Isn’t it interesting that we have so many mental and emotional problems? Look at their wide horizon: from mass murderer at one end, to me, where I have only two clients today, need more to support my family, but feel complacent, “good” to have little to do. And the rest – adult immaturity, depressed and empty and worthless feeling, hating attitudes toward “the world” and innocent people, delusional certainties, body-centered fear (anxiety) and other physical ailments that have no clear cause and ruin one’s days and years, feeling out-of-place and “wrong” and like one should die or has never been alive, loss of all feeling except negativity and maudlinness, compulsion to serve others in order to feel good, solipsism (unable to see and feel beyond one’s self), numbness to and distance from one’s self, urge to wield power and accumulate power, absence of all interests, dedication to childlike dreams – salvation and immortality, subjectivity that trumps objectivity.
How do we
have so many problems? Or rather, Why are we not healthy, and why such a strange and subtle and
multitudinous array of errors? I believe
we know the answers, which reduce to pain and the brain’s tendency to retain it
and convert it to deeper injury. This
injury could be bad philosophy, adult incompetence, internalization or
projection: self-harm or revenge in all their forms.
Life provides
some relief from disturbance: the stimuli of experience. Experience makes us ignore our poisoned roots
and feel the here and now, momentarily or transiently or repeatedly. It just has that effect. So the prisoner in solitary confinement and the depressed man sitting in the park may “enjoy” a meal or feeding
the pigeons. An angry person may feel
good about money in the bank, a traumatic one may enjoy a campsite under the
stars. Another relief is, of course,
numbness, anything that quells pain: medicine and drugs, belief, hope,
rationality, work.
Doing therapy
feels good: It is experience-stimulus, self-medication, and it is my best:
love, and saying “no” to the tyranny of my injuries. It cannot cleanse us of our problems (maybe a little), but it
can reach into the spaces between our roots, compete with them.
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Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.