Counselor, Author, and Reflective Eclectic
Has there ever been a shrink that does not suggest that her clients keep a journal? None that I ever knew of.
Journaling can help you clarify your thoughts and feelings, know yourself better, release the intensity of feelings, and unlock creative capabilities.
If you have a shrink that suggested that, then you may be at a lost of what to say in your journal. This site can help.
If you’d like to take a nap, but are not sure when, you’re probably a mother of young children or a wage slave who doesn’t have a place to hide from your boss.
If you have all the time in the world and can take a nap at any time, but are not sure what time would optimize the nap’s effect of rebooting your brain, then take the nap wheel for a spin.
I recently opened, for the first time, a volume of essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson from the collection of old books in my library that I have never read. I was surprised to find that my father, whom I must’ve gotten the book from, noted on the title page that he had read it three times in his adolescence. I started to study the book, not to discover what Emerson’s thoughts were, but to learn more about my father.
When I have a client who needs to understand something about their father, I ask them to refer to the parent by name, not title. That’s because my father was a being who was born when I was born and had existence only in relation to me; whereas, Ray, which was my father’s name, lived about thirty years before I did, had experiences, thoughts, and feelings wholly apart from me, and died about twenty-five years ago, not much older than I am now. I knew him all my life as my father, and so, only knew him partially. I’d like to get to know more about him now, as a person, not just as a father; but alas, I cannot, except through Emerson.
A conscientious teenage boy might read an author like Emerson once if it was assigned. He might read it twice if he liked it, but he would not read it three times in three years if it didn’t make a profound impact on him. There had to be something about Emerson that would unlock the hidden parts of Ray to me. Emerson was the chief voice, if not the founder, of transcendentalism. Was Ray a closet transcendentalist?
These are some of Emerson’s words, taken from his essays, Nature, Self-Reliance, Circles, and The American Scholar, the anthems of transcendentalism:
Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. [I think, by man, Emerson meant human.]
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds…A nation of men [and women] will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all …
Emerson lived and wrote in a country that had just freed itself from the domination of Europe. He advocated that Americans leave Europe and all its traditions behind and trust their instincts. Ray grew up the son of a house maid. His own father had gone off during the Great Depression to find work and never returned. His mother’s wealthy employers ruled in his father’s place: the autocratic and persnickety Old Lady Wightman, and Mr Wightman, an introverted man of letters. The Wightmans were British transplants.
It wouldn’t be hard for Ray, reading this book of essays, to imagine that when Emerson was addressing Americans to shake off the domination of Europe and trust themselves, that the author was addressing Ray directly, urging him to free himself from the control of the Wightmans. So, just as soon as Ray had an opportunity, he did so. At the tender age of seventeen, he joined the US Navy and went off to war. I’ve got to believe that seventeen year old boy, shipping halfway around the world to fight a desperate war, had to have a lot of Emerson inside him.
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Always do what you are afraid to do.
Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.
Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.
Be not the slave of your own past. Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep and swim far, so you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.
Every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world is the triumph of some enthusiasm.
World War II turned out to be a blast for Ray, tooling around the South Pacific island of Eniwetok in a patrol boat long after that island had been won from the Japanese. He returned a skilled mechanic and went to work fixing cars. Did he remember his Emerson then and regret specializing only in auto mechanics, cutting himself off from his full humanity?
You must take the whole society to find the whole man [human]. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all…In the divided or social state these functions are parceled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work… the individual, to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers. But, unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters – a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.
I think he did. The evidence is that, later, about the time I was expected, he declared that he would build his own house, despite having no skills in the building trades. Everyone thought he was crazy, but he did it.
My father never talked about Emerson to me. Indeed, I rarely saw him read a book, although I always knew he held reading in high regard. I knew this because we had a lot of books in my home, many of which he had obtained from Mr Wightman, the shy man of letters. Ray, however, was an Emersonian man of action.
Emerson also had a complicated relationship towards books. He was, of course, an author and a very well read scholar, but one who valued action over analysis. I found it hard to read Emerson until I learned that his essays are best read aloud. I elected to have them read to me. He does not develop his points systematically, his writings are like a series of epigrams, nipping at his subject from a variety of angles. Listening to Emerson, it is possible to have your attention wander off for a few minutes and not miss anything because he will return to the point again and again in a new way. To Emerson, the important thing was not what he had to say, but the thoughts and actions that his words would awaken within you.
Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire.
Books are for the scholar’s idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings.
Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.
I was a big reader when I was a kid and declared that I would grow up to be a writer. My father never pushed anything on me, but I could tell that, whatever I developed an enthusiasm for, he would delight in and support. Still, whenever there was some real work to do around the house, like when we built an addition, or the car needed something, I was right there with him, hammering and turning wrenches with him. I therefore learned to do a great many things and was never intimidated to try something new. When I, at the age of nineteen, said I would move to Western New York and build a house, everyone thought I was crazy, except my father. Ray had done something just like it. Ray was an Emersonian and he had raised an Emersonian without ever speaking a word of Emerson to me.
The secret in education lies in respecting the student.
All our progress is an unfolding, like a vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
Children are all foreigners.
Emerson is found in practically every idea that has come out of America since his time. Everyone from the Tea Party to the New Deal, from Environmentalism to Entrepreneurial Capitalism, from the Sixties Anti-War Movement to the Neo-Conservatives of the 1990s drew from Emerson. Melville’s Captain Ahab was a mad Emersonian, Gatsby a sad one. It’s in Thoreau, of course; he being a protege of Emerson; and, by way of Thoreau, he infused Martin Luther King and Gandhi. His influence is also found in William Burroughs, Rachel Carson, Edward Abbey, and Barbara Kingsolver. The Dead Poet’s Society is chock full of Emerson. Dizzy Gillespie played transcendentalism with his horn. Louise Armstrong sang it. Read Emerson today and he sounds like a New Age Guru. He also sounds like half of the memes people post on Facebook. Emerson is in the very air we breath. He’s in the nutrients of the soil. You don’t have to read Emerson to be affected by him, or even have a father who read Emerson. He is a pervasive, inescapable, unconscious part of modern ideology.
To be great is to be misunderstood.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
Every hero becomes a bore at last.
A friend is one before whom I may think aloud.
A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.
I would urge you to read Emerson even if you aren’t looking to connect with your father. Read Emerson to understand something about yourself.
If you were intrigued by my recent post about Martin Buber and the application of existentialism to psychology, then you might be interested in The New Existentialists blog. They seem to have stopped posting new articles, but the old ones are still there to read.
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I recently finished reading Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History by Norman O. Brown. Since it’s a book that only the most psychoanalytically-minded shrink will enjoy, I’ll summarize it for you, so you don’t have to read it.
It goes like this. Babies experience the world with the same level of intensity, the same level of pleasure and pain, that you, as an adult, experience sex. This is what Freud meant by Infant Sexuality, or the equally misunderstood phrase, Polymorphous Perversity. Freud didn’t mean that babies are sexual in the same way that adults are sexual, only that any sensual stimulation that was not pain was pleasure, everything from sucking your thumb to taking a good dump. In addition, it was easy to take pleasure because you could suck your thumb and take a dump anytime you wanted.
This state of affairs made you, as a baby, the observant, engagable creature that you were. The whole world, including yourself, was your plaything. You learned fast, because you were so open to experience and able to experiment. Furthermore, because your parents sheltered you from many of the realities of the world, childhood was a prolonged period of privileged freedom.
All this had to change.
It began to change the moment your caretaker didn’t come when you called. You found that you were not the master of your domain. Something else, or someone else, was more important than you. You wished you could have whatever they had, so that you could have your caretaker anytime you wanted. This is what is meant by the Oedipal Phase and Penis Envy, two other widely misunderstood Freudian terms.
So, what did you do? You suppressed your desires, especially your desire for your caretaker to come immediately, so that you were not made miserable by your desires. Instead of playing freely, you did the things that effectively brought your caretaker to your side. You performed, not for your own pleasure, but for her’s. Your play become work. So that you are not driven mad with pleasure and pain, you deadened your ability to sense. You eventually concentrated sensation to a single, small, hidden part of your body, your genitals. The pleasure you used to feel wherever and whenever, you now confine to the relatively rare act of sex, in a darkened room, with the blinds shut.
Brown says this is madness.
