Therapy

 

Beyond a given point man is not helped by more “knowing,” but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way. As Goethe put it, we must plunge into experience and then reflect on the meaning of it. All reflection and no plunging drives us mad; all plunging and no reflection, and we are brutes.

― Ernest Becker, “The Denial of Death”

Christine asked a question about therapy in the link back  to my "continuities" thought in the recent Nostalgia Revisted post. I answered there, but we also discussed it briefly at lunch yesterday. Other topics were more pressing. She remains fonder of insight as a tool of therapy than I am. She has seen places where it has worked for her, and also for clients. (Or so she says...😄) My experience with OCD was not so positive. I love insight.  I seek insight.  That is very nearly my natural state, paraphrasing St Paul, "Don't credit me for seeking insight.  I can't do anything else." Yet I did not find it did me any good in my own case, even after months of therapy. 

Insight is so fascinating to me that it might even be considered a temptation, and evasion when trying to solve a problem.  I am recalling a young man decades ago who shook his head sadly, saying he was determined to find out why he drank. It was always wonderful to work with the Twelve-Step people at those moments. They often go into substance counseling as a result of having been in rehab themselves, and they are all in on practical applications.  I recall one southern boy, about a decade older than me saying to him "You ain't gonna understand it until you've been sober about a year. Then you can start." I also remember him for counseling a woman who get going off the wagon because she would drive by her old bar on the way home from work and notice by the cars who was there; then a week or so later, sometimes as much as a month, she would stop in "just because I had something to tell Judy" then drive on. You see the pattern already? She would go from giving a message to Judy to talking with Judy, ordering a coke. A week later she would be drinking again. She always punished herself that she was so weak, even though she knew it was bad for her. My friend spoke up in group therapy. "Ya could just drive home another way." Revealingly, she had immediate excuses why this was not possible. He told me later that he knew those roads, and she would lose only about three minutes a day going a different way.

More sadly, I knew a dynamic psychologist who would tell us about his therapy sessions with a voyeur. "He resists the idea that the window frame is actually a picture frame, and I want him to consider what he is looking for in the painting." (Answer: mother.) I was too junior and uncredentialed to question him, but I remember thinking He's looking at pretty girls take off their clothes.  Let's not make this too complicated. So when I rail against the talk therapies that are attempting to change one from within rather than just having a whack at solving the problem, insight or no, that's what's behind it. Maybe I'm just complaining about the abuses and mistakes.