2020 Pessimistic therapy laws (distillation of everything before)

The basic facts of human psychology are the most unknown, undesirable, denied, avoided, or sometimes acknowledged but in a dissociated way: Everything begins in the earliest injury and pain, which can mean at birth and in the first few years. Relationship insult becomes individual structure. The first splinters in our psyche leave us more open to later splinters – as pin cushion or as gravitational force. Pain, unhelped, leads to defense, self-medication, projection, takes the form of feeling-convictions of bitterness and unfairness and hate and revenge. It leads to shutting down, depression, self-loss and self-sacrifice, and to impressionability in adults, where we absorb other people’s true or neurotic feelings. It leads to anxiety.

We do not want to know that distant injuries are the prepotent factor in our functional or dysfunctional lives. We do not want to know that childhood was often one suppressed torture or overwhelm after another, all passed by in adults’ ignorance. We do not want to know that children’s lives are worse than ours because they have no good escapes. Imagine, with an x-ray eye, what they pack in. Revisit, with a brutal and compassionate eye, what you packed in, sometimes minute to minute.

I have a client, twenty-seven years old, who is anxious all the time, because the blueprint on which she is based was to be alone without a father’s or mother’s love. In twelve sessions, three months, she hasn’t been able to leave her safe thinking, her adult plateau, but for a few minutes of remembering and feeling. But that’s enough for now: In here she is more real, and likes being seen.

Muster's last stand*

There have been, over the years, various research studies on the efficacy of different forms of psychotherapy. A stoical perusal shows that the varieties of Cognitive Therapy remain supreme. Psychodynamic therapies are also given a good bit of respect, though I’ve always sensed a weakly cheerful air of “consolation prize” whenever they’re endorsed.

I have never accepted the validity of the polls elevating the Cognitive approach, even while I know that some of its tricks, used standalone, can be a minor supplement to deeper process. My rejection comes, as many of my posts have described, from the principle and awareness that people are dysfunctional not because they think negatively or irrationally, but because they’ve been hurt, and that pushing right or bright notions cannot heal the holistic structure of the psyche.

Here I am offering an additional, though indirect, piece of evidence that the Cognitive methods are off-track. It’s neither rigorous poll-taking nor scientific evidence, and comes only from my own practice. That, though, might be considered a kind of longitudinal study, encompassing twenty years and many hundreds of clients. It is this:

In every instance when I have described to new clients the contrast between Cognitive rationale and practice and a feeling-centered regressive rationale and practice, they have recognized not merely the superiority, but the felt and factual rightness of the deeper, historical approach. It is practically common sense to them that you have to go to, dig to, pain to get it out, that you can’t simply fiddle with factual truths or erroneous thoughts or rationalizations to get better.

I am not exaggerating my experience. Every last client I have seen – those who stay mid- or long-term or leave after one session; those who have mistakenly come to me (a licensed counselor) seeking medications; teenagers through old age; those who are not even good candidates for depth work – grasps that real healing entails some level of emotional surgery, not a Band-Aid.

My “study” shows, of course, only that clients reject, when shown a bipolar alternative, the Cognitive way. It doesn’t speak to results, which will always be elusive – based on the client’s reading or misreading of himself – pending a future thorough understanding of psychology in the brain (which present-day neuroscience doesn’t come fictively close to).

Might some therapists of the Cognitive persuasion think I have mesmerized these people or misrepresented the ubiquitous paradigm? That would be their right and their safe-making delusion. Clients aren’t given rosy glasses. They learn the pessimism embedded in the optimism, the positive surviving the negative. They may rise wise to some disenchantment. But quite a few of them, maybe most, have already been through the mainstream therapies. And now they’re here.

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* It wouldn’t work to say “Musterbation’s last stand”: https://www.rowancenterla.com/new-blog/2015/6/3/musterbation-the-danger-in-shoulding-all-over-the-place.

Pessimist's piquant Christmas greeting

In my will, I am going to establish that all the countries of the world be renamed. Dethrone the irrelevant histories and traditions that gave us terms like America, France, Japan, Australia, North Korea, Ireland. I’ll require, by my final legal document, that a very unaccustomed reality be injected into the world. The new names will be such as these: Don’s Perfect Resort, Macron’s Digs, Abe Lobby, Scottland, Kim’s Haunt, Mike’s Parlor. And I’ll mandate that these names constitutionally change each time a new potentate replaces the old.

Fact is, there is no better reason for any nation’s calling card than this, a psychological one: We billions all live here, but there will forever be those disturbed individuals who need to remake the world in their name, and do remake it in their name.

Just consider your own, or any normal person’s life. You are alone or you have a family, you love one or more of them; you have friends; you have a job or career that you hopefully have good or at least stoic-like feelings about. Your life is, on the cosmic scale, fundamentally insular: It’s your time on this Earth and you sometimes have deep and wide feelings that are like a great novel, though which only you will read. You do not get it in your head to bend millions of people’s lives to an agenda concocted in your neurosis. You do not think we are all on a big ship’s theme cruise: the Medicare for All cruise, the One Percent Get Most cruise, the Control Women cruise, the liberal or conservative or socialist cruise. The Democracy cruise. The Slave State cruise.

I suspect we will always live on a planet that the sick power-seekers will terraform with their special pollutions. That sub-elite minority will always squat in the midst of the numberless majority and sway its branches, teach its lessons, convince it that the world is people and purposes, not life itself. I don’t have any solution to this ageless misinterpretation except to begin to re-perceive leaders down, deflate their importance. Vote for those whose mind turns to the quiet individual not to an airy or iron theme. There would need to be this different psychology. There would need to be this different way of seeing human meaning.

I think the world would actually be more interesting if it became atomistic, a vast scattering of individuals minding their own business, not pervaded by a constantly playing background jingle. Hikers, workers, artists, family men and women. Book clubs, culture centers, support groups, craft guilds, scientific circles. Probably most people wouldn’t agree with me, as my spirit here is different. In that spirit, I see the atheist world as more exciting than one run by God. To me, his never-moving bulk blocks out the real mystery behind him.