Interpret a dream by feeling

I do not analyze my clients’ dreams. Or rather, I don’t think I do a great job of it and offer more humility than answers. I accept the theory that the feelings in a dream are entirely true, are splinters of the sun, epiphanic fires of meaning often embedded in childhood. The scenarios are legitimate in ways that the brain uses our countless experiences and bends them to the feelings. For example, I’ve learned, from one dream, that far below my conscious feeling of pride about my work, there is a sense of being a human failure, behind all of humanity, a person who never really became an adult. In the dream, I am in my mid-forties (I’m 71), wandering along the downtown street of an unknown city, desperately begging strangers to help me find a job or a career. I am always an extinct typographer – my former profession that was replaced by desktop publishing in the 1980’s – never a therapist. It’s as if my solid present and future life never existed.

 

Here I wanted to describe one dream from my childhood. At most, it appeared four or five times, scattered about the years prior to my leaving for college. In the dream I am a child, no older than seven or eight, driving an automobile across a bridge over water, possibly an ocean. The bridge is nearly as high as the clouds, an empyrean arc. The far end of it can’t be seen or is barely visible. The primary feature of the dream is that the bridge is thin, fantastically narrow, exactly the width of the car. I am driving tensely, deliberately, but with helpless speed, and cannot afford to veer even a half-inch to the right or to the left. I am alone, a child in the driver's seat. The feeling I have is the most recondite chemistry. In quiet terror, holding the steering wheel tightly, I succeed, do not plunge over the bridge into the water. Yet the dream has always ended before I reach the other side. Each time, I negotiate the thin arc but not to any endpoint. There is a part of the feeling that must be described as perverse confidence: dread fused with, completely identical with, an odd certainty that I will survive by luck, not skill, by some uncaring fate that is nevertheless on my side.

 

This dream, which I had never thought to interpret, had remained asleep for decades. Only when a client recently related two dreams of his own that mirrored his mother's craziness did it suddenly appear, and with it, its meaning. I had never had an emotional bond with my mother, no feeling for her and possibly none from her. But she was "there," never rejecting, never holding, never cold, never warm. It was secure, but in the emptiest most meaningless way. I was made to ride along in my life, on no ground, an infant with the earth lovelessly out of reach, child's undesired adventure and terror in one, an impossible journey, with luck sadly preventing death.

A therapist trying to interpret the dream, without benefit of its complex biochemistry of feeling, might have construed the terrible narrowness of the bridge as my parents' control, the straitjacket of my upbringing. But there was no such control. There was only lonely freedom, emptiness and anxious security.

 

I don't doubt that dream could return, just as the lost man without a job could.

Micro-book: Pessimistic Psychology

Pessimistic Psychology

Part One. Introduction

Chapter 1: Old baby psych

All the psychology you read talks to the adult. But there are no adults. There are just old bodies that left their child behind. It has never died. Its heart is still beating from below, its eyes are still looking out. We, old bodies, live in a fragile dream of now, fragile because reality has more power than it. The reality that we are still our roots, our beginning. On our deathbed, we will remember, and be remembered by, our child self.

It is fine to throw away all the disorder labels, because they are just containers of injury, loss, soul death, pain, and our mind and body behavior that comes from them. The so-called disorders are essentially all the same. Anxiety and depression and anger, sadness and aimless energy and the false self that has covered us. You don't need labels to come for help. You don't need diagnoses to be helped,

You need your Rosebud. Your telltale heart.

Chapter 2: Come in

Most everyone is a lost soul. We can't live our rare childhood love anymore. It was taken from us and buried. We're older now. Time has jailed us. We may picture that distant Eden, but to go there feels like dying.

You may not know this in your therapy. Your therapist, believing you can retrieve your happiness from some magical source, won't know it either. Together, you'll be on the same blank page.

But if you come to depth therapy, what could be called time and space therapy, you'll be helped to see the cosmos whether you want to or not. Within it is the potential for contentment. You may quit, or you may stay.

Chapter 3: Stay

It's ok to be the audience for a brief moment, sitting upright, saying what you know or believe you know about yourself. Describing feelings you have or that you think you have. It is necessary to sit and listen to facts about psychological nature. But then you need to sit back, get sloppy, lie down on the sofa. Now you're adult and child, wide and deep like the ocean. If fortunate, you won't know what to say. How do you paint the ocean? So you say anything or nothing, or you cry. Even if you know it's your child that needs to be seen, you or it won't know what to say or do.

