Solidly Pessimistic Therapy Laws

Teenagers cannot do therapy. They can only do counseling. Their problems are factors of birth and family life, primarily the way they are raised. The pain their family causes them cannot essentially be faced and expressed, as that would be to question their parents' validity or humanity, an impossibility for a dependent teen. So their dysfunctions will remain. Counseling – friend and sharer of the here-and-now – is the path to travel, as long as the intrapsychic roots of issues are not touched. Depression, anxiety, anger, depersonalization, identity, eating disorders, friendships, college, intimate relationships, jobs, parents' negative personalities and tactics – all these issues can be worked superficially. It's only when the teen leaves adolescence and is away from the childhood home – both are necessary – that the parents can be faced in truth.

I don't believe young children should do therapy outside of extreme circumstances such as the parents' long-term absence. I have never had a client who said that the therapy she was taken to from age five to twelve did her any good. The parent should be the client – for individual therapy and psychoeducation.

Problems of meaning in life cannot be healed. The many adult clients who say they can't tell what is the right direction, or work, or life purpose will not find it because this was prevented by "the loss of the real self in childhood." Depression is the burial of feeling, which over time is the loss of meaning. The person is lucky if some early childhood interest survived repression. But that interest is likely to be submerged beneath the more pervasive depression. People have a desire or goal, or desire for a goal, and then it evaporates.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is simply the result of a more shocking, perceptible loss than other losses. A child whose parent is loveless is traumatized. As Fairbairn said: "Frustration of his desire to be loved and to have his love accepted is the greatest trauma that a child can experience; and indeed this is the only trauma that really matters from a developmental standpoint." All standard trauma techniques are repressive: Like EMDR, they desensitize negative images or feelings or "install" positive cognitions. Some people prefer numbness, so they would say they are helped. Genuine trauma therapy must expel the pain of loss; the more pain, the more expulsive.

Trump culture shows us that adulthood is too often the de-evolution of the injured child through time. Children are not likely to be delusional, swallowing fact-less conspiracy theories with relish; hating anonymous masses of people they have never met; contriving ideologies that are simply their emotional pain and rage rationalized and intellectualized. But the majority of Republican adults are prone to all these errors. We should never assume that children naturally mature. If their injuries are not helped, they will founder more and more as the years go by.

I suspect people will never accept a predominately childhood-determined psychology that states unhealed injury aborts evolutionary growth and makes the defenses that form character. The reasons people will never accept these facts are that they want a stable identity and to be happy. Happiness does not countenance the perpetual saboteur beneath it. Stability requires that we accept our character. So we ignore the darkness. The human race is destined to be delusional.