Therapy is a nonjudgmental process. But can we help a bad person?

Here is an indigestible paradox: Therapy is the most successful when it’s the shallowest and least effective. This is to say that Cognitive Therapy can work for anybody, as it’s based on the assumptions that (a) dysfunction is a matter of wrong thinking, and (b) irrational or pessimistic thoughts can be changed by logic and optimism. These assumptions could apply to anyone regardless of their moral system or political ideology. As it goes, the Cognitive approach can only help people who are heavily invested in their severed head, who live in their head and prefer to banish their historical body of emotion, felt sense, pain and developmental abort.

Depth therapy, that changes emotional chemistry by reaching to the origin causes of dysfunction, cannot help individuals who are married to blaming the world, to their love of a sociopathic president, to their antisocial ideologies and attitudes. These cognitive-conceptual stances are based in deep, early-onset pain that they will critically resist feeling else they will collapse into inchoate helplessness.

A woman whose childhood anger is redeemed in hateful leaders and governmental policies. A married couple who prefer the military life – seventy percent of the year – to raising their children, leaving them with friends and relatives. People with a vengeance sense of good and evil, who are deeply and complacently repressed, living on the surface of themselves and not wanting to reach or know their truth. Therapy will not help them.

But Cognitive Therapy can.