Tap, laugh, breathe, hypnotize and think your way to happiness (I'm being sarcastic)

As I move through my old age in psychotherapy, the more value I see in living on the surface of oneself. The surface is where we have positive thoughts, lively opinions, run in a bright day, drink a beer, see the swaying palms and feel the sea breeze on our face. One problem is that if we look out at the horizon and the ominous sea, we feel our depth.

There is the eternal contradiction between the desire for happiness which urges our behavior and our magical thinking, and the brain, chemical and body history we have become. That undertow can turn a blue sky into the blues, make a proud achievement feel tragically sad, suddenly reveal a total lack of motivation – dead in the water of existence.

I don’t know, and don’t want to know, how other therapists finesse the contradiction. I’ll just say that once you see it, really see it, you’ll know that there is no good answer. The palm fronds are connected to the roots, as much as we would like to picture them waving free.

There’s also this: We grow old into a contradiction. We don’t at all, anymore, want to stare at our unmet childhood needs and tragedies. We want peace, bonds and happiness. But aging forces us to think and feel the gravity of life, and what is grave.

I may be in the midst of making a formulation of sorts: What percentage of therapeutic focus to give happiness and strength making, and what percentage to give to our deeper identity. It would be incompetent to avoid the client’s past. If we do, she will never know where that sad pull downward comes from, and will decide she is simply that person, a defect. She needs to know she has been injured long ago, to see herself as a person beyond her flaw.

I think we were, almost all of us, born with an indestructible kernel of positivity: Babies are not pessimistic, and they know love. Maybe it's this: In therapy, we answer the baby.