Part Two. Beginning

Chapter 4: You think you have a feeling, or you have an idea

You may say you're depressed, but since you don't know what that means, it would be better to say you feel bad and don't know what it is. In some hundreds of years, therapists will be able to pluck the childhood pain from your brain and from the cells in your body. But they will never know how to create the years of growth and maturity that never happened.

You may say you have anxiety. You don't know why your body has dread, or why you worry and fear chronically. Lying down, you should shake, cry, moan. Then deeper, cry for mommy and daddy, need a hug and a hand to hold. Then deeper, you are drowned in the losses in your childhood, seeing your angry father, being completely alone and invisible in your family in a moment and in all the years.

You feel something else is wrong. You may not know that you feel out of sync with the world, embarrassing or invalid to be in the present moment. It would be best if your therapist could tell you this, which would be galling yet supportive. Therapy is not what people have been taught it is, a place to talk, to cry or name a feeling, get a new perspective on your life, people, the future. That's having a friend. Therapy could be defined as the penultimate moment:

The moment before it's too late.

Chapter 5: There is no here-and-now

To believe we live in the present is to be a person treading water in the middle of the ocean, sharks and other single-minded murderers swimming beneath, and looking up at the wide blue sky, thinking: “This moment is beautiful. The day is mine and it is unique. I am in love with life.” In therapy, you need to be in touch with yourself as your history, as a galaxy of feeling sensations that started in your childhood and that became you. Words are timeless: They completely exist outside of past time, moving time, and are barely your time. They are poor labels with little meaning. Neuroscientists don’t understand consciousness, and similarly our words are alien squeaks. People say “love” and they don’t mean it, they mean something else, a dozen somethings else. They say “hate” and they mean “I am hurt.” They say “I’m fine” and they say “thank you” when their history has made them incapable of gratitude. They say “I am sad” and in doing so, they ignore molecules of anger at their life.

 

The more you talk in therapy, the more you are incomprehensible.

Chapter 6: A human being is a universe of defenses

 

A person is a homunculus of defenses. There is hardly a thought that isn't an escape from a feeling. There is no belief system that is not a soother, a plush bed and feathery pillow, whether it’s a religion, a political party, a conspiracy theory, an intellectual opus, an advice book, a mantra or philosophy. If you are not writhing on fire and screaming until your vocal cords burn out of you, you can thank your thoughts, even the most truth-telling, anxious and depressing ones.

 

Depth therapy is a battle between fire and tears. Tears put out some of the fire, but you must be burning up first. That is present pain based in childhood loss, from which no one has ever recovered. When my dog died in 2001, I knew I would never cease grieving, because the feeling of her loss was one with all the devastating losses of my childhood. One was all, and could not be otherwise. I don’t know if people realize that’s what grief is: It calls forth our whole life, weighted to our beginning. If I could have cried, then, loud and long enough to honor all of my pain, I would be better than I am now. But it was just me, alone with my euthanized dog in Cañon City, Colorado, late at night in a room in a veterinary clinic. Alone does not work for grieving.

Chapter 7: False hope

 

Therapy is sabotaged time and again – time eternal – by birth. A child may be born in crack cocaine withdrawal, screaming not crying, in the pain and rage that prevents all bonding and human connection: the psychopath. He may be premature and incubated, too late for the beautiful bond, to become pure need and pure rejection crushed together. She may have that oxytocin bond to a mother who has no maturity, to form an unrequited love for the rest of her life. This is the one, this is the millions who will forever need their mother and will forever be starved by her. She will never separate and she will never join, never be held. She will wander yet never move. Where does therapy go? All her moods are blended with hope and starvation and will not be improved by techniques or advice. If therapy wants her to “individuate,” to cut the cord and walk away, she can’t. If it wants her to think positive, positive thoughts will be stillborn, and she will carry them precariously. If therapy wants her to regress to finally release her childhood pain, that is too dangerous: She is still too much the child, and process strips away the adult that has given her refuge.

 

And still therapy goes on. As far as you’ll allow.

