I write the contradiction

My entire weekend was ruined – not a smile and only a frown on my old face – because one of the major insurance companies, Anthem Blue Cross / Blue Shield, has decided to establish the jackass, cringey pseudo-scientific documentation requirements that Medicaid has always specialized in. The client feels bad. Why? Her entire life was bent and broken from as earlier as age six, and nothing since then feels right, secure, happy. And it won't, there, at the very bottom. As soon as – age six, age ten, age three, age birth – we have to repress our pain, we lose touch with our self, and we never get it back. It's water under the bridge. We start living from our underground crushed pain and in our disembodied head, but never again from our one human energy source: our body and its feelings. The phrase "too late" identifies both the dysfunction and the nature of its therapy. I've said it before: Good therapy is too-late love.

So insurance companies pay for our efforts to return innocent feeling (along with its children: promise, curiosity, love) to the client. But we can't return her childhood and all the missed, unfelt experiences. So people, after a hundred years of substantial failure of therapy, reconceive the problem. We are sick because we think the wrong thoughts. Here are the right ones. Or because "trauma" dented the brain and we have to undent it by . . . TED Talks and EMDR voodoo. The problem is that we became a different person. Healing our soul ache would be like performing surgery on Jill when Jack had the heart attack, or like retouching childhood photos to make us happy.

Poor insurance companies. They don't want us to spend time trying to find the apocryphal time machine. So they need us to soothe our client: to be a friend, a parent, a teacher, a guru. They want us to convince our client that thinking different in the here-and-now can change our life. Some of us, though, know about changing the past a little. It involves Candace Pert's "molecules of emotion." It has to do with tears that, when they fall from our adult promontory to deep beneath the earth to the earliest pain in childhood, "dissolve the walls of the unconscious"* and enable life-grieving, grieving of our earliest losses. It can happen, sometimes, in a few sessions.

But 100% of the time, 7 days a week, 24 hours a day for the next 100 years, and at 10 on the Subjective Units of Distress (SUDS) scale, that's not what the insurance companies mean by "brief, solution-focused therapy." To them, the client is: "I can't drive on the Interstate."

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* Arthur Janov, The New Primal Scream, Chapter 15, "The Role of Weeping in Psychotherapy"