Yesterday’s New York Times included a “video guest essay”: “Are You Dreading a Return to Normal? You’re Not Alone.” Various interviewees described their preference for solitude and alienation, courtesy of the pandemic shutting-in. And since this was the NYT, their responses, and those of reader commenters, had the requisite sophisticated and poetic vibe. I wasn’t sympathetic:
“Some of these letters suggest one of the main reasons therapy doesn’t work (when it doesn’t work): Many people are ‘ego-syntonic’ with their dysfunction. That is, they are in attitudinal harmony with it, endorse it, are comfortable with their impairment. A Narcissist doesn’t wish he felt less god-like. A codependent doesn’t wish to be an independent person. An introvert or loner or ‘depressive personality’ doesn’t wish to be social, which would be healthier.”
My reward for my contribution? I was ankle-bitten by several sophomorics. One commenter doubted that being social was really healthier. Another produced the impuissant cliché:
“This is a common response of the therapy profession: when therapy fails, it must be the client’s fault.”
Hello, Boob. I don’t believe it is at all a “common response” of Therapy the Homogeneous Entity that clients are at fault for their failure to be helped (nor had I made such a universal statement). The facts are:
The therapist can be entirely at fault. The client can be obtuse, overly intellectualized, strongly resistant, and failure can be entirely his or her fault. Or both parties can be incompetent. I regularly see clients I can’t help because of my or the client’s deficits, or because of the absence of any effective healing methodologies. Medicine cannot cure all diseases. Psychology cannot cure all disorders.
Clients need to bring to their sessions a willingness to be undermined, a willingness and ability to go to their unacceptable pain and accept it. I don’t believe, entirely, Vereshack’s principle that we must “move to the absolute feeling centre* of the most painful and the worst that has ever happened” to us in order to get substantively better. That “centre” could be infancy, birth or prenatal trauma, which are largely inaccessible. It’s necessary, though, to get out of one’s thinking head, the severed head that makes NY Citified boobs utter nonsense with a knowing air.
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* Vereshack is Canadian, and can’t spell.
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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.