He says that society represses you, and, to please society, you repress yourself. As a result, you cannot recognize the realities of existence. Erotic energy is sublimated and turned to the production of objects, character structures, and political organizations that yield little pleasure. You alone, of all the animals, repress your true desires, live in continual conflict and guilt, and construct for yourself a corporate neurosis you call civilization.
What does Brown propose you do instead?
Brown’s solution to your problem is the resurrection of the body. You need a science based on eros, a world animated by desire, not on objectivity that detaches mind from body. Therapy would be to return your soul to your body, return your self to yourself, and overcome this state of self alienation.
History is the story of this search to reclaim the lost body. It’s the story of the struggle of the forces of life against the limits posed by death.
Very interesting, Professor Brown, but I think you’re missing something. I’m all for partnering in a more effective way with the body. We often turn our bodies, in early adulthood, into neglected, abused, beasts of burden. We pay the price for this later. In later adulthood, we turn resentful and cantankerous toward our bodies as they begin to wear down from this treatment. Ever since toilet training, we fail to obey instinct, ignore gut feelings, deny our needs, and repress reasonable desires. We’re like masters that mistreat our slaves. The slaves revolt and then we’re in trouble.
So, connect in a meaningful way to the body you have, by all means. Take care of it. Listen to it. Sometimes obey it. You’re not getting rid of your body, so you guys have got to learn to get along. However, you are not repressing yourself just to please society. It is often necessary to repress the immediate needs to the body so that greater gains that you would enjoy can be achieved.
In other words: If you take a dump every time you want, you end up sitting around in shitty pants.
A baby’s babbling is melodious. When you were a baby, you could make every sound that a human could possibly make. Now, you’ve lost that ability because you domesticated your utterances into a language. Baby cooing is cool; but people understand language; whereas they can’t understand babbling.
When you suppress your impulses and follow the rules of a sport, you are no longer playing spontaneously. You may be playing tennis, golf, baseball, or soccer. Playing these sports can give much more pleasure than spontaneous play ever could. Well, maybe not golf.
You can think of repression as you think of the net in tennis. If you played tennis without the net, sure, you’d have longer volleys and not have to stop and pick up balls so often, but there wouldn’t be a challenge and you wouldn’t experience the beauty of meeting that challenge with power and grace.
History, you see, is a lot like tennis. It’s the story of how you play within limits. You can’t do whatever you want for as long as you want with whomever you want. There are lines, nets, and rules. When you accept those rules and play within them, that’s how life prevails over death.
Most people believe that internal or self motivation is the best kind of motivation and that people who are motivated for recovery to please others, whether they be the court, a spouse, a boss, or a parent, are not as well motivated.
Facts and figures show otherwise. They show that people who are externally motivated are more likely to succeed in staying clean than those who are doing it just to please themselves.
The one who is only self motivated is free to change his mind, and most of them do.
It’s one thing to sit and say, I’m never going to use again. What alcoholic has not prayed to the porcelain god that very prayer? Most say they do not want to use again when they are suffering from the consequences, not the desires, of use. When the desire to use returns, there is nothing to stop them. The bars, drug houses, and tobacco shops are filled with people who want to stop using. The ones who do stop have a reason to do so and have the need to make sacrifices.
The person who is externally motivated has more to lose.
I will help anyone where they are at, whether they are internally or externally motivated. But, if I were to chose who I would work with in recovery, I would rather work with the ones who are both externally and internally motivated. They would be the most likely to succeed. But I would take a client who was externally motivated over someone who only had to please himself.
That is particularly the case if the addict has someone: a spouse, a parent, an employer, or a judge, who could externally motivate him, but chooses not to. That person is set up to fail because others have failed him.
The person who is externally motivated has people in her life that care enough to take a stand.
When I used to work at an inner city community mental health clinic, Rekha Shrivastava had the office next door. Rekha is a quiet, unassuming lady. Her clients loved her. For good reason. I would watch them walk into her office miserable and walk out happy. I was never quite sure what they did in there, but Rekha called it cognitive behavioral therapy.
Well, it’s years later and Rekha is still making people happy, only now she’s in private practice and she calls it hypnosis. They never let us do hypnosis at the inner city community mental health clinic. It was considered a whacky, alternative type of therapy, even though there’s good evidence it helps with a wide range of problems.
If you’re interested in hypnosis or want to read Rekha’s blog, click here for the link.
