1981 Breakthrough

Friday, August 29, 2008

I know a lot of people who are in or have been in some kind of counseling or psychotherapy, from myself to Jay, Daughter, several current friends, and more. Something I've noticed is that those who are, seem to need it least. There are a lot more who aren't "seeing someone", who should. We're all a little warped. The healthiest people are just more likely to admit it.

An aside - when I was in college and dating Ex#1, he and his social group considered any type of counseling to be an admission of weakness, that a "real man" never admitted any emotional problem. When Ex#2 and I were in marriage counseling, he asked me not to let it slip to his father, because his father would be disgusted, think him a wimp, that he couldn't control his life or his wife.

The big change since the '70s, when I was in intensive analysis, is that back then talk therapy was the path to realization. Now it seems like medication is the first choice. That's the effect of insurance companies - they'd rather pay for pills than ongoing (no end in sight?) therapy.

I do agree that there are some conditions where medication is most effective. But I insist that there are others where medication fixes nothing. It just covers things up.

Most of us carry a lot of emotional baggage, things that people said to us or did to us in the past, that affect how we react now. It's for that kind of problem that medication is merely coverup, and where talk therapy is most effective and necessary. Unfortunately, most talk therapy seems to consist of "what happened, how did you react, why, what could you have done differently" and so on. Trying to change behavior, to change reactions.

That's often not the problem.

The problem is that we believed what other people have told us about ourselves.

People with enormous influence when we were most vulnerable told us we were stupid, or worthless, or incapable. That we were fat, or ugly (like when my mother described my nose as "all over my face"), or it was always our fault when things went wrong. And then when things did go wrong, as they inevitably will sometimes, we accepted it as proof that we are stupid, incapable, ugly, worthless. Maybe it doesn't show up front, but it's always there in the background.

So we believed them. We incorporated their judgment as part of our self image.

In these cases, the goal of talk therapy should not be simply to change behavior, but to lead to a realization that those people were WRONG! They told us lies to make themselves look good. Their need for control, their need to win, caused them to define us as lesser, and we believed them.

If we believed them, it is not proof that we were stupid, only that we trusted them. We were vulnerable. It starts when we are very young, the self-deprecation ground is broken, and from then on the predators out there recognize us as fertile ground.

The breakthrough comes when we realize that they lied to us. They were wrong, not us. When we are able to look at ourselves through our OWN eyes, not theirs, and realize that the real "me" is quite different from what we had been told we are, then we are able to finally be ourselves --- the good, strong, smart, capable, generous, creative, nice person we are, but they didn't want us to be.
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