Sept, 2011 - The Nyack Villager

Mental Health Notes
by Daniel Shaw, L.C.S.W
Ups and Downs
I had a great vacation this summer.
My whole family did. We relaxed,
we had fun, we had a great change
of scenery, great activities, great
food, great people to be with. It
was perfect.
And then we got back to JFK on a Sunday
evening and only Dante could do justice to
the infernal torment that ensued for the next 5
or 6 hours. I will spare you the gruesome details.
Suffice it to say, we finally got to home
sweet home early Monday morning.
“Let’s pretend we’re still on vacation,” I suggested
to my wife later in the week, as we confronted
the bills, the schedules, the yard
project, the lack of enough sleep, the suddenly
not-working refrigerator and the possibly notworking
dishwasher, the bills … did I mention
the bills?
But that’s the thing—vacations are great when
they are very different from the rest of your life.
Hopefully, it doesn’t mean that life=miserable,
vacation=wonderful. But vacation, when it’s
good, is good because it’s somewhere around
180° different from your normal routine.
I’ve worked with people who had it very hard
growing up— suffering extreme abuse of various
kinds. And some of these people have a
fantasy that, given what they have been
through, life should now be a bed of roses.
And they are extremely angry when it isn’t,
which is, oh, pretty much every other day,
more or less. A big part of living well for
these people is accepting that they have to
work at creating and maintaining a good life—
it doesn’t just happen, it isn’t automatically the
reward you get for surviving a terrible childhood.
And when you’re doing your best, and
hurts and disappointments still happen—it
doesn’t prove that life really isn’t worth living,
or that the world and all its people are cruel,
and you are doomed. It just means that life
has its ups and downs, and it is up to us to do
the best we can and make the most of what
we’ve got.
At the same time, I notice that one need not
have had a terrible childhood to unconsciously
entertain this fantasy—that life is supposed to
be and actually can be wonderful all the time,
that we can always be at our best. Many of us
with happier childhoods have this fantasy too
—and it is sold to us constantly, in commercials,
seminars, retreats, health food stores,
plastic surgeons’ offices, and the endless
stream of self-help books and tapes that relentlessly
identify yet another seven steps to
this, that or the other.
It’s true that we are living with a bad
economy these days, and it looks
like we may be living with it for a
while. There are many more people
out there now who are busy just figuring
out how to survive, let alone
live well. But I’ve had the opportunity
to work with people who have
nothing, and with people who have
everything, and I’ve seen both these kinds of
people have the same amount of anguish about
solving the same puzzle—how to be happy,
how to feel good, how to have a good life.
Long ago, Freud said, with a touch of irony,
that the goal of psychotherapy was to convert
neurotic misery into ordinary unhappiness.
But most psychotherapists today would agree,
I think, that we are aiming for more. We
want to help people find the strength and resilience
to get through hardships; and to find
the desire and the willingness to work at
building a good life. The two go hand in
hand—there can be no lasting good in life unless
one has the strength and the resilience to
endure and get through hardships, whether
they be material or spiritual.
Another famous psychoanalyst, Frieda
Fromm-Reichman, treated a young, severely
schizophrenic woman some years ago. As the
young woman began to regain her health and
sanity, she became terrified of leaving the hospital
and being without the therapist. As the
time for the girl’s discharge came closer, in response
to the girl’s worries about life beyond
therapy, Fromm-Reichman was honest with
her: “I never promised you a rose garden,” she
said, which became the title of the memoir the
woman later wrote, under the pen name Hannah
Green. Fromm-Reichman had already
been through a great deal herself: escaping the
Holocaust and starting a new life in a strange
land, divorce, and loneliness. At the same
time, she loved her work, and nurtured many
patients and students. She was loved and respected
by all who knew her. A good life.
Most people can’t always be on vacation, and
none of us can always dwell in a garden of
roses. It may seem, to some people, that
everything comes easily to them, but I’m certain
that most people with good, happy lives
are people who have worked hard, with persistence,
to build and maintain that happiness.
Daniel Shaw, LCSW, practices psychotherapy in
Nyack and in NY City. He can be reached at
(845) 548-2561 in Nyack and in NY City at
(212) 581-6658, shawdan@aol.com or online
at www.danielshawlcsw.com ✫
22 The Nyack Villager September, 2011