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.