My Way (article)

I was born (and raised) in San Francisco in 1939 and consider myself a World War II baby. I am 100% West Coast Jew. My professional education was at San Francisco State University, where I received my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in social work. In addition, I have a doctoral degree in clinical psychology from the San Francisco School of Psychology.

It has been a long path of 85 years, and I examine my life with greater understanding daily, thinking of the words of Frank Sinatra singing “My Way:” “And now the end is near / And so I face the final curtain” (Sinatra, 1969). The genetic blessing of longevity has given me the opportunity to learn much about myself and retrieve lost and suppressed memories, allowing me to understand mistakes and flawed decisions. The result has been self-understanding and self-forgiveness.

There were, at times, overwhelming external circumstances that were traumatic and not of my making; they resulted in trauma, flawed development, and inappropriate adaptations and decisions that could, at times, be self-destructive. However, understanding the reason for my poor choices allows me to change and not blame myself. While I have not achieved all that I have desired, I greatly appreciate that I have survived the traumas of my early years.

In the first year of my life, my parents experienced an automobile accident. When they were hospitalized, I was left in the care of my strict and rigid maternal grandmother. Upon their return, my mother seemed distant at times with flat affect. She was also unpredictably fearful (her fears included bureaucracies, cats, and some movies). As was noted in therapy, I introjected these fears and her personality. Because of her fear of bureaucracy, I also internalized it and did not master my environment until my late 20s. I have remedied this through my experience with agencies and corporations, using my ability to negotiate solutions and sometimes drive the other side nuts. Introjection was one way of protecting against fears of abandonment because it was a means of object constancy. But, on the first day of school, I was crying in the absence of my mother, stating that she needed me, reflecting her dependence on me.

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My father experienced a miserable childhood with the fathers of two failed marriages, making him dependent on his mother, a Jewish immigrant from Poland who was married to a conservative Jew upon her elders’ discovery that she was a member of a Marxist study group. Because of his difficult childhood, he was understandably angry and miserable. He was also short-tempered, sometimes scaring me to the core with his unpredictable explosions of rage. My father was subject to denying reality, such as when he felt that my need for gallbladder surgery was unnecessary, attributing my attacks to stress.

Another problem was sexual repression. Both of my parents frowned on intercourse outside of marriage. Any statement that involved sexuality made them uncomfortable. This greatly complicated my relations with women, making me nervous and awkward around those I was interested in. After being rejected when I first approached a girl at the age of 15, my parents were not supportive of my sadness and misery due to their sexual repression. My approaches toward women were complicated by normal sexual and personal desires conflicting with my parents’ sexual attitudes.

To compound my difficulties at home, I was bullied in school because I was short and physically underdeveloped, which lasted from kindergarten through my senior year of high school. An example of this was being struck in the testes with a newspaper. The bully, a football player, later threatened to castrate me when I was challenging him in a game of basketball. I should also note that he attacked a gathering of gay men with chains. Against the bullying at home and school, I did not fight back. I dissociated myself from these awful events, which surfaced in nightmares that were falsely blamed on radio programs that I loved listening to. In addition to being fearful, I was also depressed and couldn’t wait until I was older to leave these events behind and gain the respect of age.

My other defense consisted of idealizing others as superior to me. This was especially relevant to the worship of high school athletes who rejected me because of my lack of athletic skills. Physical Education teachers could be brutal, one forcing me to hang by the gym bars at the risk of being hit with a soccer ball due to my not wishing to engage in dodgeball, where I had been previously struck in the eye.

I was socially isolated in high school, repressing my misery and dissociating my feelings. The sadness finally hit me in my senior year. One manifestation of this was my acting out and being socially inappropriate. Social skills were lacking in my repertoire, which I partly attribute to my parents not educating me in manners. One of my

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defenses was fantasy and denying reality. To address my plight, I aspired to become an Olympic javelin thrower, believing that lifting weights could solve the problem. My first long-term therapist was classical Freudian, and he felt that I suffered from castration anxiety, greatly frowning upon my lifting weights. In retrospect, he was physically fearful himself, being the victim of childhood bullying. While he helped me in many ways, his therapy was an overall failure.

My life caught up with me in my first attempt at graduate school. I was lonely and miserable in Los Angeles and disappointed in the school. I inappropriately acted out my frustrations in the classroom, challenging the teachers of a conservative school. This was further complicated by being assigned to a field placement in a correctional facility where I had no understanding of delinquent behavior, and I was unrealistic in my assessments and lack of appropriate interventions. In addition, I was physically harassed without any protection from the field supervisor or school faculty. My advisor stated that those who bullied me were trying to make contact. The protocol that all staff in mental health, prison, and correctional facilities are to be protected was ignored. I was forced to withdraw from the school.

Foolishly, I expected to straighten out my life by becoming a therapist. Quite the contrary: I, myself, needed the therapy to address my longstanding problems. The experience was the beginning of my life turning around. My second therapist saved me. He encouraged me to lift weights and study martial arts, among other changes that stemmed from insights and acting upon them. My behavior changed at the worksite, where I was a social worker. It was a turning point of three and a half. Sadly, he took his own life, delaying the changes that I have made.

Despite this, I have accumulated more insight and understanding of my life with self-forgiveness and regret that I have sometimes hurt others. I can understand the reasons for the failures that I have experienced. But there is also the acceptance of myself. One of my defenses has been creativity; I wrote about redoing my childhood and addressing the loss of my first lover. I express myself by writing poetry and satire, one of which was about my mean, impossible supervisor. The martial arts have been a means of sublimating my anger and improving my motor skills. Now, my social activism is based partly on diplomacy and expressing unvarnished feelings at the appropriate time.

