Imagine a D. Trump
admirer seeking therapy for depression. If we are engaged in depth process, I’m
helping him fall into childhood loss and injury and pain, which will be the sources
of his depression and also of his Trump-like antisocial beliefs and absence of
empathy. Non-caring beliefs are a form of self-medication that numb and deflect
from core, formative injury. Lack of empathy is calluses covering the heart.
Odd as it may sound, then, if therapy is radically successful, the client, his pain
exorcised, will lose his self-medication and calluses. His love for Trump will
evaporate, though he may remain a conservative.*
Most of us are
born with a baseline of life and its positive feeling. (For some, birth or
pre-birth trauma may pollute or kill that state.) It can’t be seriously disputed
that this original good will be the
seed of later pro-vital and caring feeling, thought, philosophy and behavior,
while life’s vicissitudes will nuance these qualities. So if there are
individuals who, though remaining alive, are a pained and immune-sabotaging
emotional body, who have toxic feelings and have beliefs that want death not
life, dehumanization not equality, we must know these people became sick. Some
of them will come to therapy. And though they name disturbances that seem altogether
unrelated to their beliefs, they may find that everything is one in them.
Everything is
one.
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* This could be
because conservatism has, to some, strains of what may be called “libertarian
self-esteem”: valuing the individual’s right to own and enjoy his or her life.
That is to say, healthy feeling.
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Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.