Monday, December 28, 2020

This end-of-year's statement

 

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.