I enjoy doing therapy, probably always will, but I have lost interest in psychology. Psychology is disorder labels and theories, experiments without science, poll-taking (“Six months or a year on, do you, still-dysfunctional person, feel better or want to believe you feel better, sometimes or for the most part?”), masses of YouTube videos, incompetent psychotherapist movies* and daytime celebrities who make their money dramatizing personal pain. Therapy is intimacy without orgasm, the campfire with a friend at the end of the world, a second-birth quality of awareness. Very different from Pavlov, the “learned helplessness experiment,” and Albert “Let a Smile Be Your Umbrella”** Ellis.
For the many of us who lost the outside world through our childhood into adolescence, and came to live mostly in our head, therapy can be a main sustenance. Those who remain primarily in the world are rare.
One of my goals is to give people some little energy where they can feel good about their present and positive about their future (and often bad about their past!). I, on the other hand, look forward to nothing. Fortunately, this is acceptable and shouldn’t be perceived as depressing. After all, look at the clown limousine of gurus who adjure us to be in the moment, live in the here-and-now. I think they’re abysmally ignorant: Our lives are mostly under the surface, in the here-and-then.*** I mean something different. I live partly in the present, am deepened by my past, am regularly transported to the cosmic unanswerable, and have no future plans other than to look at my wife. But that’s three minutes from now.
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* Exception: Good Will Hunting.
** Bing Crosby.
*** https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-here-and-then.html.
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Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.