Wish list #1: Sometimes I'm tired of what I know

I recently had the effete fantasy that there should be new or different, unique and brighter therapy ideas than what exists in the cognitive and depth approaches. (I reject touchy-feely EFT and similar nostrums which masturbate one’s self-delusion capacity.) I suppose I can see why therapists go to workshops to scout out new tricks. Secretly, they hope a new “skill” will replace what they fail to understand about human warpage through personal smarts and introspection.

Partly, I’m a cop-out. I don’t take a woman out to an abandoned barn in the boonies (as a Canadian therapist did) to have her hurl glass bottles at the wall – her father – while screaming invectives at him. I don’t touch clients, on a stage, on tender body parts to bring forth a torrent of tears and regression, as I once read Upledger did in his CranioSacral Therapy. I suppose I wish I could bring the men out to a field, as David Calof used to do, to demolish a junker car with their bare hands – raging against their rapist or shaming father. I don’t do marathon groups to wear people down to the needy heartful id. I don’t even do Primal Therapy anymore, lacking a soundproofed room with padded walls, dimmed lights and a mat not a chair.

So I’m left working my knowns: insight into the child roots of current misbehavior; depth methods to pour out old pain, altering feeling and thinking. The cognitive-type processes I use come after he or she has done depth therapy. For example, after she learns, and feels, that her achievements (the one college graduate in the family; the professional in a clan of druggies and jailbirds, etc.) are more her escapes from pain than exuberance for life and will not forestall depression forever, then we can appreciate rationality, hope and positivity.

But I wish there was more. I look at the client and wish there were immediate ways to move the brain. “Insight is not enough.” Feeling some childhood pain is not enough. I can’t be her father. That would be too much right in a wrong world. I can’t be his lifelong companion. I can’t turn emptiness into substance, foundational immaturity into maturity, dependency into heretical autonomy. The paradox is that the longer I do this work, the more powerful I feel, yet the power is almost entirely illusory.

I will let you know when the magic arrives in my fingertips.