Chapter 8: Therapy is too-late love that must be rejected

 

We are trying to heal our past. There are two real, and countless artificial, means of healing. We change when our whole life is suddenly stirred. But the stirring has to be violent or disruptive enough to pour some of the original pain out of our vessel. This happened to me, to a certain degree, when I realized that I was not a defective piece of life, an error of life, but rather an injured soul. After forty-two years, I was awakened. Some pain left me. Had at that moment I wept enough to flood the earth, I would be more healed than I am. The past was changed, because some chemicals of the past evaporated.

 

The second part of healing is to become the child again and finally be loved. Everyone can feel the truth of this if they want to. If we could only go back, return to that loneliness and those moments of injustice and be true to our feeling, and be loved when we are, we would heal. We would wake up in a different world. Unfortunately, this does not happen. People are in terror of going there, regressing that deeply, and they do not want the therapist to be their ultimate parent, their loved one.

 

Too bad.

Part Three. In the midst

Chapter 9: You may have to destroy many things

 

Ralph Klein, M.D., of The Masterson Approach to personality disorder, said that individuals with borderline personality come to therapy to feel better, not to get better. I am certain this could be said of most clients, no matter their diagnosis or problem. Getting better must be seen this way: It is to change, to become different from who you are, not merely to be the same person but to somehow feel better, a drugged brain. Picture what this means at the core. In your therapy, something has happened that has changed your heart, has changed your feelings, has changed your understanding. You now see the world in a different way, see people differently. The personality you've been is behind you. The ground beneath your feet feels different. You suddenly can no longer tolerate your family's personality, their abuse, their denial, their enmeshment, their sarcasm and condescending, their minimizing or controlling you. You reject them or stand tall, and they reject you and stand small because they have never grown. You feel heavier, more serious, and yet light, a new lightness. You may laugh less, but wiser. You no longer people-please. You see your childhood being rewritten: you now know the truth. It is not the fable that you had believed.

The modern culture of therapy is to assume you'll be happier by rational talk and encouraging new behavior. That is a fantasy: Therapy cannot do this. Change means the destruction of the old, questioning everything, and it means growth without growing up. It is unique, and it is alone.

Chapter 10: The goal never, yet partly, to be reached

 

The ultimate goal, of course, is to become the perfect child: spontaneous and deliberate, confident by birth, curious and quickened by everything in the world and the universe, quiet and busy, full of imagination and creativity, equipped to feel all possible feelings even the worst, so secure and un-bottled-up that there will be no global beliefs, hates and prejudices, with nearly every vicissitude of life set upon a proton – from a good in-utero nine months – not an electron. This won't happen, sad enough: We won't even be spontaneous, before therapy and certainly not after therapy, because therapy gives us a surfeit of self-awareness of good and bad.

 

This is true even of feeling-based therapy – banish the evils of cognitive therapy that wants your life to rest upon a thought. But feeling therapy can bring a new spontaneity (that blends with new consciousness): It can invite the exonerated child to leave its prison cell. I, myself, am more spontaneous and childlike now than in the past, when I would have to guard against my immaturity.

 

So that's where it goes: facing the worst, being the worst, being naked and bleeding and protected, to ultimately be yourself.

🔱

Your standard teletherapy session

Second session (first one after the diagnostic interview), I informed my 35-year-old client ("Barbie") that her voice is sing-songy, childlike, with a breezy and nonchalant manner and attitude. That's to say, it is fake. Not surprisingly, she wasn't aware of this. I likened her voice to the "euthymic defense," the fake happy, light, smiley, chipper manner that countless people unconsciously adopt (or wear characterologically) when an underground troubling feeling materializes. The troubling feeling is unnoticed as the defense kicks in immediately. The client had named, at the first session, a smorgasbord of symptoms, basically "everything but the kitchen sink," including self-sabotage by being a "jerk" to people. So I also offered a technique. She claimed that she would prevent or ruin a relationship as a preemptive strike: Everyone would "abandon" her anyway, so obviate the possibility of it. I said – Not exactly. The jerkiness was an automatic not a conscious defense, her peculiar way – similar to a person's urge to reject a compliment – of preventing hope, preventing someone's touching her hurt and starved child's heart. The technique was to stop being jerky and allow the terrible needful feeling, and bring that feeling to therapy.

One problem she had not named at Intake, but did now when I inquired about past diagnoses, was Borderline Personality. But that was fairly obvious from the first hour.

