Personal tenets, for any readers I've failed to trouble up to this point

*  I want my clients to become happier than they are, and happier than I am able to be. This goal – especially the second part – is not a virtue of mine. It’s actually my neurosis, coming from childhood when, early on, I ceased wanting anything for myself but derived some very transient but poignant (“vicarious”) pleasure from facilitating someone else’s happiness. That is not, however, the motivation that launched me into this field.

*  By the accidental way my brain works (in the same way I was aware of my atheism, within a lightly Jewish family, at age eight), and by chancing upon a good psychology book, I realized that the adult stage and character, as most people live them, are much less valid a reality than the child within us, the child we came from. I suspect that most people believe their adult is their replacement baseline, post-youth. Not true: It is merely the small boat riding in a deep ocean, dependent on that ocean, victim to it, give its meaning by that ocean. (The metaphor fails slightly, because you can take a boat out of the water. But what kind of boat would it be?)

*  If I had to name the essence of psychological dysfunction, I’d say it is the lethal contradiction between the injured, never-helped child’s needs, and the necessity to leave those needs behind. I use the term “lethal” without exaggeration. We might lose an arm or a leg, our health, and still have our spirit. But we can’t be a spirit with bright potential if we were not loved. I’ve seen individuals with youth, health, loving partners, the world before them, but they are in some strange, oceanic pain that says “Why am I here?”

*  I know that nearly everyone must have a delusion of happiness or contentment or serenity or “acceptance” or success – whatever their particular positive is – that rides over this darkened potential. It is for them, not the therapist, to come to question the delusion. However, I will show a woman her fake laughter, so surface yet profound a defense, because it can prevent all therapy and healing.

*  It is the same with “love” – also too often a delusion. Let’s put it this way: When you were a child, if no one ever took your hurt away – which is the job of your caregiver – then you will still be living with that hurt, within that hurt. Whatever the reason your caregiver didn’t reach it and heal you: that they didn’t or couldn’t is the absence of love, regardless of their intention or goodness, regardless of your belief or your forgiveness. We reveal at high risk this delusion of love. But in good therapy, people come to see it.

*  I would like my clients to grow, before too long, a deep relationship with me, though I know it often doesn’t happen. The great problem is that they can’t reach out to me, or let me reach them, because long ago they had to withdraw into themselves to prevent more suffering. And now that it’s time beyond healing the child – so they feel – it’s even more despondent to crack themselves open to their child’s heart. By “deep relationship,” I mean for a moment they feel I am important to them. A moment when they come out of their shell and don’t feel alone with their pain. I have to be the momentary parent. If not, they have never joined the world, are just in-dwelling with their tears or grief. That cannot heal. There is a bond, or there is absence of love and continuing sickness. No other possibilities exist in therapy.