask a woman why she wore such outlandish hats?  She said, and I remember every word decades later,  “for the best reason on earth; I like them.”  Her feelings choose them, and for the first time in my life I learned about the important of feelings.  I always believed we had to explain and justify everything we did.  It carried over into how I did psychotherapy early in my career.  The patient had to explain his behavior and justify it.  It was never enough to simply feel; it needed to be justified at every minute.  So insights/explaining feelings was the sine qua non of my therapy:  it was Jewish through and through. It began with that other Jewish guy,  what was his name? And spread its intellectual tentacles everywhere in life.  

Feelings never counted; ideas about feelings is what counted.  And the more brilliant the insights the more we believed the patient was getting better. And he was: only in his head.  This was the apotheosis of it all; producing a brilliant mind  who could spin out insights on and on and sound like the  best therapist on earth.  And it goes on with Cognitive/Behavior therapy, to this day; still a Jewish disease which we mistakenly call therapy.  Ayayay  (BTW: AYAYAY is also a Jewish howl).  I guess my point is,  Do you have to be aware of lack to be hurt?  No.  I was hurt by lack of touch even though I never knew kids should be held and hugged.  I felt the pain.  I was not hiding it from others.  I was never aware of it.  Being aware is not and never will be the same as feeling it because feeling is where the need/pain lies; where our humanity is sequestered.  I felt the pain in Primal Therapy.  And to achieve that I had to literally go back in time.  So to live in the Now, we must return to the scene of the crime.  This was hidden from me my whole life.  Worse, I hid it from me.  And I dare say, that this is the case with most of us today. And we go to a therapist for help and we get more sickness in its hallowed name.  We avoid the one thing that could cure … feelings.  And the smarter we get about ourselves the dumber we become.  Not because of secret pride; because it lies in the cultural zeitgeist that militates against feeling in almost every therapy extant.

I learned something from this:  that feelings will direct you to the pain and make you consciously aware; all by themselves.  No instructions needed.


What this disease does, (does this sound anti-Semitic?), no; I describe it is a cultural trait not a jeremiad.  The effect is to drive people in their head. “Head” is the reference point; is it logical and fit in with our theory?  Then we know it is right.  You guessed it.  I am anti-head because therein lies so much of the “bad” in treatment. Feelings have become an afterthought.  And without feelings we live in the "anti-chambre de la mort".  What do I mean, “we will live in  this anti-chamber of death?” Because without feelings, the most natural of expressions, we block life.
We block the essence of our humanness. They are meant to be felt and fully experienced.  Otherwise they are suppressed and begin their life of damage; they find no way out of their emotional prison,  Eventually, the blocking of life leads to early disease and early death; not always and not with everyone but I have seen it so much.  Staying alienated from feelings is a DISEASE, not a cure! Psychotherapy as we know it is fatal. It is the ultimate affliction.  It reinforces the cleavage between ideas and feelings.  Being aware is not life saving; it is the opposite.  Being conscious is life saving; it means a cohesion of all parts of us. It means that we are not engaged in the unconscious effort of repressing feelings.

And above all, being consciousness means treating people and our children humanely so that they grow up enhancing the culture, not destroying it.

And now in therapy we get more of the same: Behavior Therapy where feelings take a back seat, if any seat at all, and everything lies in the narrow reaches of the thinking mind.  In  French there are two words that are close to each other. One is “évènement":  an event.  The other is ‘Avènement,”  an event resting on the highest reaches of achievement.  The beginning that heralds a new king or new period  or the arrival of a grand new therapy ... a new reign.  Behavior/Cognitive therapy seems to be that reign but it is still the old Freudian psychotherapy dressed up on the king’s new robes.  All of it, all of it, means saying goodbye to our humanness.  Is that what we want?

But aback to my point: day when I was fifteen  I was next door at the neighbor’s house, the Winters, their real name.  We were talking and joking, when all of a sudden the mother, Mrs Winter came into the kitchen, her back against the chopping block and she rapped and joked and had the best time.  She stayed for an hour.  I was so shocked that I ran home and said, “Guess what?  Mrs Winters stayed with us and talked to us for an hour. It was so wonderful; I wish I had mother like that”  Where up My Dad got angry and told me never to talk like that again.  In his mind I had committed a crime. In my mind I was expressing a feeling, an innocent one.  But I learned something: that mothers are supposed to spend time with you and joke and talk to you.  Now, I never know that was a basic need but my body suffered from it without my knowing it.  I needed some emotional companionship and I hurt because I never had it.  The hurt occurred even though I could not name it nor even know that something like love was missing.  I never forgot that day.  Being aware of it is a first step and yet a far cry from feeling the pain that is gnawing away at our systems without stop. “Aware” means detached, looking at feeling from far  away. Feeling means being in it and being done with it.  Awareness means a burden and a sentence for a lifetime.  Intellectuals usually prefer intellectual therapy and it is what they get.  They have been comfortable with their style of life, their neurosis.  Too often we choose a therapy that allows a bit of tweaking and not basic change. It is not either or; we can be consciously aware, and that is the summun bonum.

It is our choice.