Why jump into what might be a disturbing confrontation: her voice? Two main reasons: She had let more than a month pass between Intake and the next session, a likely sign of flaccid engagement. Better to shove some food in her mouth than to hope she'll stay to read the long menu. And Borderline would be the core disturbance from which all the others grew, so it would need to be addressed primarily and directly. I explained something about it, from Masterson's causal theory describing Borderline Personality as a developmental pathology, and related the various immaturity symptoms to that. She had already acknowledged: "I need to be more professional" at work.

I have a twenty-three-years-long bad habit: I go a full sixty or sixty-two minutes for sessions, leaving no time to reschedule. Clients have my text-message number for that purpose. Most text, but not all. I'll see if she does. Barbie would be one of the several-to-many clients whom I have an odd fused feeling about: There's nothing I can do for her; there's everything I can do for her. Impotent and life-changing. We never really know who will be helped, and are sometimes very surprised.

Showing them the light

Child therapists (little to pre-teen) may be doing the following, but I doubt it. They should say to the parents:

"You've informed me that your son is mean to his little sister. He destroys her toys, he shoves her, and he screams at her. He spits on the floor. He misses the toilet on purpose. He lies about having homework. That's to say, he acts out. Acting out is not the expressing of feelings. It's the physical and verbal tension release that results from the suppression of feelings. He does this because he has powerful sensations and feelings and no words for them, or because he is afraid to say the words and holds them in. Or he says things that don't make sense because he's afraid to be direct. A goal of therapy is to help the child become himself and not lose himself, to grow his unique personhood by expressing it. That requires that you hear him and accept that he has a right to all of his feelings, whatever they are. So I want you to know that if we're doing good work in his time here, you will hear, at home, his voice where you once saw his angry fists: words of injustice and accusation and frustration and self-pity, and hopefully eventually jubilation and silliness, and words that tell you directly what is up with him. You'll have to be man enough to take him seriously, and with respect. Your manner will have to be expansive and benign, protective, not childish and hurt. Remember that his unpleasant emotions are exactly as valid as ours.

"To summarize, had I not talked to you about this, you might be thinking your son was getting worse by confronting you, speaking clearly and with courage. When in fact that is a good sign, a sign that he is feeling better and that he is growing."

Adult therapists (18 to the age when the parents and siblings are still living and cognizantly involved in their "identified patient" family member's life) may do the following, but I doubt it confidently. They should have the client say to the family gathering:

"As you know, or now you know, I am in therapy. I've been learning a lot about myself and about you. I've been learning sobering and unpleasant things about the way I grew up, the way I was raised, and the whole family network. I've learned that I was treated as if I was invisible, the convenient, passive child. I didn't grow a voice, which happens when no one is noticing or caring. I'm telling you this because I want to prevent your shock of seeing me speak up loudly, sometimes very loudly. And not smiling when nothing is funny. It's not a good idea to hold feelings in for twenty-five years. This is a new day. Are there any questions?"

These ideas, these two types of "informed consent," were inspired by a therapy in which my client, 19, has been slowly finding her feelings and growing her voice. In her childhood, she never spoke up as she knew that no one in her immediate family noticed her. She needs to stop their toxic asses in their tracks. She needs to say: "I'm giving notice. Life will be a little different now. I'm over being invisible in this family. You may not have done it purposely or consciously for nineteen years, but it was blind and ignorant, and it was sick."

When you are starting to change in therapy, you will probably feel strange and inhibited in your family that has not grown, has never moved on in time, that only knows you as a child. It will help you open up if you announce the changes that will immediately happen.

Anthem: "Nyoing nyang nyumpie. Vglibble vglobble vglup."*

Dear client,

 

With sincere, profound regret, I have been forced into a position where I must either transfer your case to another clinician, or close it, at your discretion. This has nothing to do with you or with our clinical relationship. Anthem Blue Cross / Blue Shield, your insurance provider, has recently adopted documentation requirements that I cannot, in good conscience, meet. Anthem’s new standards require a vacuous dumbing-down of therapeutic thinking and documenting, where a client’s complexity and interrelatedness of problems are gutted of psychology and reduced to measurable, numerical objectives and short- and long-term goals – reduced to a “sixth-grade math word problem,” as I said in a blog post. These concrete milestones must be named in a Treatment Plan and reflected in each session’s Progress Note. This requires the clinician * to perceive the client as one or two simple behavior changes waiting to happen rather than as a complex psyche with deep roots, * to use boilerplate terminology, and * to frequently fabricate – invent – indicators of either progress or stagnation for each session’s Note. This farce has nothing to do with the nature of therapeutic progress or how it happens, and is not something I can do as a caring, long-experienced counselor.

