Motivational Interviewing: Another poop-scoop

 

The New York Times had an op-ed piece* about the difficulties of changing a delu­sional (let’s say “strongly convinced”) person’s belief. Subject of the piece was the writer’s friend’s refusal to allow his children to receive a vaccine of any kind. Anchor of the piece was its promo­tion of a therapy technique called Motiva­tional Inter­view­ing. The writer believes that the nuanced and respect­fully open-minded ques­tion­ing that iden­ti­fies that process can often slide someone off his bent soapbox and onto a more rea­son­able (true) per­spec­tive. The person will “find his own intrin­sic moti­va­tion to change.” The paper was kind enough to publish my comment on the op-ed:

Some false convictions – delusions – are safe-making commitments that prevent loss of identity, loss of a sense of self. These would be person­ality disordered and psychotic delu­sions. A Narcis­sist (Trump) absolutely must believe he is the one superior person, as that’s the seam­less shell of escap­ism that keeps him from feeling his devel­op­mental abort. Other false convic­tions, such as love of Trump, might be changed if the person could go to their deep pain, in regres­sive therapy, and let it finally come out. I became an organic­ally empa­thetic per­son in a single afternoon when I reached my core pain: liber­tarian to human­ist. And there are those convictions based on bad mood, stub­­born atti­tude, that might be changed when the per­son simply feels happier about his life. There are indi­viduals who’ve “hated Blacks” (without ever having person­ally known any) who come to see with com­pas­sion once they them­selves have received compassion.

Only one person “liked” this explanation. I believe that’s because it under­mines people’s conceit of intel­lec­tual super­iority and touches the tender under­belly: People commit their consciousness to the poorly evi­denced or the non-evi­denced because they are emo­tionally troubled, not because they are cogni­tively dimmed. Readers of the Times want to believe they are better, more logical thinkers rather than know the truth: that they are relatively healthier feelers.

Do you think Motivational Interviewing will help them see that?

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* (By the way, the technique proved ineffective. The anti-vaxxer friend didn’t change his mind – https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/31/opinion/change-someones-mind.html.)

Therapist, therap thyself

 

I think I’ll be my therapist today, and try to figure out why I’ve been depressed. It’s a mild sick pressure behind the sternum. I’m not sure how, but it has kept me from smil­ing, even once, for at least three weeks. No circumstances have changed other than unexpected oppor­tu­nities to extend my irresponsibility: taxes and student loan pay­ments are deferred. I know my baseline, in child­hood, was depression, but that has always been diluted by decent adult circum­stances, a tablespoon of narcissism, some good therapy sessions, writing. And yes, some of it was evapo­rated by natural process: feeling through. Somehow none of that has mattered now.

We know that feeling is a magnet or a spray can that attracts bad thoughts, coats the back of our eyes with them. Less than our seeing the world through them, we only see the backs of our eyes. Last night, I shed some tears watching The Curious Case of Benjamin Button again. Somehow the man who loses everything by becoming more and more alive, younger and younger, has felt absurdly real to me. He has the best life, but everyone else moves on as they should.

Versed in the Focusing process of getting deeply in touch with bodily nuanced feelings – the sensation verdicts of our history – I am not going to say “it might be this” or “it’s probably that.” The felt-sense can be read directly, without speculation. It opens up to our brain.

And right now, it has. It says this: I need to have a real conversation with my wife. She is my dearest (my only dear), but we haven’t had a real talk, a grave talk, in years, and we are growing old now, and nothing could be worse than remaining separate as the future fades. Love and hope should normally go together. But when the second is gone, the first must grow stronger.

(Thanks, Focusing.)

Manifesto: The good enough voter

 

Raise your children well to prevent future Trumps. Why is the most critical fact the most ignorable? It’s not culture, poverty, racism or white supremacy, deMause’s “psycho­classes” or even Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis that determines a country’s ideo­logical leanings or the lead­ers it chooses. It’s what grows in young children’s minds and bodies during their formative years. If children are raised in anger, irrationality and pain with no satis­factory relief or release, they will more than likely grow up to find solace in others’ anger and revenge. Their deprivation frustration and their alienation will form beliefs that agree with apostles of nihilism. They will not, outside of crises, know compas­sion for strangers.

Children raised in love and respect, fulfilled from the start, will grow up to care about people. That is not equivalent to accepting a socialist philosophy, that we are every­one’s keeper. It is to accept that a society, or small societies within the larger one, are a “neces­sary family” that, given only two choices, must lean toward com­mu­nity not isolation.

I’ve been wondering if the psychological baseline of most of humanity, imprinted in the new­born and infant, is frustrated love, the result of the “not quite good enough mother.”* This ambiva­lence – love fused with frustration – may be reflected two decades later in the four- or eight-year oscillations of a society, left then right, Demo­crat then Repub­lican. We feel the impulse for love, but it is blocked. We embrace then we withdraw. We hope, then we are burned. But since love is life, it may tend to have hegemony.

Raising our children well would eventually, in a century or a millennium, eliminate this cycle.

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* Re: Donald Winnicott’s famous concept of the “good enough mother.”