Preface to a barely conceived future second book (not a joke, probably)

In America’s present psycho-culture, the term “evidence-based” has become the popular hypnotic buzzword of my hypnotized profession. Implying rigorous science, it is the imprimatur of instant trustworthiness and value. It is applied primarily to various species of “cognitive therapy” including cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), rational emotive therapy, EMDR (“Phase 5: installation of new cognitions”), reality therapy, existential therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy. What is the nature of this evidence that equals tacit proof of effectiveness? During or after their therapy, clients and former clients tell someone they feel better.

I submit that they do not tell themselves they feel better, not for long, not within themselves at the deep root of their sense of self. This is because thoughts – the medium of exchange of cognitive and most other therapies – can’t change the physical history of the body and mind and feelings. Thoughts impotently, fickly, restively color then pass through the cloud of the head. One has to force, over and over and over again, positive or “rational” words into consciousness to believe one has improved, become a different person.

In psychotherapy, the only true evidence of improvement is inner experience. No one outside of you can know who you are or how you are, even while analyzing you, even while knowing you for years, even if you are rich and full of laughter and surrounded by friends and love, or poor and alone. No one else can know. To understand your psychic status is to feel yourself, not just your surface changeable feelings, but those embedded in your past, the emotional themes of your existence.

My previous book, ‘I Forgive’ and Other Delusions, is a collection of ten years of therapy blog articles based on established principles, client work and brutal introspection. It features many case histories and, admittedly, a title that is bound to separate the men from the boys, or more accurately, the seekers from the hiders. Illustrated Dictionary of Contrarian Depth Therapy aims to establish a foundation of insights about the human psyche that I believe can only be contested by wishful thinking. I am disgusted that people’s need for healing has been turned into saccharine by a profession that should be intransigently reality-based. Psychotherapy has become the most deceptive of self-medications, a bait-and-switch where hurting people may be deeply heard, possibly for the first time in their lives, then learnedly guided to bright-paint and spin (“reframe”) their lifelong pain, pain that needs, above all, to be expressed exactly as it is to a caring person.