I announce my idiocy*

I walk down the hall of our group practice office and occasionally peek in other counselors' rooms (when their doors are open and they are not present), and notice bookshelves holding counseling and self-help books. Most often there will be the contemporary ones on the latest memes, like "gaslighting" and "trauma bonding." One must, after all, keep up with what money-seeking experts think of these phenomena. Quite by contrast, my bookshelf looks like a sad street gang of consumptive urchins out of Dickens' novels. The two dozen or fewer are all in pieces, so I may cite a passage to my client by extracting the one needed page. They are old – hardly any new purchases since the early 2000's – and their subjects are old, musty fogies that would embarrass the "with it" culture of TikTok and Instagram. So today's question is: How can someone do twenty years of five-day-a-week therapy, seven to ten clients a day, having never read another book (and only a smattering of articles)?

Since I obviously do a lot of therapy, maybe the better question is: What do we learn from psychology books after we've absorbed the basic known principles and behaviors of human dysfunction? My first scandalous response is that I have never found a therapy technique that is useful outside of the feeling- and memory-evocative ones, the Gestalt and Primal ones. This rejects all Cognitive and Silly processes such as RET, DBT, ACT, NLP, tapping, eye wobbling, mindfulness, which just tease-and-feather the topmost thought-neurons or, Lord help me, brainwash "new cognitions" into the person. The books of yore taught me about radical feeling-is-healing work, the regressive identity of domestic violence perpetrators, emotional incest, causes of OCD and anorexia in "underparenting," infant-stage origin of Borderline Personality, the almost natural incompatibility of couples, "bad objects," children's attachment needs, the "as-if personality," soul murder, brilliant and not-brilliant ideas about the "real self," solid parenting principles that also apply to marriages, the psychopath. After those, which traveled with me through some years of hard-trekking and sometimes wayward adventures in different offices in different states, I tried to find new ideas, new principles, new insights. But the later books didn't have them. They often had errant and superficial claims. Instead, I found that clients' own descriptions of their distress, their memories, their assumptions, sparked in my mind new questions and understandings and possible solutions. It seemed that at a certain point, old and new facts fighting among themselves and fusing together – like couples arguing then having sex – begat newer ones. So far, they've begotten quite a few children, as seven-hundred blog articles will attest.

I am describing, I don't mind admitting, a perspective rooted to a theory: what could be called holistic depth psychology. It assumes that people are dysfunctional because they have been hurt, and they must be freed of pain which may be buried fifty years, five years or five minutes deep. This foundation will look at almost every concept of psychology and psychotherapy and see hidden notions. "Codependency" proves to come from the child's lack of self and self-esteem, her depression, and will need to be addressed at the "inner child" level. The same with angry and power-hungry men, who are such dependent little boys that they disintegrate without their mommy-wife. "Trauma" loses its billboard-type identity and is seen in the child's eyes when his father spends too much time at work. Depression is loss of the child's true self in benign or abusive homes. Anxiety is the later smoke from earlier fires of fear and apprehension. And the past proves not to be the past at all, but the poison which remains locked inside and which changes the nature – every molecule – of the person.

I noticed, at the very beginning of my work, another problem with the books. When I read into a good one, my therapy the next day would be inferior. A good book would give me ideas which would replace my feelings, my own eyes. I use that phenomenon as a lesson now to clients. If I suggest a powerful book such as Alice Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child or The Body Never Lies, or Arthur Janov's The Primal Scream or Steven Levenkron's first book on anorexia, I say: If something epiphanic hits you, put the book down. Don't continue reading: It will keep you in your head and out of your body, your life. Do what I do when I read a client or myself: Let the shock open doors within you, showing you molecular truths that had been buried by time and adult escapes. Anyone can be the best therapist, because all the answers are within.

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* The original title of this article was “Books, shnooks.” I decided to change it after reading a July 23rd article in The Guardian: “Want to quickly spot idiots? Here are five foolproof red flags." Red flag number one is: “Beware of anyone who describes themselves as a ‘proud non-reader of books.’” While there are likely many bright people who don’t read new or old books, and who don't say "describes themselves," the flag of idiocy is raised when one admits to being a non-reader. To save myself from stigma, then, I promise to pick up a Colleen Hoover. Or maybe Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life, (though at age 72, it's probably too late).