End of year summary

Over time, I go through internal cycles or biorhythmic changes in my feeling about my abilities. Accompanying them are morphing views on the effectiveness of psychotherapy. If this amounts to an evolution in understanding, it is not Darwinian-type withering away of bad ideas, but more like a slow sinking into quicksand, touching motley particles but on the grand scheme richer and darker material on the way to the bottom.

At this moment (which may last a month or a year), my sense is that while children can be made happier, by improving their parents and environment, adolescents and adults need to be disturbed by harsh or sobering news. Making positive, in therapy, is like planting flowers on diseased ground or telling jokes in a war zone. People find enough ways on their own to soothe troubled feeling. They do not need to come to therapy for that.

Recently, an intelligent 18-year-old said he felt uniquely helped by our first session. I told him that his pervasive sense of “guilt” was mislabeled. He didn’t feel guilty: He’d simply been made to feel bad about himself in his malleable childhood. We also deconstructed his belief that his depression damaged other people’s lives. This was “splitting off and projecting”: Seeing people through the eyes of his internal devastation, he assumed they were as collapsible as he. No! They are resilient. You are wrong.

Did these crucial corrections make him happy? Yes. No. They made him stronger. What can ultimately make him happier is crying and his mother’s deep apologizing and his regressing to boyhood in her arms. And that can only go so far down into his quicksand. He has already lost so much.