Just be yourself

I recently received a transfer client from a clinician leaving the group practice. Interesting young man with a historical bipolar diagnosis which we determined to be valid. I perused – aloud for both our use – the other counselor’s progress notes. A phrase stuck out, hitting me in the eyeball and intestines simultaneously: “We discussed how feelings come from thoughts.” The majority of my previous articles over the past five years have proven the trashiness of this utterly blind and ignorant notion, that people are psychologically damaged because of their thoughts. I won’t go over this again now but to ooze upon you, readers, my cosmic violent contempt for the idea. Look at it this way: Imagine you are one of a lonely scattering of physicists who accept the atomic theory of matter, while the predominant belief among your peers is that Tinkerbell created all Substance, gave all the tiny balls their spin, and that the universe is what it is by magic, music and smiles. That’s akin to what my cohorts in this fine profession believe about the nature of their subject. Thinking is our escape from feeling, injury, and sickness, not the cause of them.

But this is how the world is. There is no consensus about the best knowledge. Everyone adheres to their own delusions – in the Trump era and before. And that is, sadly enough, actually better than all the agreement that exists in different domains. People agree, like children fed candy and stories, in political goals and ideologies that require physical force (punitive consequences and expropriation) to realize. They enrich artists of schlocky songs, while teenagers have never heard of or listened to Bach or Brahms or Samuel Barber.

It shouldn’t be different than this – we are just organisms – but I find it disappointing. I know that a part of my work is to try to effect a communing with my clients, where we are in the same deep place of childhood hurt and loss and adult wisdom and need. Sometimes this urge leads me to play a tune for them that they don’t know. I have found that certain principles of psychology are actually startling to them, and opening to some gold in the bowels of their life.