Pessimistic therapy laws #5: Therapy conversations are better than almost all other kinds

All the people in the world stranded outside therapy offices should be jealous of our conversations. Everything they say eventually reveals, in hindsight, its emptiness, its missed truth. Salutations, jokes, politics, religion, art, obituaries. Pillow talk, Shakespeare, prejudices and hatreds, philosophy and poetry. Parental lessons, campfire songs and ponderings. Everything but science. In an absolute way, all of it is breezes flying high above a fire. People are bleeding, lost, blind, stuck, and not knowing it they live lives of noisy desperation, moving their tongues about anything. In therapy we look at our question marks, we look for the buried or huddled in a corner child. We question ‘what is love? What do you really feel? What am I?’ We search with compassion the humanness that others call weakness, failure, guilt, lazy, mental illness, crazy, evil. We stop the ride that is the world we never made and are still, looking both inward and at our widest possible horizon, like a physicist peering through a telescope all night, after midnight.

We give love without needing, we reparent, we respect, we find a truth or two that will support and last to the grave. We find realer and realer layers of the person, sometimes down to the seed that bore her.

After therapy, other conversations are icing on the cake. Without therapy, they are icing without a cake.