Inspiration #1: Wrong and effective therapy

Listening to a new client today, I realized that in some cases there is the right way to do therapy, and the wrong and effective way to do it. The thirty-five-year-old man was a shambles of trembling panic, distrust, suicidal depression and ineffectiveness, and had been since he was a child. Nearly lethal sex abuse by female babysitters; a Borderline mother (“I love you.” “You’re disgusting, so why not kill yourself?”) who would dump him on a poker hand’s worth of indifferent relatives; seven elementary schools in six years; a Mob stepfather who beat him; a schizophrenic father who used meth and saw angels and demons and shared them with his son; severe school bullying of this wimpy victim boy. One would label him B-movie maudlin with his despair and self-pity. But it was one-hundred-percent real. He was a toilet of loss continuously swirling down the drain.

So, good therapy would be loving encouragement, grieving and raging or whatever was in there, years of it, that needed to come out; visibility for the first time in his life. And maybe some Cognitive-type logic, though the torrents of his feelings constantly scattered his thoughts and his ability to hear.

The wrong and effective therapy would be über-Newtonian: more than an equal and opposite reaction to the crimes.

* He must force an emotional backbone within himself. Breathe deep, rich, made-calm. Go to your new job, no matter what.

* Hate your criminals with grim strength. Get a baseball bat attorney and don’t let your evil mother get custody of your child, as mothers like this love to try to do. Yell, with poison, their abominations at her and your two stepfathers. Let them try nothing, not get a word in edgewise.

* Cry like a baby in here.

* Bring your mother to a session. “Look – here you are in Lawson’s Understanding the Borderline Mother. Yes, you’re that sick, a universe of sick. Yes, you were that useless. You have no argument. You don’t deserve to touch the hem of my client’s garment. Now get out.”

* Go to the mountain top, shake your fist and shout your new life to the old world and your new world.

* Cry more, be cared about in therapy and in the groups.

* Walk away from your family, leave them in the dust.

This would be the right, the best way. This would be rational, as rational as combating weakness with strength, injustice with justice, submission with chain breaking, and the removal of germs. But we don’t go there. We don’t go there because of the nice, false hope factor. The ethical factor. The cover-your-ass litigation factor. The autonomy factor. And one more –

He loves his mother.