How
can people whos [ sic ] jobs are to care be such a [
expletive ]? Stop being an [ expletive ]; your [
sic ] a dumb [ expletive ] head.
I don’t get much hate mail, but the little I do get
comes from persons whose orientation to life stands upon a seething mass
of unconscious hostility and
anger and who object
when, in my own political incorrectness, I dare to say so. And why are you
so consumed with anger and hostility?
Well,
your bitterness derives from the fact that your parents didn’t really love
you—that is, they didn’t care for you as a child needs to be cared for
with real love. Instead your parents manipulated you emotionally and treated you
like an object, leaving you emotionally crippled, with a
fear of love.
Wanting a psychotherapist to care for you is just a way to avoid admitting
the truth that your parents did not care for you.
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Have you ever
heard the term cognitive dissonance? In
music, dissonance refers to tones that do not harmonize with each
other; in psychology, cognitive dissonance refers to perceptions or
beliefs that do not harmonize logically with each other.
Consider what
happens to many children during childhood. To establish the trust for their
parents that allows for basic survival, children have a natural belief that
says, “My parents love me.” But then many children experience a
parent doing things that cause emotional or physical harm to them. Thus the
children experience dissonance between the belief that says, “My parents
love me.” and the perception that says, “My parents do not love me.”
To resolve this dissonance, many children take up a new belief that seems to
make sense of the perception that parents “who are supposed to love me
are hurting me”—thus the children tell themselves, “I don’t
deserve to be treated with love.”
In essence, without
being able to express the truth that their parents are psychologically
dysfunctional, children
take the blame on themselves, believing that they are contemptible failures and
don’t deserve love.
Sadly, the problem
compounds itself, because unconsciously
any child knows the truth—“My parents really do not love me”—and
yet fears to admit it. Thus unconscious anger at the
parents builds up but, because it cannot be expressed, it gets directed at the
world around the child, and the child ends up pointing at everyone else saying,
“You don’t care about me!” |
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And this
leads right into the authentic value of your
“question.”
Is a
psychotherapist’s job really to “care”?
Well, in the
technical sense, no. A psychotherapist’s job does not involve being
a nanny, a friend, or confidant; it does not involve
making you feel good about yourself; and it does not involve supporting you
in pointing blame
at someone or something else, either personally or
politically. The
psychotherapist’s job should be nothing more than helping you recognize
the structure of your
unconscious motivation
so as to confront your pain
honestly—and
change your behavior in the process.
To do the job
well, though, the psychotherapist must be willing and able to probe into
all the dark and
unpleasant areas of your psyche that you, in
shame and guilt,
would prefer to keep hidden.
Moreover, here
is where it gets sticky, because many psychotherapists are themselves caught
up in the very social
illusions that secretly conspire to deny the nature of the psyche’s
dark, and often unpleasant, reality. So how can such persons—these bad
“therapists” I often mention in these pages—have any deep
healing influence? Well, in many cases, they can’t. And so, it comes
to this: only those who care enough about their job to cultivate, through
rigorous scrutiny, their own self-honesty will, in the end, be able to show
that they really care about you. It’s a genuine caring, and it cares nothing
for political correctness.
No
advertising—no sponsor—just the simple truth . . .
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