If you don't know what's broke, you can't fix it

It is time to “psychoanalyze” a fellow therapist based on only five biographical facts. Though my means seem catty and low, my ends are high: to open the eyes of clients.

The five are: He’s going for a PhD at age AARP. He drives a Mercedes. He was in the military, assumedly his first and main career. With a one-in-a-thousand exception, every time he opens his mouth to initiate or respond to me or to someone within my hearing, shooting the breeze, talking clinical or with a client or administrative staff, he mentions that he was “in the military” or references “the military.” Really – steadfast as the loon’s throaty song, reliable as the hands on an atomic clock. And, he loves President Trump and clearly has no ability to see (diagnose) the man’s Narcissism or to grasp his stunning lack of adult-level acumen and president-level breadth of knowledge. The placidity with which he goads our psychiatrist about Trump’s sterling qualities is an emetic waiting to happen.

So beware. If this is true, then it could happen over and over again: Your therapist may be blind to himself and to grave disorder. She may be neurotically self-enclosed, which is what you are seeing in someone who chronically talks about herself. And you may be sitting before someone who remains, in his hidden engine, a child, despite his medals (if any) and years in the rugged death-kill, deferential and duty-bound terrain of the military.

Why a child? It is impossible to like this president with his global self-loving immaturity unless your own caregiver (when you were a child) was an immature authoritarian at some level and you were stripped of your own power and submerged under his. Look at Trump’s adult children. They “chose” to become capitalist Midases, have the emotions of a predator-lizard, and do not notice the poison or the razor’s edge of their father’s character disease. Shadow souls.

This is similar to the millions of Germans who saw a right-thinking, heart-warming father figure in Adolf Hitler. There is something very wrong with people who cannot feel the pain that a toxic person radiates.

It is not hard to be a counselor. This is because there are many kinds of touches that can help a client feel better short of – far short of – getting better. Pleasant, humorous conversation. Advice and a knowing air. A genial manner that seems caring but isn’t too empathically intimate (which would threaten one’s defense, one’s child’s heart). Asking questions. Providing personal experience or book-based insights. Intent eye contact (which, as I believe Jeffrey Kottler points out, can be maintained even when the therapist is falling asleep). Many therapists don’t help a person change. They just throw a little pink cloud under her ass for the session.

This could be the case of my peer, here. I cannot see how someone who lives on the psychological defense of dull-axe dogma can be adult and “empty” enough to contain a client’s burden, transparent enough to know what she says. That his work, and many others’, endures shows that people do not ultimately know what is wrong with them, and may therefore accept any candy or band-aid that’s offered.