Nadia Bolz Weber is a foul-mouthed, tattooed, former comic, turned preacher. Read about why she calls her depression Francis.
I got on an energy-saving kick once and became concerned about the light inside the refrigerator. Did it really turn off when I shut the door? Little did I realize how this question took me to a place shared with one of the most renown of modern philosophers, Karl Popper.
The question about the light was an important one because if the light stayed on when I shut the door then it was wasting energy, both by uselessly lighting the inside of the refrigerator and by heating it up. I studied the button in the door jam. It turned off the light when I pressed it. The door pressed the button when I shut the door. Therefore, when I shut the door, the light must go off. That might have settled it, except I had been studying psychology, the behaviorists in particular.
The behaviorists said that we should not be making claims about anything we could not directly observe. We shouldn’t be talking about the unconscious, for example, or any thoughts and feelings of another person, because they were all interior events. The only thing, they said, that we could study in psychology was what was on the outside; the behavior, in other words. That’s why they were called behaviorists.
Whether the light was going off when I shut the refrigerator door was an interior event, much like another person’s thoughts and feelings. It was true that I could directly observe the operation of the button by my finger or the door while it was shutting, but, whether the light remained off when the door was shut all the way was conjecture and thus not worthy of the claims of science.
I began to make plans to cut a hole in the door with an acetylene torch or remove the food so I could crawl in. That seemed the only way to directly observe. I might have actually done that, but I had another thought. Even if I did directly observe the light going off when I crawled in or cut a hole in the door, how would I know whether it continued to go off when I wasn’t there to see it? Yeah, I know that it’s highly probable that it would, but how could I be certain?
It’s a good thing I was studying psychology because I soon recognized that this quest for certainty was ill conceived, maladaptive, and dysfunctional. It was the same quest for certainty seen in obsessives, the worried, the panicked, the psychotic, and the paranoid. It was also the same quest for certainty demanded by the scientific method.
That was precisely Popper’s point. Popper lived in the 20th century, a refugee from Nazi Germany, a dissenter from the prevailing philosophical position of the day, logical positivism, to which the behaviorists belonged. His thing was that science was not as rigorous as claimed. Most of science, he said, was really pseudo-science, making untestable hypotheses and relying on conjecture and inductive leaps far more than admitted. Even what is assumed to be direct observation is infected with biases and shaped by unconscious theory.
To say that something is not a verifiable claim, not science, in other words, is not the same as saying that it’s worthless. Popper puts the entire field of psychology into the pseudo-science category. I agree with Popper that psychology often says it knows what its talking about far more than it does. That is not to say, though, that it cannot illuminate, inform, and inspire. In fact, you could also say the same about Popper’s assertions.
The point in revealing that this emperor called science is wearing no clothes is to question authority. That’s Popper’s thing, too; questioning and undermining authority. When people attempt to exert power, they do so by claiming to represent the truth. We see this in totalitarian societies of all types. Popper thought he saw this in the way science is used to exercise authority.
I know quite a few scientists. I know them as humble people. They are very careful not to say more than the data suggests. One only has to read the conclusion section of any scientific paper to see how painstaking they are to say exactly what they mean and not go overboard by claiming more than their experiment suggests. They couch their assertions in so many qualifiers it’s often hard to tell just what they are saying.
No, it’s not the scientists that make overreaching claims; it’s the people who attempt to use science to gain or keep power. You hear this sometimes in the respectful tones they use to report science: “studies show… the doctor says… research tells us… we need more education in….” You see it in the way people will defer to MDs and PhDs. Underneath these self-effacing, deferential tones is a person attempting to control you, to use the authority of “Truth” against you, to be influential in the halls of power.
Now, please don’t go off and think that any assertion is just as good as any other, that the claims of astrology, intelligent design, The Flat Earth Society, climate change deniers, your favorite psychic, and the most outlandish crank should be taken as seriously as those of a board certified physician, a conference full of physicists, or Nobel laureates. Some deserve more of a hearing than others. The point is that every claim needs to be evaluated on it’s own merits, not on the merits of the person professing it. Every physician, physicist, or laureate, is a person and subject to all the biases and prejudices to which people are susceptible.
After all, even a wise and educated counselor and writer was once ready to cut a hole in his refrigerator door to prove that the light goes out.
Click here to go to the Karl Popper Web
Keith Wilson - Counseling