 

I’ll acknowledge that other counselors are able to comply with the new standards (especially interns).

 

Anthem, in what may be a fraudulent act, has not been paying Oasis Counseling for, I am assuming, hundreds of hours of sessions, as I am not the only clinician facing these absurd new requirements. I have lost a great deal of income – unfortunately, a significant factor – and my family has suffered for it in a near-calamitous way. Consequently, I am forced to remove Anthem from my panel of insurances and to make room for others which, at least for now, underwrite my services from an understanding of the ambiguity and complexity of clients’ difficulties and needs.

 

All Anthem clients who are presently on my calendar through January will remain on schedule. Special, individual needs will be respected, which could extend the closure process into the following month. As mentioned, you may ask me to transfer your case to another clinician.

 

-- The Pessimistic Shrink

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* John Barth, The End of the Road, page 70. Originally published in hardcover by Doubleday in 1958. Copyright © 1958, 2016. Some context: "He mugged antic faces at himself, sklurching up his eye corners, zbloogling his mouth about, glubbling his cheeks. Mither Morgle. Nyoing nyang nyumpie. Vglibble vglobble vglup. Vgliggybloo! Thlucky thlucky, thir."

The god we don't talk about

I've read half-a-dozen articles about the six-year-old first-grader who shot his teacher two days ago. The following statement from a CNN article is the only one to come close to allowing, alluding, blushingly hinting, leaving open the pearl-clutching possibility that there may be some background to the incident other than a post-toddler's willful initiative:

"Authorities are 'working diligently to get an answer to the question we are all asking – how did this happen? We are also working to ensure the child receives the supports and services he needs as we continue to process what took place,' Jones said."

None of the articles, stupefyingly, included the words "parent," "father," "mother," "gun safety," "irresponsibility," "negligence." Are the media this cowardly, this petrified? Do parents – in our time when 14-year-olds carry their psychiatric diagnoses like backpacks, know abused classmates and crisis hotlines, have unselfconscious contempt for their teachers' ignorance and incompetence, recite their parents' and grandparents' childhood trauma histories, know their fathers are narcissists and their mothers are drug addicts – still possess the magical cachet of the inculpable, the perfect harmless? Shouldn't we be saying, as an obvious and "educated guess," that the boy's father is a scumbag or at least a complete idiot? Shouldn't he be expecting jail? Shouldn't we be telling the parents of Idaho murder suspect Kohberg: You raised a complete piece of garbage, and you turned a blind eye or condoned him for twenty-eight years?

Abusive priests can be condemned, but less likely the Pope. It took decades, and Christopher Hitchens, to reveal that Mother Teresa was a hypocrite and a fraud. Geniuses and other luminaries, once admired, have feet of clay today. But parents – they seem to be above them all. They may very well have a labor union in heaven that has made them the law of right nature.

Would the world collapse if parents are condemned and ostracized for their failures? I believe that's the unconscious known. That without that anchor – the Parent as Good – living itself will be unmoored, there will be no certainty, no security, no peace and no meaning. We will be destroying our ground, to fall blind in the darkness forever.

The parent is our hope and our succor. We, the children, will always need, or dream, their godliness.

Spontaneities #1: Love of hate

A therapy client of mine has an underlying "infrastructure" of rage and injustice, which feels supported by and comfortable with others' rage and injustice, and feels very uncomfortable with warmth and benevolence – because he never received those benefits in the critical years of childhood. That's to say, he loves Trump and feels apoplectic hate for Biden. I assiduously avoid getting into politics in his sessions, but I did propose to him, as the hour ended, that he ask himself why, as he'd said, he likes a president who is "a bull in a china shop." Introspecting on this could, if he is capable, carry him down the rabbit hole, at the bottom of which is a snake.

This was my comment to a recent Washington Post article on Kevin McCarthy's ignominious ascent to Speaker of the House. It's worth repeating (I've discussed the psychology of the Trump loyalist before) that to admire a narcissist and sociopath such as Trump is to be an extremely troubled person alpha and omega, at the foundation of the psyche. In that place, is there a predominant or ultimate kernel of love, or a predominant or ultimate kernel of fire, burning up, anger? There will be one or the other, though I suppose in some people the balance may be near-perfect. This fact is so axiomatic that even those who came from abuse, terror and defeat who grow to be saintly and wise will be found, at the bottom, to be raging. Their saintliness is a cover.