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Salman Akhtar (2009) cites Anna Freud’s belief that capacity for insight can decline in adult years, but psychoanalysis, the creativity of artists and poets, and the individual’s search for truthful self-discovery can counter this. While I am not a stellar poet or artist, I have an active imagination, assisted by psychoanalytic psychotherapy, which has enabled me to write poetry and works that have addressed traumas in my life and myself. My creativity constitutes regression with the intent to address earlier conflicts and traumas, resulting in a synthesis of strength, integrity, and the ability to see and accept oneself.

Regression can enable personality development when an advanced ego regresses to earlier developmental stages to address its components (drive organization, object relations, and earlier modes of conflict resolution), resulting in the new synthesis of an advanced developmental stage (Blos, 1968, as cited in Akhtar, 2009, p. 243). Regression in the service of the ego hones intuition, improves imagination, and advances creativity (Kris, 1952, as cited in Akhtar, 2009, p. 243). By writing and reflecting on daily life, I can understand myself. By rearranging the schemas of my memory, I am transforming the past. One way of doing this is by executing karate kata, where I am fighting against imaginary opponents, specifically the bullies in my past. In the kata, one performs blocks, punches, and throws, imaging the defenses against single or multiple attacks. Another means is by writing, imagining a different past, and, in the process of doing so, understanding one’s stressful and immutable circumstances through self-forgiveness and inner peace.

I presently reside in assisted living due to my problems with falling and the necessity to have my physical condition and needs monitored. I am also sheltered from a difficult world and a dangerous city. Our society and city are not always kind to seniors or the disabled. In addition to self-reflection and understanding, there is interaction with other residents who share the same expectations and fears of aging and death. Some firmly believe in, deny, or wonder about the afterlife. We are facing our mortality.

Trauma, not the intrapsychic conflicts that resulted from it, was the basic cause of my misery and torment. I can look at this, understand the stress that I experienced, and see how it caused me to make poor selections of friends and partners and perform poorly in academic and work settings. Fortunately, this was remedied by the work and effort that psychotherapy enabled. Today, I have a Master’s in Social Work, a PhD in Clinical Psychology, and a Black Belt in

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karate with some training in judo. While my strength and mobility have diminished, as displayed by my need for a walker to prevent falling, I still practice karate movements and engage in physical exercise that address my body from head to toe. Despite attention and concentration problems, I continue to do complex reading and write position papers and poetry while in assisted living. If I were living alone, I could potentially be at risk of falling while having to meet needs, such as securing meals and cleaning my home. In an assisted living setting, my medical, physical, and basic needs are met.

In earlier years, I provided services to others as a social worker. Now, as an elderly person, younger people are caretakers, providing services to me. Life, in essence, is working in reverse with physical deterioration, cognitive decline, and dependence on others. I feel that I am reverting to childhood. By being as active as possible, I am attempting to slow this decline. There are also what I consider to be mature defense mechanisms: the gift of wisdom, buttressed by insight, introspection, retrieval of memories with understanding, the lack of self-blame, and self-forgiveness. Wisdom constantly evolves and is never complete. It will never be complete. Yet, this precious wisdom brings peace and the assurance that one will not die in self-ignorance.

These mental processes occur in the setting of assisted living, including dining room conversations, group discussions, and the peace of my room. In my residence of one and a half years, I have experienced the death of others, honored them, and am preparing for my end of life. While we have separate rooms and, for the most part, are alone in the evening, we still are a community with many common concerns. When I was young and miserable, I looked forward to this stage of life that would end the suffering that I experienced as a kid. Now, it has arrived, with earlier years seeming like yesterday. I see the problems of our world as old wine in new bottles and wish to share my knowledge of the past with younger generations.

Despite my tough childhood, there were many enjoyable things and social benefits. True, there were problems of antisemitism, racism, homophobia, and conformity. However, there was economic security for many, easier admission to affordable colleges and universities, and Saturday matinees for 35 cents with double features, a cartoon, a serial chapter, newsreels, a travelogue, and coming attractions. Contrast those benefits with the stressors that younger generations endure, including the need to apply to numerous universities despite a 4.0 average, which should be sufficient grounds

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for automatic admission to higher education. Think of neighborhoods where individuals don’t know each other; the physical distance during COVID was a direct manifestation of the social isolation that was previously experienced. Violence has been layered into our society with daily shootings, which could have been prevented with mental health services that are tragically deficient. Teenage suicide is a major problem. Older and disabled individuals are ignored and poorly served.

In light of the above, it is high time that younger and older generations form alliances to address our social and historical problems. Many of the problems experienced today have historical roots. For example, school shootings are the result of shooters being bullied and/or ostracized (Vossekuil et al., 2022). In previous years, those tormented by bullying would commit suicide. Now, the Devil’s Pact is that they will commit suicide but take as many victims as they can with them by mass shootings.

Earlier and current history are joined by older and younger generations who need to explore this. In doing so, older generations are bequeathing necessary knowledge, and younger generations are caring for us in return. Whatever age, we are all human. These thoughts and sentiments have been partly enabled by the comfort that assisted living enables. True, they would have occurred in other settings, but they would be less pleasant than this one.

Erik Erikson describes my stage of life as the conflict between ego integrity vs. despair, with the fruit of its resolution being wisdom (Erikson, E., & Erikson, J., 1997). I feel fine battling the oftentimes misery of the past and understanding why events beyond my control occurred. Old age may not be for sissies, but it should not be the time for despair and disgust. I say: Despair and disgust be damned! Ego integrity full speed ahead!

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