Were my client to trace, down the taproot of his feeling-memory, being tickled and gratified by a "bull in a china shop" president, he would find childhood feelings of redemption at destruction and defiance. He would find nothing sophisticated, nothing civilized, but rather psychological anarchy pure and simple. What makes his, and others', blindness to this guaranteed is that injustice anger feels right and powerful. It obliterates the past and becomes the present. It becomes amnesia for the hurt child who remains cowering at the antipodes of the spirit.

Any devotee of Trump or the other sociopathic snakes in suits* in today's Republican Party would lose their belief, their love for hate, if they could engage in feeling-centered depth therapy. They would exorcise enough pain to reverse their psyche's balance.

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* https://www.amazon.com/Snakes-Suits-When-Psychopaths-Work/dp/0061147893.

Spontaneities #2: Freditation

I propose a new form of meditation, which should actually replace all former and other types. That sounds refreshingly arrogant, and I couldn't give less of a damn. While it's been determined that meditation changes the brain in reportedly positive ways, it's just a form of self-indulgent distraction and suppression: Focus on one's breath or on a mantra to quiet the mind, suppressing the natural reaction of emotions and bodily emotionalized sensations. Quite unbecoming to the human species. Pathetic, I'd say.

Real meditation should be to receive the world like a baby, but silently. Though a baby would experience stimuli and would cry, shriek and laugh, an adult's similar expressive reactions would be too mixed with experience and ideation to enable the pure meditative effect. The goal would be not to shut the eyes but to open them. Not to artificially suppress feeling but to be awed by things, probably by everything.

True meditation would be taking a walk and just looking at what's around: a tree, the leaves, the sidewalk, a cloud or the clouds, a street sign pole, a mailbox, a roof with chimney, the rain, a child catching a bee on a flower, a pebble or refuse in the gutter. Smelling the air, but not hearing the murmur of traffic because that would engage the adult mind. Silently, without judgment, philosophy, analysis. I'd say that ninety percent of human thinking is refuse in the gutter. We carry decayed and putrid ideas and assumptions, often of a cynical bent, that have no originality. But a baby is quite original, and we should return to that.

This practice would be as difficult as traditional meditation is for most people. Most of us can't quiet our mind as the process requires. Thoughts come "marauding back in," as Dan Harris said in his "10% Happier" video.* But this new meditation would purify by cleansing not by distracting and numbing. It would have the salutary effect of creating regressive innocence. That's what the world needs.

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* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sXBEfIXUno.

Advertisement for therapy for the new year

Inner child / adult and their respective urges. Dependent / independent. Feeling / thinking. These human integral dichotomies are reasons for pessimism – relative to the optimism we would like to have – about individuals, cultures, and the future. A seeming dichotomy that most people would cite – good / evil – is subsumed within the others and does not exist in itself. Good should be considered the natural benevolence that a loved child will have for self and others. Evil, the projection of the unloved child's pain into the world and absorption into the self.

We can't avoid experiencing the pressure of our childhood unmet needs and the pain this starvation caused. We are therefore dependent, but also an individual not collective mind. We are grounded in body sensation and emotion but we think our way away from our feelings. Is there any method to measure, in the individual psyche and in the mass culture, the summary effect of these contradictory forces? Which, in the broad arc, wins and which loses? Could the Book of Humanity, written at the end of time, have the prosaic title: "Two Steps Forward, Three Steps Back"?

Why pessimism and not optimism? Emotional pain is prepotent. It sickens us when it happens and is not healed. And this is generally at birth and in childhood. Human dysfunction comes down to early pain and the timeless abyss it carves into the timeline.

We should look at the individual, the microcosm. Do most people "win," or "lose"? Before the end of their lives, have they found meaning and contentment, or struggled for it, or given up? My view, which I don't think will change for the rest of my days, is that there is no real movement forward or backward. We remain one and the same, barring healing work. That does not include advice taking or thinking things, which I read so often. It involves going to where we're wounded.

Alice Miller mentioned that a person can grow intellectually but remain the emotionally injured child. This is evident in the macrocosm: Civilization grows and deteriorates, and people juggle their dichotomies.